Room Allocations
The new room allocation page is now in your booking system. Before we explain this, a quick bit of nomenclature:
Book-by-bed lodges have a single row on your step 1 booking matrix.
Book-by-room lodges have more than one row. Each row can be a room or it can be a bed, but even if all your rows are beds, that lodge is book-by-room, not book-by-bed.
The new features in admin -> bookings -> allocate rooms allows you to drag-n-drop a booking onto a room, and allows you to move individual people from bed to bed, across or within rooms. For the first time, the database is recording beds as well as rooms, although so far the beds don't appear anywhere outside of this screen. When you start to use this feature you can give us feedback on whether you would like to see beds identified on the output reports, e.g. the Room Allocation or Arrivals and Departures reports, which you are probably already printing and putting up on the lodge's noticeboard.
The new page has top pane and a lower pane. Previously you only had the top pane, and it showed you all your bookings. Now you can use the button control (it's right down the bottom, on the right) to select how the top pane works. If you are using this page to allocate bookings to beds, then we suggest you select "only show unallocated bookings" so that the top pane empties as you allocate.
Book-by-bed lodges can now allocate bookings to beds within rooms in a much easier way that was available in the past. Just drag bookings down from the top pane onto the room/bed you want to allocate. Individual people will be spread out onto the first available beds from the point you drop onto. When you drag from the top, the whole booking moves. When you drag from the lower pane, only one person moves at a time. You can de-allocate a person (so they have no room) by dragging them up to the top pane.
For book-by-room lodges, this screen gives you the ability for the first time, to mix more than one booking into a single room. This is the only page where you can do this. Members can't do it when they book. Even admin will need to see at least one vacant room in order to create a new booking via the matrix, after which you can move people around. You can also use this screen to swap rooms between bookings. If all rooms are booked, you create space to make the move (or to make a new booking) by deallocating a booking so it doesn't have a room. Be careful doing this however - if you accidentally leave a booking deallocated (showing in the top pane) those people may not have a bed when they arrive.
Because this page (and an increasing number of other admin pages) use advanced browser features, they might not work on non-standard browsers, such as touch-screen devices. Our target browser for admin functions is Chrome and we strongly suggest you use Chrome for admin functions. For members making bookings, we try to ensure any standards-based browser (and Internet Explorer) will work. For bookings on touch-screen devices there is a separate web-app, custom built for those devices.
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