Managing Held Bookings

By the end of this informative article you will be able to;

• Setting up internal notifications for Held bookings.
• Receiving notification for Held bookings
• Processing Held Bookings
• External Payment Failure notification 

Held bookings relate to those customers using the HART booking engines and a 3rd party hosted payment solution. 

There may be instances when a customer makes a HART booking online when, for various reasons, the booking does not process correctly or a customer does not complete the booking process. These bookings will drop into the held booking feature on the cloud.

Setting up internal notifications for held bookings.

In the cloud Navigate to Hotel > Configuration and the email tab. Press Add new record. Under the Activity, column choose Booking Failure Notification from the drop-down box. Free type the Agent name, Agent email, and the email that you wish the notification email to be copied into and tick the Enable CC box.

 In the Return, URL field add in the URL that you wish the customer to see if they have a booking failure.

Receiving internal notifications for Held Bookings

When a customer completes and pays for a booking but it fails to create into HART PMS you will receive an email as per your configuration above to inform you of a booking Failure.

Navigate to;

• Reservation > Rooms > Held bookings for Room Reservations
• Facilities > FB > Held booking for the Restaurant Reservations  
• Sales > Function > Held Function booking, for Function Reservations
• Sales > Function > Held Cookery bookings for Cookery School Reservations
• Facilities > Spa < Held bookings for Treatment Reservations.
• Facilities > Spa Day > Held bookings for Spa Day Reservations.

Below is an example of a Held Booking screen for rooms. The most important information here is to see if there is a Transaction ID number.

• Cart ID: displays the customer cart ID
• Order ID: displays the customer order ID where applicable
• Transaction ID: displays the transaction ID or further information about why the booking did not process.
• Names: displays the customer's name
• Email: displays the customer's email
• Phone: displays the customer contact number
• Arrival; displays the arrival date
• Departure: displays the departure date
• Room/Extra : displays the room and or any extras that have been added
• Notes: displays any notes that have been added
• Rates: displays the rate plan

Processing a booking with a Transaction ID

If you can see a Transaction ID against a held booking you must confirm with your account teams that you have received the payment for this booking. Once this has been confirmed you can then highlight the transaction and press the Process button.

Pressing the process button will then process the booking to the PMS and the guest will then receive a confirmation.

External Payment Failure notification to the guest.

You may have been contacted by a guest who received a message with a reference number to quote to continue with their booking. This happens in the instance of a declined payment and the guest may call you to make the booking.

You can either;

• Search for the reference number in the held bookings screen. The reference number will be the cart ID.

Check no payment has been taken with your account team and take the payment from the guest as usual and press the process button to process the booking.

or 

• Proceed to take the customer booking as a normal telephone booking.

It is advisable not to remove any held bookings, you can use the filter option here next to the transaction ID to filter those bookings you need to process.