How It Works: Rate Classes

Why It Is Important:

Define Your Pricing Structure Then Start Selling Your Rooms

Configuring your hotels room prices is perhaps the most fundamental component in using your Property Management System. Luckily, with Frontdesk Anywhere you have a large range of options in how you want to set these prices up. To make things as easy as possible for you, we’ve broken this down into several key steps here. Once you’ve got these covered, you can sell your rooms online and watch your occupancy rise.

How It Works:

Rate Classes

Begin by navigating to the Admin Settings of your Frontdesk Anywhere account. Your first click will be on the Rate Classes button under the Rates tab.  Once you’ve made it that far click on the ‘New’ button at the bottom of the page. Your next step is choosing a name for your new rate and a brief description. If you are using the Frontdesk Anywhere booking engine, you'll see the description appear underneath the name of the rate, when a guest is making an online reservation.

Specify the type of rate you are creating by selecting the right option in the scroll down menu, next to the tag Rate Type. If you choose the option Nightly rate, the value you insert will be considered as the nightly price. If you choose the option Multiple Nights, you will need to specify how many nights the rate is valid for. For example, you may want a certain room type to only be bookable with a 2-night minimum stay; therefore, you should create a multiple night rate.

Next you will define your Season Periods. Season Periods allow you to build different rates for different times of the year within one rate class, and also create unique prices for different days of the week. Typically season periods range from High to Low and mid seasons. Start by clicking on the window icon next to the tag Add Period. Select your season period start and end dates from the calendar. You may input a description such as High Season Rate if you wish. Next, select the days of the week you want the value to be valid for, and finally, place the value for the rate in the first box. Don’t forget to save the period once you’ve entered all the relevant information.

Duplicating a season period comes handy when you are building a weekend rate that is different from the weekly one. The starting/ending date for the season period will be the same, the difference is the monetary value and the days of the week to which the rate applies.

Finally, you will need to choose what are the room types to which the rate will be applied to, and the channels on which it will be available. You will see a list of available channels including IBE and Frontdesk. IBE stands for your Internet Booking Engine. This will enable the rate on your online booking engine. Frontdesk will enable it for your Tape Chart.

Duplicating a Rate

Duplicating a rate will come in handy when you are trying to set up different rates for different room types. Although the value of the rate will be different, your Season Periods will be the same. Rather than re-building all Season Periods for each of your room types, you can duplicate an existing Rate Class with all the Season Periods, and simply place a different monetary value in them. This is a great time saver. In the Rate Classes section, click on the button Duplicate on the right-hand side of the relevant rate. Once you’ve done this you will need to amend the information that is different from the rate you are duplicating from. This includes the Rate Code, Rate Description, the value in each Season Period and Room Type applied.

The Rate Grid

The Rate Grid is the tool via which you can see and change the rates on a daily basis. It is also a great tool to change rates for shorter time periods. Check out our other How It Works blog post on The Hotel Rate Grid for more details on this convenient time-saving tool.

Deriving a Rate

You can create a new rate by applying a Discount or Premium on the value of an existing Rate Class. The new rate is called a Derived Rate. Derived rates are linked to the master rate (the one you are deriving them from) by the way of a certain adjustment you set up. If you are running a 10% promotion for returning guests, you can create these promotional rates by deriving it from the master rate and set an adjustment of a 10% discount. Every time you change the master rate, the derived rate will also be automatically calculated.

Rate Priority

If you’re building different rates for the same room type, you might want to control what is the default rate that comes up when making a reservation. Unless you order your rates, they will appear randomly in the folio. In the Admin Settings, click on Rate Priority. You will see a list of all the rates you have created in the system. Replace the 999 number with a progressive numeric order. Click Save and you will see your rates in the order you placed.

If you’ve got any questions on the above, please contact us at support@frontdeskanywhere.com