Control Rates & Limit Availability for OTAs and agents
The Selling Group functionality allows you to provide different agents and OTAs (Online Travel Agent e.g. Booking.com, Expedia) with separate room types/rate plans, to those sold on your own website. It also allows you to vary the pricing per OTA or agent within the selling group, by assigning each one with their own rate modifier. The functionality enables you to restrict the percentage of rooms available for each separate OTA or agent within the selling group for a specified date range and also allows you to change the percentage markup/mark down for each one, using the selling group calendar.
When you register a new Sales Channel connection or update an existing connection you'll find that there are 6 available rate variations - the Base Rate is the price you initially set within the system and Sell Rates 1 - 6 can be set as a percentage variation of the Base Rate.
The Selling Groups tab will give you a calendar view of all of your rate modifiers and availability restrictions. On this screen, you can control the mark up/ mark down of each sell rate for any given date range, by simply clicking on the sell rate markup/offset row and the desired date (you can use the calendar widget on the right-hand side to jump to any day). Within the popup, you can set a date range and enter a percentage modifier or a monetary offset per Sell Rate.
Once these changes have been saved, they will automatically be updated to the sales channels (although a resync to each channel is advised following a large number of changes).
Similarly, it's possible to restrict the number of rooms available for sale for any given period, using the Set Availability Restriction option. As an example, if you wanted to restrict the amount of rooms available for sale over the Christmas period, it would be possible to set the date range and then the availability limit for the selling group. In the example below, only half the rooms for each mapped room type would be sent to the sales channels for our date range.
Please make sure that you are not restricting availability on selling group Main, as this selling group is used by your own website booking screens.
