elloha is an online booking platform and online booking often means Instant Confirmation: this is the default operating mode.
However, you may need to switch to Delayed Confirmation mode, i.e. publish offers on your booking engine with a price and availability subject to confirmation.
NOTE:if you use elloha to distribute your offers to distributors such as Booking, Airbnb or Expedia, please note that for offers in Delayed Confirmation mode, booking confirmations will remain immediate on these platforms.
This feature is accessible from the Connect subscription.
Why offer Delayed Confirmation?
The most common example is when you decide to close your establishment for your annual holiday or during the low season. However, you would like to "throw a spanner in the works" and offer a reservation service during "test" periods. Delayed Confirmation is ideal for this: the customer sees your offer and your price for the given period, we explain to them that their request has been registered under the conditions set in the booking engine and you have a few days to confirm whether or not you are going to honour this reservation.
Perfect for testing additional sales periods for your establishment!
The other most common case is that of a gîte owner with 5 rooms. Each of these 5 rooms is offered for booking individually. But you may already have considered offering your gîte (or guest house) as a whole (as a form of privatisation). Without Delayed Confirmation, this is impossible.
Until now, you could only take a huge risk by displaying for the same day :
your 5 individual rooms,
your whole house,
however, if someone booked one of your 5 rooms for a given date, another customer could book your whole house for that same date,
And then, conflict! Worse than overbooking!
With Deferred Confirmation, you can :
Display your 5 individual rooms as instant bookings,
Show your whole house as a deferred confirmation.
This means that if a customer asks you to book your all-in-one house (which you may be interested in doing) for a date when one or more of your rooms are already booked individually, you can decide to cancel the booking of your individual rooms with your "individual" customers to confirm the booking of your all-in-one house and therefore make more money!
Note: remember to make provision for this in your general terms and conditions of sale and cancellation policy to avoid any risk of disputes with your customers.
How does it work?
By default, all your offers are created in elloha in "Immediate Confirmation" mode, but if you want to create a new offer and offer it as a deferred booking:
You must create a new offer or duplicate an existing offer,
You need to fill in all the information, including the price (essential!),
Then go to the Schedule tab and allocate availability to this offer at the times of your choice,
Then don't forget to indicate whether this is an "On-Request" offer, if that's what you want,
Click on Modify next to the "box" indicating "Confirmation: immediate"
Then, move the button to "Delayed Confirmation", taking care toindicate the number of days you are giving yourself (and which will be indicated to the customer in their voucher) to confirm whether or not you are following up their request,
Once this has been done, validate your modification and you will see that your offer will be placed on Delayed Confirmation with a response time of "x" days as shown below:
When the Internet user reaches your booking engine, your "Delayed Confirmation" offer will appear in the same conditions as the "Immediate Confirmation" offer, with a few minor changes:
The "Book" button has become "Pre-Book",
An orange text indicates that "This offer is not in immediate confirmation",
And by clicking on the information "i", it is specified that the pre-reservation will be confirmed within "x" days as you previously set it up,
When the customer has validated their pre-reservation (by giving their payment guarantee or not, depending on your conditions), they will receive a pre-reservation document that is particularly clear about the fact that their reservation still needs to be confirmed by you.
For your part, in your elloha account, you can access the status of this booking file in the Bookings tab, where you can decide whether to accept or decline it:
During this period, it will be up to you to confirm or decline this request with a simple click:
If you accept it, a confirmation is immediately sent to your customer.
If you decline, a message informing them of your refusal will also be sent,
Finally, if you forget to confirm or decline within the allotted time, the booking request will be considered to have been declined on your part and a confirmation will be sent to your "prospect"
A notification concerning these booking confirmation expectations appears on your dashboard.
Please note that bookings that have been closed before being confirmed or cancelled will remain closed and will not be cancelled once the check-in date has passed.
IMPORTANT: if you have set your payment method to Prepaid (total or partial) in your elloha account for all or some of your offers, when the "Delayed Confirmation" mode is activated for reservations, Prepaid is no longer active and it is therefore important that you cash the reservation yourself once it has been validated.