Need to know how many cancellations you have received?
The recent travel restrictions have meant a lot of cancellations are coming in for accommodation providers. We’ve put together a comprehensive guide of how you can manage cancellations in iBex, how to extract important data, and some changes we are working on to better manage cancellations data.
To get a report on your recently cancelled bookings:
Go to Search Bookings (in the Bookings section of your menu).
Open the filter and set these options:
Arrived: Choose a recent date (e.g. 8th March). Leave the ‘to’ date blank.
Status: Cancelled
Click Export to create a csv file.
This can be opened with Excel, or any spreadsheet software.
This file will give you detailed data on all future bookings which have been cancelled. Look for the date_cancelled column to sort by the date these bookings were cancelled.
We are working to add a “cancelled date” filter directly to the Search Bookings page as soon as possible. This will allow you to see your recently cancelled bookings in the page without the need to export.
Need a comparison of this month’s revenue with the same month last year?
This information can be helpful for insurance claims.
Go to the Occupancy & Revenue Report (in the Finance Section of your menu).
Choose a date range (this can be any range you’d like) and the option “Same period last year”.
This produces a report comparing your revenue over the two periods.
Need to update your cancellation policies?
To change your cancellation policy in iBex, go to the Manage Property page (under Property in your menu). You can change your cancellation and other policies in the Policies section.
These policies appear on your website and (depending on your settings) may appear on emails sent to guests using iBex. If you have any sales channels (like Booking.com or Expedia) make sure to check your policies with them as well. All sales channels require you to maintain policies directly with them; they don’t receive this information from iBex.
If you have Agents or Companies with special policies, these can be changed on the relevant Agent or Company page.
Need to know how much your cancelled bookings are worth?
These stats are a bit trickier to track down. Once a booking is cancelled in iBex, its value becomes $0.
If you want to have a cancellation fee extra automatically added to cancelled bookings, you can set up a Cancellation Policy. For example, this can be used to add 100% of the booking’s value (excluding extras) as a fee upon cancellation.
Please note, this will only apply to bookings cancelled after the policy is set up.
Cancellation Policy is an optional extra in iBex. Please contact support if you would like this enabled in your account.
We are currently working on an enhancement to better track the value of cancelled bookings.
Need to quickly see basic stats on cancellations, amongst other useful info?
Your dashboard has lots of quick details, including the number of cancellations you’ve received recently. This is helpful if you want to keep an eye on the number day to day without generating a whole report.
Accounts on our Accelerate or Growth plans can also see pace reports on their dashboard, which show how your revenue and occupancy are going compared to previous years.
Pin bookings to stop staff moving them to other units
Do you have regular guests who are happiest when they get to stay in the same room?
Two bookings travelling together and you want to make sure they end up in adjacent rooms?
You can pin a booking to a unit, preventing your staff members from accidentally relocating it to another unit.
Here’s how:
An icon will appear to show you the booking is pinned. Staff won't be able to move the booking without un-pinning it first.
No more group bookings accidentally split up or disgruntled regulars in the wrong room!
We recently conducted a survey for customers who booked direct through your iBex booking engine on your website. The aim of the survey was to ask customers booking through iBex, how quick, easy, efficient, and satisfactory their journey was.
We will use this data to help strategize and plan our future developments and enhancements to iBex booking engine.
We would like to share the results with you.
Our engineering team and support team have been working in overdrive to help deliver you new features to help improve your business and yield.
Our most exciting upcoming development is an integration with Point of Sale system, Kounta. Kounta, like iBex, is a great cloud-based service that you can run from any device - no need to purchase POS hardware! Our team is working hard to build an integration with Kounta so you can record purchases at your restaurant, cafe or bar straight into the guest’s booking in iBex.
Some other developments that have been rolled out recently are:
- General iBex Improvements:
New Dashboard (including Pace Reports)
New Housekeeping Module
Version 5
2 Factor Security Login for iBex Vault
- Integrations:
New revenue management integration with Room Price Genie
More channel connections (eg Pan Pacific)
- Company Improvements:
Increased development team
Increased website team
New Customer Success team
- Structural Improvements:
UX Design for better usability
- Architecture changes:
Adopting Ibex into a more cloud-native environment by breaking down the monolith into microservices, which means;
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- Scalability - Support our growing customer base.
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- Performance - System latency improvement.
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- High Availability - 99.999% server uptime with resiliency.
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- Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) - Getting new products out much quicker.
All of the above are essential to making sure that Seekom and iBex are fresh, modern, secure, and delivering you the best possible service.
What happens to your last available room on busy nights? Have you ever found yourself in the middle of selling it to a walk-in, only to realise a sales channel booking has just come in at the same time? With iBex’s On Request Threshold, you can have a last room up your sleeve on nights like this, allowing you to make sure it’s sold as a direct booking - no commission and no risk of double bookings!
On Request Threshold is set on each room type. You could choose to have it on just one room type (wouldn’t it be good to have one spare of your most popular room?) or on multiple room types, for extra peace of mind. Once you are down to the last room of that type, it will automatically put itself to On Request status. This renders it unbookable on sales channels, but allows customers on your website to request a booking. You can then decline or accept the request - so if a walk-in has come in at the same time, you can decide which booking to accept.
