Guides for property owners

City tax, tourist tax, occupancy tax, visitor levy, taxe de séjour, imposta di soggiorno: the name and the rules change from town to town. In some places the guest owes the tax and you collect it; in others the tax is yours and you may pass it on. Either way, the authority looks to you for the right amount. Charge too little and the difference comes out of your pocket; charge too much and you owe a guest a refund.

Every rule answers the same five questions: what is charged, who pays it, for how many nights, at which rate on which night, and whether VAT is added. Set up each tax so it gives those answers, show it on its own line before the guest pays, and keep the night-by-night figures your return asks for.

The benefits of an online restaurant menu are undeniable, including:

• Reducing the printing cost
• Environment friendly
• Updating the menu without re-printing
• Safer for both customers and staff: the online menu can limit cross-contamination from sharing the physical menu. It is especially important with the current COVID-19 pandemic

In this blog post, we will show you how to create a touchless online menu with our RMS component through some simple steps:

If you sell the same room on your own website and on one or more booking sites, something has to tell each of them when a night is sold. When nothing does, two guests book the same room, and one of them gets a phone call nobody wants to make.

There are two ways to pass that message along, and both are sold under the same word: sync. They move very different things. iCal sync moves blocked dates, after a delay. A channel manager moves availability, rates, restrictions and the reservation itself, as they change. Which one you need depends on your property, and for some properties the lighter one is enough.

The Travel & Tourism industry is no doubt a huge global market, according to the statistics from Statista.com, in 2015 this industry has contributed directly 2.23 trillions U.S. dollars into the global economy.

In such huge market, there are a lot of chances for everyone from traditional tour companies to a new trend called tours by locals.

If you run a small property, the chances are that most of your bookings arrive through online travel agencies, the OTAs. It works. The platforms bring guests you could never have reached on your own, the bookings keep coming, and you pay a commission on nearly every night you sell.

That arrangement has a name worth saying out loud: you are renting your demand, not owning it. The visibility, the terms and, in a real sense, the guests belong to someone else, and they can change without asking you. The answer is not to leave the OTAs. It is to run a booking channel of your own beside them, and to make it the one everything else follows.