Vacation ownership and hospitality are two concepts that weren't always used in the same breath; however, changing times have now placed them hand in hand. Vacation ownership comes in many forms, perhaps known as a timeshare or fractional ownership, and now add "hotel room" as we often come across today. The difference in these scenarios is that in the past a “guest” would know they are going to a time-share resort, but today units are often disguised as hotel accommodations. With this, hotels need to ensure that both guests and owners have seamless experiences when it comes to booking, on-site service, billing, and ensuring that owned guestrooms are occupied consistently and fairly.
How can OPERA Cloud simplify a hotel’s role?
To facilitate the often-manual processes of reconciliation and management of vacation ownership-related tasks, OPERA Cloud has introduced Ownership and Room Rotation functionality. This advanced offering allows staff to manage room ownership details and set up room rotation rules to ensure the balanced assignment of inventory to reservations. Let’s take a look at how these tools streamline staff duties and assure owners that the hotels are effectively managing their units.
Room Ownership:
Hotels can use Ownership Records to define the ownership of a room to a guest profile. When rooms or units are marked as “exclusive”, the room is restricted to being occupied by the owner themselves or to authorized/referred guests, such as a relative or individuals of their choosing. This feature ensures that rooms are not showing available to be sold to standard guests or assigned by staff by mistake. An added benefit allows the owner flexibility to define dates when their authorized guests can book to stay in their room. When staff enters the Look to Book screen to check availability, the availability of the owner’s room is not displayed until after the owner or authorized profile is selected. This “check” by the system removes all of the guesswork for staff, ensuring timely service and that only the correct individuals at the right time can book stays.
Room Rotation:
Room Rotation is crucial to ensure happy owners, who can sleep soundly knowing the hotel is managing their investment effectively. These automated and complex calculations save staff countless hours and are key to their ability to work efficiently, without hesitation, and with the confidence that rooms they are selling and assigning rooms correctly.
When rooms or units are not designated as “exclusive” to an owner, this means that the room can be shown as generally available for sale. When this is the case, it becomes important that hotels are ensuring that rooms are being assigned and occupied fairly. This responsibility of the hotel has financial impacts on the revenue share and accuracy is key to the success of these relationships/agreements. Traditionally it would be the responsibility of the hotel to come up with their own methods of assigning these non-exclusive rooms; however, OPERA Cloud is outfitted with functionality specifically built to remove this responsibility and give flexibility to the hotel to create their own rules for the calculation of “points”. Some available considerations include:
- Rotation Point Rules: Allows hotels to configure rules which determine the formula used to accumulate points to facilitate the rotation of the assignment of rooms. Rotation Point Rules are highly customizable and can be configured to calculate points on a per night, per stay, or revenue basis, and can be applied to specific room types, rate codes, and even specific days of the week if desired.
- Owner Multipliers: Allowing hotels to configure a multiplier to be applied to Owner Reservations when they stay in their unit instead of being available to be booked by a guest.
- Out of Order/Out of Service Multipliers: Out of Order and Out of Service multipliers are used to add or subtract rotation points when an owner or property places a room in an Out of Order or Out of Service status and wants to keep the rotation points calculation equitable.
- Rotation Periods: Provide the flexibility to define the frequency and interval that the accrued rotation points for rooms are reset. When the rotation period is reset, all current rotation point accumulations are deleted, and a set of randomly generated rotation point scores are applied to all units so that a ‘baseline; is established and each room has an equal chance of being rented.
Expand OPERA Cloud’s functionality with seamless integration to third-party vacation ownership management software.
Looking to add even more functionality to accommodate your vacation ownership-related functionality?
Check out the Oracle Hospitality Marketplace to search for available partner integrations!
Overall, hotels today play a crucial role in ensuring that vacation ownership is a worthwhile investment for owners and their own continued success; let OPERA Cloud do the hard work and allow staff to continue offering exceptional service to both owners and guests!
Learn more about OPERA Cloud’s Ownership Records and Room Rotation here.
Cody Nielsen is the OPERA Cloud Strategy and Product Enablement Manager. Connect with Cody on LinkedIn.