A Holiday in the system may be either a quote, booking or a snippet. The same screen is used in all cases to create, edit and cost an itinerary. Each holiday can have multiple revisions each containing a different itinerary and pricing, only one revision is used to represent an active booking. A holiday has a status selector which is used to move it through it's life cycle (e.g. quote to booking to closed). See the
Life of a Holiday
for more details.
A holiday always starts out as a temporary quote. to enable it to be subsequently retrieved it is then either assigned to a client or saved as a snippet. Once it has been assigned to a client it can then be set as a confirmed booking.
Each holiday revision supports calculation of multiple sales prices as well as the overall price - this allows including third bed or single person on the same quote/booking. To do this, you create a "Pax Group" for each set of travellers that you expect to need a different itinerary (e.g. room type) and who will thus pay a different price. All travellers in the holiday ("Pax") are then assigned to one of the Pax Groups. This gives a per-person price for each passenger in a group that is the Group price / number of Pax in the group. The overall holiday sale price is the total sale price of all the Pax Groups (plus any holiday level charges such as transaction fees). This functionality can also be used to break out other charges, for instance to display car hire charges separately (although there are also other ways of doing this).
A holiday itinerary supports a selection of services types:-
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Hotel - accommodation in a fixed location
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Tour - A tour is similar to a hotel, but has a separate start and end location
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Excursion - considered to last less than a day, an excursion does not alter itinerary dates
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Flights - flights are added in each direction, and as separate legs if desired
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Transfers - can be from/to hotels or ports (airport/ferry port/railway station)
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Car hire
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Train journey
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Visa
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Insurance
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Miscellaneous - Not overnight, no location, just the detail text should be shown to the customer
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Price adjuster - can be applied to another service or to overall holiday value, for special offers of extra markup
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Click on the "Menu" Application Tab
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Optionally type in a
Snippet
ID or select a Snippet name from the dropdown. The snippet will be used as a template for the new holiday. If you do not want to star from a template, clear any snippet ID currently set.
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Click "Add new holiday"
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Note the message "Holiday not yet saved" message below the holiday toolbar, and that the Application Tab title is "* [New]"
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If you will need to retrieve this holiday at a later stage, before closing it you must assign it to a client or set the status to Snippet - see "Assigning to a client" below, or the Snippet documentation as appropriate.
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When assigned to a client or saved as a Snippet, the "Holiday not yet saved" message disappears, and the Tab title changes to reflect the client or snippet name.
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When finished, close the Holiday using the 'X' in the Application Tab. If there are outstanding changes you will be prompted to confirm the close.
To create an entirely new quote (e.g. for another client) using an existing itinerary. To add a new revision to an existing quote use the "
New Revision
" button, rather than creating an completely new quote.
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Open the existing holiday as described below in "Retrieving an existing holiday quote or booking"
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Select the revision that is to be used as the basis for the new quote
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In the Holiday Menu bar, click on the Tools button and select Duplicate
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A new quote will be created that is a copy of the current revision in the original holiday. Other revisions in the original holiday are not copied over. The new holidays status is reset to Quote, and any booking specific data in the original (e.g. Ledger, Payment details) are not copied over.
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The quote will be re-priced based on current data; if this is not possible the copy will fail.
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To save the quote assign it to a customer as describe below "Assigning to a client"
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Changes to the new quote do not affect the original holiday
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Click on the "Menu" Application Tab
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Select the type of holiday to search for - if you search for a a holiday ID this is ignored
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Enter a client name or Holiday (Quote/Booking) ID - the "%" and "surname,initial" options as described in "
Retrieving a Client record
" are supported
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Click the "Go" button (or press Enter)
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If no holidays match your search a "NoMatch" message will be displayed - check you are not searching for a booking, when the client is only at the quote stage.
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If more than one holiday is found you can navigate between them using the "Match:" buttons in the Holiday toolbar
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You can update the holiday as described below
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Close the search by clicking the 'X' in the application Tab.
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Open a Holiday as described in "Adding a holiday" or "Retrieving a holiday" above
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Make changes as needed - fields are described below and on the quote/booking specific changes
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Depending on the type of change a red or green triangle will be displayed in each modified input
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Press the "Save" button in the Holiday Toolbar to commit the changes
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If no error occurs the red/green triangles will disappear
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If an error occurs a message will be displayed. Correct the error according to the message and press "Save" again.
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To revert an input displaying a triangle back to its original value click inside and press Escape twice
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To close the Holiday without saving outstanding changes, click the 'X' in the Application Tab and confirm the close
It is often useful to set a reminder of when a holiday needs to be revisited to take further action, for instance when sending a quote add a reminder for a few days later to check that the customer has responded. Every holiday has an alert date/button that is displayed in the Holiday tool bar.
The system periodically checks for holidays with an alert date that is not in the future and which are assigned to the logged-in staff member; matching holidays are displayed in the
Alerts menu
. Note that alerts are automatically generated for the
Next Pay
date
so a manual alert may not be required for this date.
-
Set Alert
button on the Holiday Toolbar:
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Before an alert date is set, the button displays the "Set Alert" title; click the button to set a reminder.
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Once an alert date is set the button displays that date; hold the mouse cursor over the button, or click it, to see the message. click the button to alter to clear the alert.
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Set Alert window
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Alert date
: The date from which the holiday should start appearing in the list of alerts, can be the current date and onwards
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Message
: An optional, short, message to indicate the action that needs to be taken on the alert date
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Recipient
: Optional, if set indicates an additional member of staff that should see the alert. The staff member that the holiday is assigned to is always alerted so does not need to be selected.
It is typical to add a new revision and then make a small change, such as duration; this tool helps to compare two similar revisions to indicated what items differ between them. For more complicated revisions, simply taking a screenshot of the itinerary in the first revision and aligning it next to the itinerary in the second revision can be very effective.
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First column is the name of the item that is different
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Second and third columns identify the service and item value in the current revision
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The last two columns identify the equivalent service and item value in the other revision
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If a service only exists in one or other revision it is listed in a single row with suitable field name
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Click the Export button on the holiday Toolbar
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Select the template required, one suitable to the current holiday status will be selected by default; the available templates will depends on your tour operator configuration.
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Within the template selector choose the desired format (e.g. HTML or PDF). The default document format can be configured per tour operator. If the format is HTML, the quote will be displayed in the body of the email, otherwise the quote(s) will be attached to the email.
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Select the destination - screen or email
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In quote status it is possible to select multiple revisions to be emailed as multiple PDF attachments. This makes it easy to send a client a selection of itineraries. Use the item selector to select revisions to send. "This" (the default) selects the current revision unless other revisions are explicitly selected in which case it is ignored; if "All" is selected all revisions are exported, other selections are ignored.
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Click Export.
Note that it is not possible to send multiple revisions for export to screen; or to export multiple revisions in HTML format.
Note that generating
requests
and
vouchers
is done through the corresponding options in
Holiday Tools
, so do not have templates in the main Holiday export list.
The Holiday screen is presented as a set of tabs below the Holiday toolbar. If you scroll down the page you will also see a set of heading corresponding to each of the tabs. You can click on either a Tab or a heading to display a subscreen, but they behave slightly differently:-
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Clicking on an inactive tab closes all other tabs and opens the inactive one
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Clicking on an active tab closes that tab
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Clicking on an unexpanded heading opens the corresponding Tab, and also leaves any other active tabs open
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Clicking on an expanded heading closes that tab
This means that you can use the Tab navigation to quickly get to just the sub screen you need; but when you need to see several sub tabs at once you can do so by using the heading bars.
When navigating through revisions or search matches the currently open tabs stay in the same state so that is easy to look for a specific item in a search.
The tabs are in order of expected use - so when creating a new quote, you would normally alter the departure date on the detail tab, and then update the Pax Group and pax tabs in turn if you need to alter the default party composition. then alter Prefs if the system defaults are not suitable for this quote. Then onto the service tab to create the itinerary. When you add a service it takes into account the current Pax groups and saves you work - if you add a Pax group later on it may be up to you to create an itinerary for the new group.
To save a quote for later retrieval it must be assigned to a client. This can be done at any point between opening a new holiday and closing the Application Tab (though if you close your browser window or your computer crashes you will lose the quote unless it has been assigned) - if the client will provide their name at the start of the conversation then it is often best to assign at that point.
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Add a new holiday as described above
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On the Detail Holiday Tab, in the Summary group, in the Client row is a button "...", click on it.
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Enter a client name or id - the same search terms allowed when
Retrieving a client
also work here
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Press find
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Find your client from within the list and click on their record
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If your client is not in the list and you are sure they are not already on the system, click the "Add a new client" button
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Complete the client screen as detailed in the
Client documentation
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Click "Attach to holiday" at the top of the window
Note that you may re-assign a holiday to a different client (for instance if you picked the wrong holiday), as long as the client type is correct.
You may not assign a holiday whose Agent? input is set to "Agent" to a "Direct" client, nor can you assign a "Direct" holiday to an "Agent" client.
In the same way that a client can be an "Agent" or "Direct", and if an agent can have a commission level, a holiday has similar settings. This allows an Agent quote to be done before it has been assigned to an actual agent, and also allows overriding the commission level on a per-holiday basis (see below for details). As per the note in 'Assigning to a client' above, it is not possible to assign a non-agent quote to an agent or vice versa.
When selling to an agent, the agent will be expected to pay the holiday sell value less the agent commission VAT on the agents commission.
Holiday Inputs
This section describes the inputs/subscreens that are common to both quotes and bookings. For subscreens that are more specific follow the quote/booking links above.
Note that although there are many inputs, the system is designed to set sensible defaults wherever possible, leaving you to alter only the values it can't know. So, for instance, upon creating a new holiday, you may quite possible only have to set the departure date and add the hotels - this would give you a quote for the most common passenger composition (e.g. 2 adults) at your tour operator.
