Contents
Issue date for this document (en_manual.html), manual for HHG in English: 2006-02-20
The Room Management System manual for hotels shall be useful to manage the available rooms for online-booking and
the online-booking page on Hirners Hotel Guide. It also contains an explanation how to subscribe,
concerning online-booking settings, daily use and data maintenance.
Abbreviations:
RMS → Room Management System
HHG → Hirners Hotel Guide
HInstant Req. → Hirner's Automated Instant Request System
The Contract / Agreement has been issued as separate document, please see at Contract - Agreement.
We are a small, modern company in Vienna, Austria. Our goal is to facilitate locating and booking hotels worldwide.
We think the Internet to be the future market for this branch, so we focus on Web and WAP technology.
We are not willing to congest the Internet with senseless, bandwidth-consuming advertisements, but are
interested in providing stable, easy-to-use and functional products.
The framework of our hotel guide consists of a worldwide hotel directory and a search engine.
The directory is split into continents, countries (territories) and cities (locations).
We don't have political criteria, but orient towards tourism and the ISO 3166-1.
Most hotels are listed with their own homepage and email address. Guests can use our HInstant-Request-System (an automated inquiry system
invented by us) to send requests to the properties which provide an email-address. Further guests can visit your proper home page and use
the contact details to contact you via phone, fax, mobile phone, WAP-browsers, PDA's and of course, postal way.
The directory is continuously and automatically maintained by our Web spider
HHGRobot and human-edited by us (Helmut and Richard Hirner) and by the properties themselves.
There's a set of hotels which are "best recommended". These hotels have ordered either a link entry or an online-booking homepage. The recommended hotels are advertised on a separate page. Also, they are listed foremost on an extra page for the respective location. Just choose a country at "best recommended hotels" to see what it looks like.
The standard listing includes:
Using the change/amend form you can change/amend listed data and upload a small picture for the listing in your location and a larger one, for the page where your property is shown.
To sign up for this product please use the form at 3. Standard listing!
A link entry includes:
To sign up for this product please use the form at 2. Link entry: recommended hotel.
This product consists of:
Bookings are contracts between the guests and the hotels. Hirners Hotel Guide only provides technology, bandwidth and web space. Please notice that we only validate the formal and numerical correctness of credit card numbers. The hotels are responsible for pre-authorising before expiration of their cancellation time limit. The implementation and the service itself are free of charge, but we demand 8 % commission on the booking amount for guaranteed and effected bookings if the guest has stayed in your property.
To sign up for this product please use the form at 1. Free homepage + WAP page + online booking system.
Contact: See also at Imprint
Helmut HirnerSupport:
Please understand that we can offer you only email-support and from time to time a support via chat. If support via chat is
available you will find a message in our forum. If this manual is not sufficient for you please:
Bank account:
Bank Austria - Creditanstalt (bank code 11000)To use our online-booking system, you need:
Please find on the page add your property a subscription form to subscribe to our online-booking system.
The right column compromises the input fields. These marked with an asterisk (*) must be filled in, the others are optional.
After filling out, click the "Request online-booking" button. Then a confirmation email will be sent to you and enable you to continue with logging in to the RMS.
Please consider that you are responsible for the data (rates, availability, text...) you set on your online-booking page! See also Contract - Agreement.
After subscription, you will receive a confirmation email. This email contains your shortcut (user name) and your
password, as well as an AutoLogin link. You will need either to log in. To log in, just click on the AutoLogin link in
the email. You can use an AutoLogin link as often as you want. If you generate a new AutoLogin link at RMS, the old ones won't work anymore.
Please note that we use encrypted connections for transmitting login details. If you are prompted whether you
want to be redirected to a non-SSL page, answer with YES. Further information concerning our security measures
is available at the security information page.
For a convenient access to the RMS we may recommend you to add the "AutoLogin link" to your "Favourites" or to put it on your desktop (use drag and drop or click with the right mouse button on it and choose "send to desktop"), so you can access the RMS with a single click. If you request new login data the link on your desktop (in your favourites) must be updated, too.
To log in manually:
If you logged in successfully, you will be redirected to the Room Management System's start page.
To make your site bookable, a framed box (Setup Assistant) will inform you about the necessary steps. It looks like this:
Before you can do any settings, please read and accept our online-booking contract: Enter the name of a contact person and click on "Accept".
Just follow the instructions next to the exclamation mark till the warning message disappears.
At first you are required to accept at least one of the available guarantee types. This is only to guarantee the bookings and has nothing to do with the payment, which always is to be done directly at the hotel. If your accepted methods of payment diverge from your accepted methods for guarantee, the methods of payment have to be mentioned on the rates page.
There are three possibilities for methods of guarantee:
Seasons are certain time spans which are used to assign rates to room types. You can define as many seasons as you want. You can also use seasons for differentiated rate management, e.g. if you have no reservations for a certain day within a fortnight, you can define a season for this day. Then, choose rates in the menu in order to set lower rates for the rooms on this day. It may be used also for weekend rates and to close all rooms for a certain period.
As the name "room types" indicates, those are templates for the rooms you can add. That means you should create
and describe your room types. Before creating a certain room type, you can choose how many rooms you want to
add to this room type (at least one). Each room type has the following characteristics:
Name: The name of the room type. Users will see it on the "rates" and "book" page so it's wise to choose a meaningful one.
In the same column you can choose for how many persons the room is available for. E.g. single room, 1 person, double or twin
2 persons, triple 3 persons, suite 4 or 5 persons....
Description: Provides a way to explain your room type more precisely. Will be shown on the "rates" page. You may provide which
amenities are available, whether the rooms are smoker or non-smoker rooms, type of furniture etc.
Number of rooms: To define how many rooms of this type you want offer.
Example:
To reduce the number of assigned rooms to a certain room type just choose a new number of rooms for the appropriate
(existing) room type.
Note: If there are pending reservations you can't delete the room type! If you want to
disable it, please use "close dates".
The text field "Rates information" may be used to enter additional information that will be displayed next to the rate table. Please mention your cancellation policy, terms and conditions and other information like whether taxes, half-board, breakfast etc. are included. You may use BBCode to layout your text (e.g. [b]bold[/b]) and insert links (e.g. [url=http://your.homepage.com]our homepage[/url]).
Below you can find the table to set certain rates per room type and seasons. To set or change rates, enter them into the appropriate fields and click on "Save new rates". Rates are set per season and room type.
If you leave single rate fields empty, the rooms for the corresponding room type will not be bookable for these seasons.
Rates on HHG are to be set per room and night and not per person!
To set rates for certain dates (e.g. weekend rates), please define seasons for these dates.
If all these settings are done the Room-Management-System Assistant should display:
Thank you, online-booking is enabled for your property. Please do the other "homepage settings" from the menu on the right and keep them up-to-date.
Please consider that your property is bookable now, but if you really expect bookings it's essential to do also carefully all "home page settings".
The property's name, contact person, email address you entered with subscription. In contrast to the other settings, you cannot change these details yourself (if you want to do so, please contact us).
The fields "phone" and "facsimile" are self-explanatory, we guess.
Here you can select which facilities your rooms, hotel and environment offer.
Each checked image will be shown on the "facilities" page. If you are missing something, please let us know.
Use the text field to describe your rooms' and property's facilities / amenities. BBcode is available also for this text area.
Various optical styles are available for your home page. Choose the one you like best.
Slogan: It's important to choose a slogan which is most specific to your property (i.e., mention
things other hotels don't have) because search engines use and display it as description for the home page.
The slogan will be shown next to the logo in the directory. The slogan's length is limited to 255 characters.
Description: The description is placed on the entry page of your site. Describe your property in such a
way that guests can image it. You can practically use as many characters (words) as you need and BBcode to
design the text and set links.
Additional statistics: Please mention the spoken languages, check-in and check-out time, how many
rooms/beds and stars your property has etc. Every line in this field will be shown as an entry in a list.
Map: Select a map on your computer (jpg/gif/png) and click on "Start upload".
Coordinates: If you know the GPS coordinates of the property please enter them in degree-minute-format,
e.g. N 6° 25.300'. Guests can use it to find your property.
Textual description: Please describe how to approach and feel free to set links using BBcode.
Here you can upload and delete images for your home page on HHG. Please note that it is required to upload a
logo and a start page image in order to make your online-booking page active. To upload an image,
click on the "Browse" button and select the picture from your computer. Then enter a title and a description and
click "Start upload". The image must be in JPEG, GIF or PNG format. Images have a maximum size which is stated
on the upload page.
The logo will be shown in the hotel directory it's size is 100x80 pixels.
You can upload images of any size, but they will be resized to max. 100x80. If you upload a new logo,
the old one will be overwritten.
To delete a slide show image, just click the "Delete" button next to it.
This feature will be available soon and enable you to translate all text areas into different languages.
If you need new login data please request them at any time at RMS. Just type in your hotel shortcut (user name) which is also part of the Internet address of your page on HHG (http://www.hirners.com/hotel/shortcut) and click on "Send AutoLogin link" or "Send password".
Use the calendar to close and re-open rooms. To change the start date of the calendar view, select the start date at "Show calendar from". Check or uncheck the check boxes for the days and rooms you want close or re-open. Then click on "Update closed dates". If you need to close all rooms for a certain period use the feature "Close all rooms". You may also re-open all rooms at once by using the "Reset all closed dates". The legend explains the colours and status codes used to indicate the status of the rooms and reservations. For more details on reservations and commission invoices, see below.
Choose "reservations (+cancel)" from the menu to get an overview. The colours correspond to the status. To see more details on a reservation or to cancel a reservation, please click on the reservation ID. You will find all details and a button "Cancel this reservation" which you can use to cancel it. Please enter a reason for each cancellation. If a reservation is cancelled, the guest will be informed and you don't get a commission invoice; the room is bookable again.
To enter special offers, packages, group conditions etc. for HInstant Requests. Guests can send you a request using the
HInstant Request form. You will get an Email containing the request. If you use the "answer button" you will be directed to a
page on HHG where you can answer the request and/or make an offer. The guest will get your answer/offer and can accept or reject an offer
and he can answer again in the same way.
On the HIstant request page in the RMS you can check earlier requests by click on the appropriate "Rq. ID".
Enables you to check and pay commission invoices. If there are unpaied invoices you will be informed how you can pay them. To see or print the original invoice (e.g. to see the guest names and arrival/departure) click on "Show invoice xxx".
The Affiliate Centre is not available for the moment due of revision.
HHG offers several types of membership, each with particular possibilities and advantages. Members can earn special
discounts and use some features only members have access to. There are three types of membership where the
Business Class Membership is the one which could be interesting for you.
You don't need to sign up for another membership class because you can use all advantages with your
automatically created Business Class Membership. You may use it to:
To get 50% of the commission you can use our "AvailabiltyViewer" (see below) or just a link on your home page to the online booking page on HHG. You can offer your customers a convenient to use online-booking system on your home page and we will refund you 50% of the commission. That means you pay just 4% instead of 8% for such bookings. To earn money you can link to any page on HHG. The link must contains your "Affiliate ID" (as provided in the Affiliate Center). If someone comes to our site from such a link and books a room you earn 50% of the commission. For more details have a look to our "Affiliate Centre". There we also provide a "search box" to find the cheapest available room among our best recommended hotels. For bookings made via this search box you get also 50% of our commission, which is 8% of the total amount.
It is possible to use the HHG online-booking technology on Web sites which are not hosted at Hirners Hotel Guide. If you have such a home page, you can use the "AvailabilityViewer link" to provide real-time availabilities on your home page. This link is displayed on the first page "home" in the RMS and in the Affiliate Centre. If you don't manage your home page yourself (e.g. because you instructed a Web designer), please contact the responsible Webmaster. Of course, we can embed the AvailabilityViewer for you. In that case, please send us the login details for your Web space or the email address of your Webmaster.
Hints to improve your results with HHG online-booking:
If you need help, please let us know per email or have a look to our FAQ's and to our forum first.
Please use English or German to contact us.
Monthly we send you a statistic which should give you an overview on the set availability.
The feedback page is not available for the moment.
Thank you for spending your time to read our manual and use our room management system. We hope that you and your guests can benefit from our online-booking system.