How to sell a room or space without affecting your occupancy

Juss Reyes

Updated September 12, 2023 15:03

This article explains how to create a room or space for your property that can be reserved without impacting your overall occupancy in Cloudbeds PMS.

Overview

To sell a room (or space) without affecting the occupancy, it will be necessary to create a virtual accommodation. A virtual accommodation refers to a combination of physical rooms that are sold as a single unit.

For example: A property with six physical rooms can create virtual accommodations by combining them in different ways (such as selling two standard rooms as a deluxe suite) to fill specific guest needs.

Examples of usage:

Event space or sell the backyard for the event
Rent the ballroom
Non-nightly packages when guests are spending the day at your property without staying the night (Day use, Day-pass)
Renting kayaks, boat slips
Parking, etc.

Virtual accommodations do not add to your total room count for your Cloudbeds package pricing.

Virtual rooms and occupancy

Do virtual accommodations affect my occupancy?

No. When creating a new accommodation, and the room type is marked as physical, it will be included in the occupancy calculation. Virtual room types on the other hand, will be ignored, and the occupancy will be calculated by using their relationships.

Creating this type of room will not increase the total capacity of the property, and marking it as occupied also will not affect reports. For example: In a 10 physical room property, adding a virtual room will not change the physical inventory to 11.

Occupancy in Calendar with virtual rooms

Due to the particularity of these rooms, virtual accommodations do not appear in the Reports, meaning that it does not impact your occupancy as regular rooms would.

See the example below:

Jane Doe's virtual room reservation dates: September 29th - 30th, 2023
Occupancy percentage in the calendar for September 29th - 30th, 2023: 0%

Occupancy Report room comparison

Reservations overview in the Calendar:
- Reservation 1: October 2023
- Reservation 2: September 2023
Rooms selected for comparison: Standard Shared Room Female and New Virtual Room
New Virtual Room in report: Displayed in blue (For September 2023, 0% of rooms occupied)
Standard Shared Room Female in report: Displayed in green (For October 2023, 1.94% of rooms occupied)

Manage your virtual rooms

Create a virtual room or space

Check this article to learn how to create a virtual accommodation
Add prices for this room if you plan to sell it externally: on the channels (OTAs) and/or Booking Engine. You may also add a price for this room, and adjust the availability to 0 (or block the availability, so it is not available for booking. See how to do it in this article.
The new virtual room will appear in your Accommodation Types page

Do not add prices to this virtual room if you want to sell it internally only.

Also, learn about how to combine same physical room types into one virtual room.

Book virtual rooms

Follow the steps to create a new reservation in Cloudbeds PMS. In the accommodation list of the reservation creation process, add your new virtual room. The room will be automatically added to the left panel
Go to the booking details
Add the corresponding guest information
Click to Confirm and pay
Click to confirm reservation