This article explains how to adding the basics to your Cloudbeds PMS as a part of your Onboarding Process. This section covers the most necessary customization options for your property.
Once these have been completed, go to the Onboarding Self-Setup - How to set up Distribution.
Getting Started
- Setup your password with the link provided by your Onboarding Coach
Once your password is setup, you can always access your property from the Cloudbeds website or through your login page directly.
- Answer setup questions (currency, time zone, channel manager and PMS status), and how your rates are designed. Once finished, click on Begin setup.
If you need any assistance during these first steps, reach out to our Support Team.
Add the Basics
The Setup Guide does a great job of guiding you through the majority of the setup process. All the pages feature a detailed tutorial and and we will be highlighting the settings in the required sections that you'll need to complete to progress to the next stage.
- Click on the Account icon
- Click on Settings
- Click on the Setup Guide
- Go to the Step: 1 Mandatory Information, and navigate through the left-side panel to complete all the sections of your Mandatory Information. See more details about each one below.
The General System Settings refer to the basic property setup. See the General System Settings Overview for a full description of all the required fields.
2.1. Format Preferences
- Select your Application Language (English, Spanish and Portuguese are available)
- Confirm that your Default Time Zone is correct. If you have an existing myallocator account, make sure the time zone settings in each match.
- Confirm your Currency Format
- Select your Application Date and Time format
- Confirm your Default Currency. If you have an existing myallocator account, make sure that the settings in each match one another and also those used on your distribution channels
- Save
- Mismatched time zone settings may cause bookings to be displayed with the wrong check-in time or even date. If you need to change your time zone setting, but you've already set the viewing credit card password, contact our Support Team
- Mismatched currencies may cause rate discrepancies and also result in mischarging customers.
2.1.1. Automation Preferences
- Select whether to allow additional bookings even when your property is at full occupancy. We recommend you leave this inactive by default. If enabled, be aware that there is a significant risk of overbookings.
- Select whether to activate the Auto No show feature, if active, it means that all reservations that have not been checked into the system by 2:05 am (your time-zone) the next business day the system will have the status changed to No Show automatically and release room inventory.
- Select whether you want to auto-assign new reservations coming from sources to the first available accommodation
- Select whether you want to use default country for guest. When turned on, the country field for guest details will be pre-filled with the property's country
- Select until when you allow same-day bookings
- Select whether to activate the Auto Check out Extension, if active, it means that the reservations that have not been changed to checked out status will be automatically extended by the system. We recommend you leave this feature inactive.
- Select whether to activate the Intelligent Assignment, which uses accommodation tags to keep guests closer together.
- Select do you want to allow same-day bookings through your Booking Engine.
- Save
2.1.2. Miscellaneous Preferences
- Show Estimated Arrival Time: If enabled, the estimated arrival time for the reservation will appear when creating a new reservation, on the reservation, on the calendar, and when configuring your Booking Engine.
- Enable GDPR Compliance Functionality: If enabled, tools to comply with GDPR such as Guest Data Extraction, Anonymization, and Marketing Opt-In will be available to your property. You will still be solely responsible for complying with GDPR legislation.
- Enable Payment Allocation Enabling payment allocation means when a user takes a payment, it's possible to specify exactly which charges that payment is for.
- Show Check-outs in Departure List on Dashboard: If enabled, a property can see guests who have already checked out in their dashboard's Departure List. If disabled, a property will only see guests who still need to check out.
- Format for customers name in the calendar (Name Surname or Surname, Name)
- Select if the full payment amount will be collected prior to check in.
- Save
The Property Profile section includes your basic property info and what customers will see on your booking engine.
3.1. Property Contact Info
- Make sure your property type is correct
- Write your property name. This name will appear on your booking engine.
- Add your property contact email.
- First name and last name of the contact person for your property. Keep in mind that this is the information that will be available on your booking engine, so you may not want to have your full name listed as a contact. You will also want to ensure that the property email is accurate and accessible to users as any guest inquiries will be sent to the property email address.
- Add your property phone number
- Add your Website URL.
3.2. Property Address
- Add the Country where your property is located
- Add details about the address
- Include the State/Province
- Add the Street Address
- Add City name
- Add the Postal/ZIP Code
- Add property address and make sure that the location is defined correctly on the map.
- If the location of your property is not displaying in the correct location on the map, drag the marker to the correct location to update the coordinates.
- The website URL has a limit of 100 characters.
3.3. Property Photos
- Upload some Property Photos. These will be used on your booking engine.
- Add a Print Header image when printing Dashboard, Housekeeping and Folio.
- Add your property description.
- Click Save.
To create the accommodation types correctly is one of the most vital settings for your property. This affects both your Cloudbeds PMS and Booking Engine accounts as well as the inventory and availability of your distribution channels.
4.1. Add a new Room Type
- We strongly recommend creating distinct room types (example: Standard Dorm or Women's Dorm) and not separate individual rooms (example: Standard Dorm Room 1).
- Creating separate individual rooms instead of room types will make your inventory incompatible with the majority of distribution channels. For more information and details, see: Distribution Channel Mapping Guidelines.
- Go to the Accommodation Types section
- Click on New Accommodation Type
-
Name the new accommodation type
- Remember that guests will see the names you input. We recommend using easy and simple titles like Standard Double Room for example.
- Select whether the room is a dorm or a private room
- If it's a dorm, you'll add the number of rooms, room occupancy (number of beds), and then whether it is gender-specific
- Add the number of units of this type, the maximum occupancy and the number of adults and children included in rate (Booking Engine only)
- Add a description of the room for your guests
- Click on the Edit Room Names button to rename individual rooms or beds inside of an accommodation type
- To delete a room, you will update the number of units for private rooms and/or number door rooms. By reducing the inventory count, it will remove the accommodation from the bottom. Once this is done, it cannot be reversed, so only do this if you are certain. See How to Delete an Accommodation Type
- Add the accommodation amenities
- Upload Images of the rooms. The featured image will be displayed on booking engine
- Accommodation Naming & Organization (optional): Enter the room name for each individual accommodation. This information will be for internal use on the calendar and reservation page unless you use the below option.
- Save
Go to the Accommodation Types Overview to learn more.
Once your accommodation types have been created, it's time to add your rates. This section allows you to quickly control what prices are displayed for each room type based on the date.
Include the base rates for any period, including specific days of the week and minimum or maximum length of stay limitations. These are the standard rates for your rooms and the only rates that are sent to your distribution channels.
Per-person Rates are used for customizing your Booking Engine and are not sent to your Distribution Channels. To allow the greatest level of flexibility, Cloudbeds PMS sends out a standardized Best Available Rate across all your channels. This helps ensure a consistent sync with your multiple OTAs.
5.1. How does more availability help me get more bookings?
Loading plenty of availability (both long-term and last-minute) means you are more visible to more bookers and thus more likely to get bookings. For some OTAs, like Booking.com the availability you load lets us market your property on channels like Google, not to mention our thousands of affiliate partner websites (from airlines to comparison websites) so we can make sure you are seen by an even wider, more global audience.
Also, travelers like to plan ahead, so you will appear in more search results for if you load availability further out into the future. We recommend at least 1 year to 16 months of future inventory, and to keep this updated continuously.
Learn more about the Availability Matrix.
5.1.1. Set up Base Rates in the Availability Matrix
- Go to the Availability Matrix section
- Click on +Long-Term Interval
- Select the accommodation(s) to set the Base Rate
- Select the dates/days of the week to set a rate for. Not selecting a day within this range will restrict you from being able to sell inventory on those days unless there is a different interval for only those days added.
- Click on Add Date Range (optional) to add several periods. Note that the Base Rate and Restrictions have to be the same if you use this option.
- Select Base Rate as interval setting
- Enter the Room Rate
- Click Add Interval
Optional: Set up different intervals by selecting specific Interval Settings:
Enter all the taxes you charge on this page. This should include any sales, state or federal taxes, and any other taxes you may charge on top of a room night or a sold product.
If all of your taxes and fees were already included in the total room rates you added, then you do not need to fill this out.
- Example: If you enter a rate of $100 and do not set up any, the guest will pay $100 because all taxes and fees are included in the rate.
If your taxes and fees were not included in the total room rates you added, then you will need to fill this out.
- Example: If you enter a rate of $100 and set up a tax of 10%, the guest will pay $110. This is because all taxes and fees are not included in the rates you have entered. Your 10% tax has been added to the rate.
Create, enable or disable the sources from which you receive the reservations. Configure tax/fee for specific source meaning that it will be automatically applied to the booking once it comes from the selected source.
Find out more about Adding and editing Primary & Third Party Reservation Sources
These are the specific details for how you handle the daily operations of your property. Learn more about Policies.
Create additional users to access your Cloudbeds PMS account. Make sure to create the corresponding Roles first.
Learn more about Users and Roles
Cloudbeds PMS allows you to receive and store credit card details from your guests.
Cloudbeds enforces stricter password requirements when allowing the retrieval and viewing of customer credit card data. For these reasons, you must establish a separate credit card details viewing password in order to access the credit card information from your bookings.
Find more information about Viewing Credit Card Details.
Overview
You're almost there! This is the final step in the setup process before moving on to distribution. It's time to add all current and upcoming reservations for your property.
This is an absolute requirement as it is what creates the availability for your property and helps prevent overbookings. For most people, we recommend just adding reservations manually since it will help build a great understanding of the reservation creation process.
Things to note:
- Importing your past reservations is not required, but can be useful for reporting and maintaining a past and repeating customer list.
- Only the following info is required to create a booking:
- Date
- Accommodation type
- First and last name
- Email (if you don't have one for your guest, simply enter a placeholder email (ex: guy@dude.abcef would work)
- The guest's country of residence
- Source (how was the reservation booked)
- For reservations previously created on OTAs to be automatically updated with possible future modifications, enter their valid third party ID.
Options to Import Reservations
- Reservations from the following channels are automatically imported at the moment of connecting your property to Cloudbeds PMS:
- Booking.com
- Expedia
- Airbnb
- Goibibo
- Remember to inform your Onboarding Coach to perform this action after connecting your property.
Option 1 (recommended) - Manual Quick Import
Manual Quick Import tool allows quickly import many booking at once by filling out the selected fields.
Option 2 - Add Reservations Manually
If you are only adding a few reservations to the system (under fifty or so), we also suggest adding them manually by clicking the New Reservation button. This can also be done in the top right of the reservations page, calendar, and dashboard. Doing this will allow you to gain familiarity with creating reservations and is used by many properties as a training exercise for their staff.
To learn more about creating new reservations, take a look at one of the following knowledge base articles:
Option 3 - Reservation Import Service (paid service)
To use this service, make sure you have at least 100 reservations to import, which is the minimum requirement.
Learn more about Reservation Import Service.
We are here to help!
If you would like us to review what you have set up so far, select the review option and click the Request Review button, and a member of our Support Team will be in touch as soon as possible.
You may select a Remote Review (by email) or Review Call with your Onboarding Coach.
Remember to click on the Save button at the bottom-right corner every time you finish filling out a page.
Your Next Steps
Now that you've setup the core of your property, it's time to move on to Step 2: Distribution. Remember to review all the sections of your Step 1 first, before moving on to Step 2.
Register at Cloudbeds University to get access to all training videos.
