Now that we've prepared, it's time to begin adding the basics. While myfrontdesk has a lot of customization options, this section covers the most necessary ones for your property.
Once these have been completed, you can then progress to step 2 and begin setting up your distribution channels. Let's get to it!
There are short tutorial videos available on each section of the Setup Guide in many languages
After setting your password with the link provided in your first email, you can always access your property from https://www.cloudbeds.com/ or directly through your login page.
You'll answer a few short questions about your property
These include your currency, time zone, channel manager and PMS status, and how your rates are designed. Once finished, click on Begin setup.
Welcome to your property's interactive getting started guide!
The interactive getting started section does a great job of guiding you through the majority of the setup process. All the pages feature a detailed tutorial and also have tool-tips you can hover over for a quick explanation.
We'll be highlighting the settings in the required sections that you'll need to complete to progress to the next stage.
Click on the Save button in the bottom-right corner every time you finish filling out a page.
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.
- Mismatched time zone settings can cause bookings to be displayed with the wrong check-in time or even date so this setting is very important.
- If you need to change your time zone setting, but you've already set the viewing credit card password, contact our support team
- 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.
Note: Mismatched currencies can cause rate discrepancies and also result in mischarging customers.
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 you do enable it, however, be aware that you are at 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 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 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 whether you would like the application to assign an accommodation to all existing reservations
- Select do you want to allow same-day bookings through mybookings
- Select until when you allow same-day bookings
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 mybookings.
- 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
- Breakfast (Channel Distribution) - this setting only affects rates being sent in channel distribution and does not affect rates set in MyBookings. Check further details here: How to add Breakfast Inclusive / Exclusive Option for Channel Distribution
The general profile section includes your basic property info and what customers will see on mybookings. We'll be going through each of the settings here briefly:
- Make sure your property type is correct
- Write a description of your property, this will appear on your mybookings page, so make sure it's good!
- Upload some images to your property. These will be used on your mybookings page.
- 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 property address and make sure that the location is defined correctly on the map
- Click Save
If the location of your property is not displaying in the correct location on the map above, drag the marker to the correct location to update the coordinates.
Correctly creating accommodation types is one of the most vital settings for your property. This affects both your myfrontdesk and mybookings accounts as well as the inventory and availability of your distribution channels. There are additional customization settings available on this page, but we'll be going over just the basic steps.
We strongly recommend creating distinct room types (ex "Standard Dorm" or "Women's Dorm") and not separate individual rooms (ex "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 about why creating room types is strongly recommended, read our Distribution Channel Mapping Guidelines.
To add a new room type:
- Click on New Accommodation Type
-
Name the new accommodation type
- Remember that guests will see the names you input. We recommend using normal titles like "Standard Double Room"
- 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 a description of the room for your guests
- Add the accommodation amenities
- Upload Images of the rooms. The featured image will be displayed on booking engine
- (Optional) Accommodation Naming & Organization: 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
- To rename individual rooms or beds inside of an accommodation type, click on the Edit Room Names button.
- 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.
- If you need to remove an accommodation type, you will want to ensure you follow the steps in the knowledge base article titled Deleting an Accommodation Type from Myfrontdesk.
- No changes will be finalized on this page until you click to Save
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. On this page, you may 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.
Note: Per-person rates are used for customizing your mybookings engine and are not sent to your distribution channels. To allow the greatest level of flexibility, myfrontdesk sends out a standardized Best Available Rate across all your channels. This helps ensure a consistent sync with your multiple OTAs.
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, travellers 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 Availability Matrix in this Knowledge Base
To get started, click on the green +Long-term interval button.
How To Add Base Rates
- Select the accommodation(s) for which you want to set the base rate
- Select the days you want 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.
*to add several periods click Add Date Range - though 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
You can set up different intervals by selecting specific 'Interval Settings':
Do your rates include any taxes or fees? If you are planning to connect to any channels, you'll want to make sure your taxes and fees are consistent across myfrontdesk and all of the channels.
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.
For details on how to fill this out, take a look at our article on how to create taxes and fees.
Enable/disable or create the sources from which you receive the reservations. You may also 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 in our Knowledge Base: Adding and editing Primary & Third Party Reservation Sources
These are the specific details for how you handle the daily operations of your property. For the specifics on setting this up, read our Policies Feature Overview.
On this page you may create additional users to access your myfrontdesk account.
If you would like to manage the permissions associated with each user you add, you must first create a new user role by navigating to the "Roles" tab below. After you have configured the roles, you can add the users and select which role they belong to.
See Users and Roles article to learn more:
Myfrontdesk allows you receive and store credit card details of the 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: All You Need To Know
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. Think of this as adding the batteries.
For most people, we recommend just adding reservations manually since it will help build a great understanding of the reservation creation process.
- Importing your past reservations is not required, but can be useful for reporting and maintaining a past and repeating customer list.
- Want to get through adding a reservation quickly? 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, you can just enter a placeholder email (ex: "Guy@Dude.abcef" would work)
- The guest's country of residence
- Source - how was the reservation booked
- If you want reservations created previously on OTAs be automatically updated with possible future modifications - you will need to enter their valid third party ID.
There are three options for Importing Reservations:
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
This is a paid service, If you wish to use this service, make sure you have at least 100 reservations to import, this is the minimum requirement.
To learn more about this service, take a look at the following article:
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 - a member of our support team will be in touch as soon as possible.
You may select remote review (by email) or review call with your onboarding coach.
Done! Time to move on to Step 2: Distribution
Now that you've setup the core of your property, it's time to move on to Step 2: Distribution
