Split Inventory - Everything You Need to Know

Property owners want to increase the possibility of bookings via different marketing techniques. One of these techniques is selling a physical space in multiple ways in order to maximize revenue and occupancy. The working name for this comprehensive functionality is “Split Inventory”.
It begins with the physical accommodations that you wish to sell. You should first create your rooms in the system in order to continue creating virtual accommodations by combining these rooms: Accommodation Types - How to Create and Manage

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Important:

  • Split Inventory is a very powerful tool for maximizing revenue and occupancy. Having it along with the overbooking feature ON can lead to uncontrolled overbookings.
  • While there is a potential for overbookings when selling the same room multiple times, our split inventory feature significantly mitigates this risk by automatically adjusting the availability of linked rooms. This is particularly helpful for group bookings made through your booking engine within the system. However, if two linked rooms are booked simultaneously on an OTA (Online Travel Agency), we are unable to modify the availability to prevent a guest from reserving both rooms in a single reservation.

Benefits

  • you can sell a physical space in a variety of ways;
  • you will cover more customer needs;
  • increase the possibility of bookings via different marketing techniques;
  • helps to maximize revenue and occupancy.

Set Up Examples

We can create many combinations and make them available through the booking channels. See the example below, where a property with 6 physical rooms can create virtual accommodations by combining the physical ones:

Split Inventory Feature Set - Google Docs - Google Chrome
  • Combine Physical Room Types of the Same Type into a Single Virtual Room Type - this way we can combine two deluxe rooms DLX1 and DLX2 into Suite.
  • Combine Rooms to be Sold as the Whole Floor - we can create a virtual room called First Floor and connect it with three standard rooms: STD1, STD2 and STD3.
  • Combine One Physical Room and One Virtual Room and Sell It as a Whole Floor - create another virtual room type called Second Floor and connect it with one standard room STD4 and with the previously created Suite (which already consists of 2 deluxe rooms).
  • Create a Virtual Room from Two Different Physical Room Types - create virtual room type called Duplex and connect it with one standard room STD1 and one deluxe room DLX2.
  • Make the Whole Place Available for Reservations - create House as a virtual room type and connect it with Floor 1 and Floor 2.

Booking Scenarios

If the Suite is booked:

  • the inventory of 2 Deluxe rooms, Duplex, Floor 2, and Entire Place will be decremented.
  • the system will also block these rooms’ availability and remove them from booking channels immediately. 

If Duplex is booked:

  • the system will decrease the inventory of: 1 Deluxe, 1 Standard, Suite, Floor 1, Floor 2 and Entire place
  • only 3 standard rooms will be available on the channels. 

Occupancy calculation when using Split Inventory

When a room type is marked as physical, it will be included in the occupancy calculation. Virtual room types will be ignored, and occupancy will be calculated by using their relationships.

Difference between “Shared” and “Split” Inventory

Shared inventory allows a property to divide a physical room type as main and secondary accommodations. It is a helpful feature for hostel scenarios where you divide your actual rooms into beds and accept reservations for these units. But it doesn't cover the ability for facilities to combine numerous room types as part of a single, bigger unit, such as a suite, which would include both deluxe and regular rooms. This is where the split inventory can help but we must remember that we need to start with the smallest unit and combine it with others to get larger ones.

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