Hello!
In principle the idea is good. On the other hand, this would mess up you company database quite a bit. You will get duplicates and other problems if you allow inserting that info directly as a linked company to the reservation. At least it’s not so easy to avoid that…
The only thing that comes to my mind would be to ask guests to provide the company invoice details in the Special request text field (as the OTAs deliver that info mostly), so that it shows up as a comment/note to the reservations and your staff can manually assign or create the correct company profile.
That beeing said, it would be great to be able to customize the label of that “Special request field” or have some hint text inside the box (like “Enter special requests, comments, and company invoice details here ...”)
Another idea: if you have lots of guests from only a few companies, and maybe they have their own rate anyway, then you could create a separate booking engine for each company. That way, I believe, it should be possible to assign the correct company profile as an associated profile automatically.
Finally, we do invite guests to check out online with the “Check-out invitation” mailing. In that text we clearly and strongly state that if a company invoice is required, we ask the guest to either let us know by chat or email in advance, or come to the reception the night before departure, to settle everything before Check out queues in the morning…
Kind regards,
Jean-Philipp.
Thanks for your detailed reply Jean-Philipp,
our current IBE allows for entering a company name and that field is transferred to the correct field in mews. It works well. Of course you always have to check if the company name is correct. It's an ongoing thing at any company I guess. But having an idea who is coming prior to checkin is really useful and we avoid invoice corrections.
Some guest get creative and use whatever field they find to enter information that doesn't belong there. So no matter if you offer a company name field, you will get bad data to some extent. Eventually, I think it’s less work with better data quality and better pre-check-in information to have that company name field in the booking process.
We have a lot of different and small companies and it really helps to get the information prior to arrival/prior to check-out. Companies with specific rates are not an issue. That works well.
To use the special request field would be an option but you would still have to copy/paste the company name into the corresponding field in mews, add the address and you still don't know if the company name (entered by the guest) is correct. There is no perfect and safe method to this problem, but I think it would be better, if the company field is there during the booking process.
Happy to discuss further ideas
Dear @Max and @j.spiess,
Thank you for bringing this to our attention, and for your thoughtful feedback! We really appreciate your input.
This is not possible with the current functionality. As @j.spiess suggested, the only workaround would be for guests to include the company name in the notes section when submitting their details. However, I do understand that this does not address the challenge fully and still requires some manual work :(
I took a look at our feedback forum, and it seems that this particular request hasn’t been posted yet. We’d be extremely grateful if you could share your suggestion there. Our product managers review the forum regularly and use the feedback to help shape our roadmap. By posting it, you’ll also give others the chance to upvote the idea, which could help us prioritize it. I think including a link to this discussion would be very helpful as well as there were many valuable points shared by both of you.
Thank you once again for your contribution. If you have any additional thoughts or need assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out!
Warm regards