Hi Aldair,

Thanks for this opportunity to provide feedback on the availability blocks in Mews.  As you know it has been one of the aspects we would like to help contribute ideas to for development and growth of the platform.  Our Sales and Reservations teams would be excited to get on a call with your development team as well, as many of these points are easier to convey graphically via a screen share than with the written word.

That said, here are some of the main challenge items we have specific to Groups: 

1. Block Inelasticity
   1. Stay patterns of pre-assigned rooms don’t jive with availability.  Meaning..  We may show 1 room available per night over 3 nights, but it won’t necessarily be the same room number.  Fighting auto-assigned rooms in timeline to make room for Group block.  - the team has to play “Tetris” on the timeline too often to get it to fit..  This is especially true within two weeks or so, where the timeline gets quite full.

2. We need more flexibility for the front line hotel staff to manage reservations within a Group Block without having to make drastic modifications to Availability block headers. groups.
   1. We would like the ability for reservation changes to force an override of guest room block availability? Not having this is preventing our front desk staff from being able to extend a block reservation. They do not have the permissions or time to add space to blocks while working directly with the guest either on the phone or at the front desk..

2. Rooming List import - (Mews Import Tool) 
   1. Group Rooming List (Property Level)
      1. We have to have greater than or equal to the exact number of rooms per night by room type in order for MEWS to accept a property level import .xlsx file. to be able to pare back to the exact room nights per room type for each night.   A single room night needed by a reservation on a property-level rooming list that is not already pre-prescribed in its associated block will cause the import job to error out and fail.

2. Group Object Rooming List (Pickup)
   1. Have to pick up the exact stay patterns first before generating a rooming list from a group object. If there are too many different stay patterns, it’s most efficient to add more rooms than are needed to a block, book a “mode” of all needed room nights,.  Meaning you have to overbook for a group of a series of days, and then either pare the books back to match the specific count for each day.  This seems counterintuitive, but it is the most efficient way for us to deal with variances in number of rooms per day for a Group.

2. Can only Manage the contact object, not the reservation
   1. Arrival and Departure dates cannot be managed via the import spreadsheet. 

3. For our front desk or Reservations teams, the ability to quickly Move or Change the Room Type or Reservation Dates of a reservation(s) within a Group.

4. Ability to add or remove an existing reservation to a Group without needing to cancel and re-create it. 
   1. Need capability to update the reservation with the Availability Block ID
   2. Why don't the Availability Block Headers update the count when group ID's are merged for reservations? 

Ancillary functions to Groups:

These items are not directly related to the Availability group block function, but are part of the workflow and do create issues.  

1. Confirmation Letter emails - For our Group customers, most often we need the option to send the confirm email to the Guest only.  Right  now the options are only Booker and Guest or Booker only, or no one at all.
2. Bill printing options for Itemized Room Nights.  Many of the companies we work with require itemized billing, and we need a print option for the bills to show each room night individually, not grouped when there are multiple nights.  Right now we have to go through a process to screen print the page from Mews that does show it itimized, and then attached that with the proforma invoice that has the room nights grouped.  Not efficient.
3. Availability Block Report - Please Bring back the ability to sort the onscreen report by Release Date.  That is the most important column we would want to sort that by.  It used to be able to be sorted by that column.

Love to see the topic surfacing. At The Incline Lodge, our core requests would be the following: 

• In House: Allow users to extend existing room block reservations outside of negotiated dates and rates without adjusting availability or spaces within the availability block link. Furthermore, this adjustment should take into consideration if an extensions is available within a given room block category to avoid overbooking. I don’t believe that this is the case when adjusting reservation dates in “properties” in both group or transient reservations. You must first manually check availability in the timeline, availability report, or while making a new reservation in Mews Commander. This would facilitate the following
  • Easy extensions by hotel staff without overbooking concerns. 
  • Simplified billing, automated payments, confirmation emails, as well as room access information through numerous integrations. 
  • Eliminating guest confusion as it relates to the above mentioned areas. 
  • Assign public (premium) rates for shoulder dates outside of the negotiated agreement, thereby optimizing ADR. 
• Guest Facing: Another option would be to add a feature to the unique booking links within the availability blocks that allows them to book shoulder dates and then automatically combines the reservations in the system. In theory, this would allow guests to extend on either side of their reservation during one smooth booking journey. Once again, this feature should take into consideration public rates for shoulder dates, availability within room categories, as well as any automated payment scheduled built into the group rate to keep everything aligned. 

These features would save time and eliminate many issues for both management and ground level staff. 

Hi Aldair,

A little late to this thread, but a few other changes that I think would improve the experience for our teams include:

• Ability to change the base rate of a block after it is created. Sometimes, our onsite teams create blocks under the wrong rate name and it’s painful to rebuild the block, especially if it already has bookings picked up 
• Ability for the block rate name to be captured by existing product rules. When I make an availability block, MEWS now makes a new synthetic rate name (i.e if I use “Group Social” as by base rate, MEWS now makes a temporary rate called “Group Social (Block Name)” in the system)
  • If I have a product rule to cancel resort fee for all bookings under the Group Social rate, that product rule is not intelligent enough to know that “Group Social (Block Name)” is the same as “Group Social” and it doesn’t apply to the group block. We end up having to create ad-hoc product rules for each block to get around this issue 
• Show rooms held by a block in the timeline view (ideally like optional bookings or in a different color). Teams can sometimes glance at the timeline quickly when a guest calls in to inquire about availability and they are misled because the timeline shows no bookings, but those rooms are actually held in a confirmed block and just not picked up yet. 
• Ability to export a pickup report from a block to share with organizers. We are often asked “who has booked already” and there is no easy report for us to pull and share, so we have to summarize the info we can see on screen into an email or call the booker.

Let me know if you would like to chat further on any of these points - happy to jump on a quick call! 

Thanks,

Alessandro