How to Use Housing Management
Using the Aptify Housing Management application, you can create and manage housing requests for an organization's customers and/or members. While you can administer housing reservations as a separate process, the Housing Management functions are closely associated with Aptify's Meeting Management application.
The following is an overview of how an organization might use the Housing Management application:
- The organization schedules a meeting, for example: Organization Meeting 2006.
- The Aptify user creates a Meetings product in Aptify, named Organization Meeting 2006. (See Creating a Products Record for a Meeting.)
- The organization identifies housing opportunities near the meeting site, such as nearby hotels, and reserves blocks of rooms on behalf of the meeting attendees.
- The Aptify user adds the participating hotels as Companies and the hotel contacts as Persons within Aptify.
- The Aptify user creates a Housing product that represents the local hotels that have rooms available for the meeting.
- Housing products are created in the Housing service.
- To reduce the system complexity, you can create a Housing product specifically for the meeting. For example, a housing product, named, Hotels for Organization Meeting 2006.
- See Creating a Products Record for Housing for more details.
- The Aptify user adds Housing Blocks to the Housing product.
- Each Housing Block corresponds to a group of reserved rooms for a specific hotel. For example, if you have reserved a block of rooms at two hotels, you would create two room blocks, one for each hotel.
- You can also create sub-blocks for a Housing Block. For example, if the same hotel has a several room types available, such as standard rooms, suites, and penthouses, the parent block would be for the standard rooms, and you could create sub-blocks to track the available suites and penthouses separately.
- Aptify recommends that you use the Housing Inventory Management dashboard to add blocks to Housing products.
- See Creating Housing Blocks for more details.
- An Aptify user adds the rooms to the Housing Blocks. This tracks the number of each room type available within a particular Housing Block.
- Aptify recommends the use of Housing Inventory Management dashboard to add rooms to Housing Blocks.
- See Creating Housing Block Rooms for details.
- Data entry personnel create Orders to register members and/or customers for the meeting and to reserve rooms within an applicable housing block.
- See Creating a Meeting Registration for information on creating meeting registrations using the Aptify Orders Form.
- See Creating Housing Reservations for information on creating housing reservations using the Aptify Orders Form.
- To register a customer for a meeting and to reserve housing for the customer use a single Order form.
- An Aptify user exports the housing reservation details to a file and sends it to the participating hotel.
- The format of the export file may vary from hotel to hotel. See Transferring Housing Information for details on transferring information to and from participating hotels.
- The format of the export file may vary from hotel to hotel. See Transferring Housing Information for details on transferring information to and from participating hotels.
- The participating hotel imports the file into its system and uses this information to create reservations.
- The hotel provides an organization with a file that include confirmation numbers for each registrant.
- An Aptify user imports the file from the participating hotel into Aptify, which automatically updates the Housing Reservation records with the hotel confirmation number.
- An Aptify user charges customers and/or members for meeting registrations and/or reservation services by setting the Order Status to Shipped for the relevant Orders (if they were not marked as shipped previously).
- The meeting attendees pay the hotel directly, typically upon check-out. The organization is only a facilitator between the hotels and the meeting attendees. Note that an organization can configure the system to charge customers a service fee for managing hotel reservations, if desired.
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