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:

1. The organization schedules a meeting, for example: Organization Meeting 2006.
2. The Aptify user creates a Meetings product in Aptify, named Organization Meeting 2006. (See Creating a Products Record for a Meeting.)
3. The organization identifies housing opportunities near the meeting site, such as nearby hotels, and reserves blocks of rooms on behalf of the meeting attendees.
4. The Aptify user adds the participating hotels as Companies and the hotel contacts as Persons within Aptify.
   
   
5. 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.
     
     
6. 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.
     
     
7. 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.
     
     
8. 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.
     
     
9. 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.
     
     
10. The participating hotel imports the file into its system and uses this information to create reservations.
11. The hotel provides an organization with a file that include confirmation numbers for each registrant.
12. An Aptify user imports the file from the participating hotel into Aptify, which automatically updates the Housing Reservation records with the hotel confirmation number.
13. 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).
14. 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.