Reservations from enquiry to check-out
How Achekam's Hospitality pack follows a reservation from enquiry to check-out, why cancellations carry a reason, and what it leaves to your room calendar.
By Achekam · · 4 min read · For Hospitality businesses in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya
Launching soon. The Industry CRM add-on described in this article is launching soon. This article describes it as it will work at launch.
A small lodge or guesthouse takes enquiries from everywhere: a phone call at breakfast, an e-mail overnight, a message through the website, a booking that arrives through a booking site. By the afternoon, the person on reception is trying to remember who was quoted, who said they would confirm by Friday, and whether the family arriving tomorrow has actually paid.
Most venues manage this with a reservations book, a spreadsheet, or both, and both depend on someone updating them. Achekam's Industry CRM, with the Hospitality & hotels pack switched on, gives every reservation a record and a stage. This article explains how a reservation moves through the pack and, just as important, what the pack does not try to do, for venues in South Africa, Nigeria and Kenya.
Guests, reservations and event enquiries
When a business switches on the Industry CRM, it chooses one of twenty industries, and each pack sets the words its screens use, its record types, its pipelines and its workflows. The Hospitality pack calls customers Guests and keeps two kinds of record:
- Reservations, with their guests and their stay dates.
- Event enquiries, for conferences, functions and celebrations.
When an enquiry is converted, the CRM creates the guest and the main record at the same time and starts that record's workflow, so nobody has to type the guest's details twice.
The stages of a reservation
A reservation moves through these stages:
| Stage | How venues typically use it |
|---|---|
| Enquiry | Someone has asked about dates, rooms or rates |
| Provisional | The rooms are being held while the guest decides or pays |
| Confirmed | The guest has committed to the booking |
| In house | The guest has arrived |
| Checked out | The stay is over |
A reservation can also be Cancelled, and the pack asks for a reason.
Seen as a whole, the stages answer the questions reception is asked every day. Which provisional bookings are about to lapse? Who is arriving tomorrow? Which guests are in house tonight? For the bigger picture, Investopedia's RevPAR explainer shows how hotels calculate revenue per available room from average daily rate and occupancy, and how they use it to measure performance.
Why every cancellation carries a reason
Reasons turn cancellations into information. Over a season, a pattern emerges: guests who chose somewhere cheaper, guests who found the dates unavailable when they went to confirm, guests who never answered after the quote. Each points to something different, whether your rates, your response time or the way provisional holds are followed up.
Keep the list of reasons short and plain so staff pick the right one, and look at it at the end of every month.
Conditions before a reservation moves on
In the Industry CRM, a record cannot move into some pipeline stages until set conditions are met. The conditions the CRM can use include fields being filled in, a customer being named, an amount being set, a workflow stage or a whole workflow being finished, or a particular kind of task being done, such as a signature.
For reservations, that keeps the pipeline honest. A booking cannot look further along than its details support, which matters most when the whole team relies on the Confirmed list to plan rooms and staff.
What the pack does not do
The Hospitality pack is not a property-management system or a channel manager. It does not check room availability, and it does not receive bookings from booking sites. Reservations made on booking sites are entered by staff.
That is a deliberate boundary, and it is better to know it up front. If you already run a property-management system or a channel manager, keep it as the authority on which rooms are free. The pack's job is the relationship around the booking: the enquiry, the follow-up, the paperwork, the guest's history.
Working alongside your room calendar
Because the pack does not check availability, a simple routine prevents double bookings:
- Check availability in your room calendar or property-management system before moving a reservation to Provisional.
- Enter booking-site reservations in the pack as soon as they arrive, not at the end of the week.
- Give one person the job of comparing the day's arrivals in the pack with the room calendar each morning.
- When a booking is cancelled on a booking site, cancel it in the pack too, with the reason.
One booking, start to finish
A couple e-mails on a Tuesday asking about a long weekend. Reception converts the enquiry, which creates the guest and the reservation together, and the reservation sits at Enquiry while a rate is sent. On Wednesday the guests reply that they would like the room; reception checks the room calendar, holds the room and moves the reservation to Provisional. The guests confirm on Thursday, and it moves to Confirmed. On arrival it becomes In house, and on departure Checked out.
A booking that comes in through a booking site skips the early stages. Staff enter it in the pack as soon as it arrives, at the stage it has really reached, and check the room calendar while they are at it.
What happens after the guest leaves
A reservation does not end at Checked out as far as the guest relationship goes. The pack's check-out steps, from the bill to the guest's preferences, are covered in after check-out: the bill, feedback and preferences. Conferences and functions follow their own route, explained in conference and event enquiries to function sheet.
Behind every busy month of reservations is a busy month of deliveries; paying food and beverage suppliers in parts covers the cost side.
Start with the reservations already confirmed for the coming weeks, then the provisional ones. Put each at its real stage, check them against the room calendar, and from then on enter each new enquiry the day it arrives.
General guidance only, not advice on your own circumstances. Tax and payroll rules change: check the current position with the authority or your adviser.
