Split-Leg bookings may occur when NightsBridge has availability across two or more rooms, within the same room type. This best way to maximise the availability of a room type, allowing you to accommodate and accept more bookings - improving both your occupancy and revenue.
Split-Leg bookings are a good thing. It means that all the in-between dates you had availability for can get booked and you don't lose out on potential bookings. You should be able to shuffle all bookings around to accommodate your guest.
Based on the Online Calendar below:
- A potential guest searches availability at your property for arrival, 08 June and departure, 11 June.
Although you don't have availability for 3 consecutive nights across one physical room - rooms 7, 8 and 9 in this example - you do have availability across the room type, Deluxe King Room with Mountain View.
- NightsBridge will note that you have the availability on your booking engine and accept the booking.
What will the rooms look on your calendar?
How will the room type show online to your guests?
How you are notified of split-leg bookings
You will receive an email informing you of the split-leg booking.
This email will mention that:
- you have received a multi-day booking, and that
- it couldn't be entered into your system properly
The email will also confirm that you have the availability within the specific, only spread across more than one room.
Here is an example of the email sent to the property for each split-leg booking.
How split-leg bookings are displayed on NightsBridge
On PCBridge, the version of NightsBridge you're currently using, a split-leg bookings appear as a double booking.
In this case, you are still able to 'shuffle' (or reallocate rooms to) your existing arrival bookings in order to allocate a room to the split-leg booking.
If you are first opening your calendar that synchronises, you will get this pop-up that indicates a double-booking needs correction, but in this case it would be a split-leg booking.
If you are working on your calendar already, and synchronise, you will get notified of the new booking that has entered your system.
To check if this booking is clashing or is with another booking you can follow these steps:
- Click 'Tools' at the top of your calendar.
- Select 'Double Bookings'.
- Double-click on one of the bookings to move them to another room of the same type.
When accessing the Recent Bookings tab via Quick View, split-leg bookings are easily identified by the pink banner.
How to handle a split-leg booking
In order to get your calendar to open to shuffle the bookings around you can approach this by doing either 2 actions.
- Double-click on one of the bookings to open your calendar to see if this booking can be moved into another room of the same type or another room type temporarily to see if you can shuffle the booking into another room of the same type. If you can do this, this sorts out the booking completely so you don't need to shuffle more.
- If you cannot do this, click on the 'X' button to open your calendar to visually see how you can shuffle the booking around.
If you click the button that says 'Exit' this will simply close the window and not open your NightsBridge calendar.
- If you follow the first option, make sure to click 'Check Again' on the pop-up after saving your booking details to open your calendar.
- Click the 'OK' button when you get the pop-up notifying you that there are no more double bookings on the system in order to shuffle the rest of the bookings.
If you have clicked the 'X' to visually see the changes and you synchronise, you will get notified that the booking was added to your calendar which looks like this
Moving the booking
When you will see the booking has been moved, and you can start to move others to allow the booking to fit in the correct room type. Do not synch until you have moved all the bookings into the correct rooms to accommodate all guests.
1. Check which bookings in your calendar can be moved to another room to free up the required availability in one room.
- In the imaged example, we can move the booking for Richard Fernadez to Room 6 or 10 temporarily as there is no room of the same quality available which is the Deluxe King Room with Mountain View.
Room 6 is a Double Room and Room 10 is a Queen Room so Richard Fernadez will be in a similar quality room, but this can help shuffle the other bookings to accommodate the guest in the - This will free up the available nights in one room within the Deluxe King Room with Mountain View.
2. Reallocate the room
Click on the booking to change the room allocation.
If needed, guidance is available in our tutorial 'How to move a booking to another room'.
- In the imaged example, the booking for Richard Fernadez has been moved to Room 6 temporarily and the booking for 'Gab' to room 10 temporarily to assist with a shuffle.
- 6 nights of consecutive availability is now available in Room 7 to accommodate the new booking and the booking we had to shuffle temporarily to get all bookings in the same type.
3. Allocate the freed-up room to the split-leg booking
Allocate the newly available room to the split-leg booking.
If needed, guidance is available in our tutorial 'How to move a booking to another room'.
- In our imaged example, the original split-leg booking for Richard Fernadez or 'Fer' on the calendar - that could not be place on the calendar by the system - is now accommodated in Room 7 along with the booking for 'Gab' we also temporarily moved.
You can now synchronise the changes so this change reflects online on your booking engine and booking channels. When using the NightsBridge Online Calendar you do not need to synchronise your calendar. This will automatically update. Reach out to NightsBridge if you would like to upgrade to the latest version of our software.
If you're unable to reallocate arrival rooms due to clashing or overlapping dates, creating an offline room to temporarily host the split-leg booking can be done. The split-leg booking can then be allocated to the offline room while other arrival rooms are reallocated to free up the availability. You can see an example of this in the image above. The most important part of an offline room is that you do not connect this to a room type or it could get bookings and it is only used for admin purposes.
- This tutorial is available if you are confident to complete the process on your own, otherwise, please contact NightsBridge Support for assistance.
This option will require the guest to change rooms during their stay.
To help manage the guests expectation, we recommend that you contact the guest to advise them that they will need to move to a different room during the stay.
- Here is an example of a typical message:
During your stay, for your last 2 nights, we will need to move you to a different room. Our apologies!
We will assist with moving you on the day and limit the inconvenience as best we can.
We felt it important to let you know ahead of time.
- Guests usually have no issue with moving rooms if you're able to do the physical moving as well.
- It is important that the guest knows about the move before arrival though.
To accomplish this, you would need to change the nights booked on the original room to the number of nights available, once done, you would manually book the other room(s) for the same guest so all rooms can be on one invoice.
We're here to help!
If you need any additional guidance on the topic, please contact NightsBridge Support.
Don't want split-leg bookings?
Please note that we do not recommend restructuring your NightsBridge Setup to avoid split-leg bookings. This will defeat the designed benefit of maximum availability to maximise revenue. A restructure will also require additional changes to all your connected channels. Most booking channels will also not accept multiple rooms with the same room type name as this will cause guests confusion - and confusion leads to less confirmed bookings.
Best Practice:
Cleaning the grid
Referred to as "cleaning the grid", this practice is simply:
- reviewing the arrivals your online calendar and
- moving the room allocations of future bookings around to free up consecutive available nights within the same physical rooms
This is best done according to you booking window - that way you're cleaning up room-specific availability in advance, reducing the occurrence of split-leg bookings.
- Many large properties and brands consider this a common practice and it is often a task assigned to Front Office staff.
That said, if you're certain that split-leg bookings are not for you, reach out to NightsBridge Support for guidance with your options.