Calendar driven shopping experience
The calendar driven shopping experience provides a responsive design that displays availability information alongside room and rate details on the same screen. This streamlined approach reduces the need for separate room and rate detail pages, creating a more efficient booking journey for your guests.
The calendar driven shopping experience centralizes the guest's reservation journey around an interactive calendar display.
When you enable this feature, the booking engine updates availability without requiring guests to select an update button each time they change their search criteria.
Key booking flow differences from the previous generation booking engine include:
Automatic updates allow rates to refresh immediately when guests change their selected dates in the calendar.
Streamlined navigation allow room and rate details to display on the same screen rather than separate pages.
Enhanced rate display allows available rates to appear in a horizontal carousel section above the available rooms.
Enable calendar driven shopping
To set up the calendar driven shopping experience follow the steps below:
Go to Property Description.
Go to Branding.
Go to the IBE Settings tab.
Select the Calendar Driven Shopping checkbox for either A or B setting.
📌Note: When you enable this feature, the system automatically adjusts other settings on the screen. These settings may be changed at any time to fit your online selling strategy.
Enable your chosen combination of booking engine settings:
Default view, choose one from the dropdown:
Most popular, sort order as configured in the CRS.
Price low to high.
Price high to low.
Enable enhanced multiroom, check to allow shoppers to select multiple rooms and occupancies for each at the start of the journey instead of using the shopping cart experience to add a room then navigate back to the availability page for additional room selections.
Reduced clicks to book, check to reduce one step in the booking process by taking users to the combo cart or checkout page instead of the cart page and then the checkout page.
Rooms left upper limit, enter the number to trigger scarcity messaging when rooms left to sell for a date fall below this number. Messaging example three rooms left.
Rooms sold lower limit, enter the number to trigger popularity messaging when the rooms sold for a date over a set number of days go above this number. Messaging example: 95 rooms sold in the last seven days.
Past days for rooms sold, choose from the drop down the number of days to monitor and trigger messaging for the rooms sold logic above.
Display room extra attributes for future functionality.
Branding, select from dropdown to enable or disable specific branding already setup from this menu.
Calendar pricing display, choose from one of the following in the drop down menu:
Always.
On offer selection.
Never.
Show offers expanded for future functionality.
Click Save IBE Setting.
Calendar display options
Configure how wide the calendar displays on the screen for this booking engine layout. Follow the steps below to adjust the size.
Go to Property Description.
Go to Branding.
Click on the branding name and you will be brought to the Modify tab.
Locate the Page Width dropdown menu and choose from the options:
Compact 960px.
Wide 1143px.
Full screen, uses the full screen width.
Click Save.
Features not applicable with the calendar driven shopping experience
Listed below are traditional CRS booking engine features that are not applicable with the setup of the calendar driven shopping experience:
Add-on upsell modal window.
Add-on length of stay modal window.
To keep the shopper on the same page and streamline the booking flow, there are no separate room or rate detail pages in this setup:
Enhanced details.
Room detail.
Rate detail.