Questions and Answers
Beds24 is a cost-effective self-service system offering powerful online booking engines for your own website property management and optional channel management.
Contents
1 Bookings
Beds24 shows real-time availability. Bookings can be instant (auto confirmed) or on request (manually confirmed or declined). Bookings can be changed or moved to another room if required.
Cancellations
You can give guests the option to view and cancel bookings but not change them.
Information
You can set which information your require the guest to enter when they make a booking.
2 Channel Manager
We have a two way XML connection with mayor booking channels so Beds24.com can export inventory and prices and import bookings and modifications to bookings.The capabilities of the connection depend on the channel. You can find details for each connected channel here.
Beds24 can only update inventory, bookings and rates but not descriptions occupancies or pictures. You will need to do this directly in the booking channels.
If required you can set different rates for your own website and booking channel(s).
3 Currencies
You can set the system to display any (one) currency. If you are using booking channels which require a different than your standard currency you can ass a multiplier to prices to convert to a different currency.
If you are using multiple properties you can set a different currency for each.
Your account fees are billed in € but you can pay in any mayor currency according to the current exchange rage.
4 Deposit Payments and Payment Gateways
You can use Beds24 to receive deposit payments with the booking or collect credit card details. Integrated payment gateways are Paypal (which also allows credit card payments), Stripe, Realex, Authorize.Net, Paymill and Bitpay. All later payments have to be processed outside the Beds24 system. Beds24 does not handle money. All payments go directly into these accounts.
There is a small per transaction fee, see the Account >> Billing page for details.
Beds24 is not involved in deposit collections for bookings from booking channels. Each booking channels handles them according to their rules/your account settings.
Although we use what we believe to be best practices to store and transmit the card data securely we can not claim PCI DSS compliance when collecting the card details from the guest.
If you need to collect a deposit and be fully PCI DSS compliant you can use one of the payment gateways to collect deposits from your guests. All the payment gateways we connect (Stripe, Authorize.NET Paymill, Realex, Bitcoin, Paypal) to are fully PCI DSS compliant. Because they then handle all the card processing on their servers and none of it passes to us you can use their PCI DSS compliance statements for your records.
5 Fees
The basic monthly fee is €3.90 including one room or unit. Additional rooms or units can be added at €0.30/month each, activities at €0.10/month. This includes unlimited use of the system, Facebook booking app, and availability calendars and booking widgets on as many web sites or blogs as you like.
Optional extras which are only charged if used are channel manager (from €1.00/month), SMS booking notification (€0.10 per SMS message) and online deposit collection (€0.10 per collection). Additional user log-ins cost €1.00/each per month.
The monthly fee for the channel manager is based on the number of links you make. One link is a connection of one room type (can be multiple rooms of the same type) to one channel. Each link costs €1.00 per month. If you have more than 10 links we offer substantial discounts.
Examples: a lodging with 2 room types (e.g. 5 double rooms and 3 studios) uses 2 booking channels. This would be 4 links costing a total of €4.00/month. 1 room type and 3 booking channels would be 3 links costing a total of €3.00/month.
You can use the calculator on our website to calculate the monthly fee for your set up.
6 Facebook
Beds24 provides a Facebook app to accept bookings directly from a facebook page.
7 Google Analytics / Tracking
You can install Google Analytics on you booking page. Beds24 also has a built in logging system which will give you information on the activities on your booking page and where a booking originated from).
8 Import Data / Connect to other Systems /API
If you need to import bookings into Beds24 you can use a csv via our API (https://www.beds24.com/api/). For some channels we can try to import bookings.
The API can also be used to im/export other data, connect to third party systems or to build your own application.
9 Languages
The backend is English, German partially in Spanish, and we can offer customer support in English and German. The booking page where guest can make their bookings is available in 21 languages (Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish). If the booking page does not currently support your language we can look into adding it if you help us with the translation.
Hosts can choose to activate one or more languages to give guests the option to book in their own language.
10 Messaging and Notifications
E-Mail You can set up template Emails to manually or auto send to guest e.g. x days before arrival/departure, based on origin of the booking etc. You can export all bookings and process the data e.g. add to your mailing lists. We are planning to add a guest database which will make this even easier.
Bookings through OTA´s will be confirmed directly through the OTA not form Beds24.
11 Mailings
Guest information and contact details can be downloaded to be imported into external mailing lists.
12 Mobile
The design of the control panel is responsive meaning it adjusts to the size of the screen. This allows you to perfom all actions from your smart phone or tablet it you need to.
The booking page is mobile friendly. It detects which device the guest uses and adjusts the view accordingly.
13 Multiple Properties / Agency Functions
With Beds24 you can manage multiple properties in one account. You have the option to create subaccounts with individual logins for each property. The subaccounts can have their own login with full access (read and write) or limited access (read only).
The agency search page allows guests to search for availability by criteria you define and book directly online. For a simple example please look here: https://www.beds24.com/demo/agency-online-reservation-system.htm
We do not have a way to automatically split payments or calculate commission. You could collect the deposit from the guest (your commission) and the property collects the balance when the guest arrives.
14 Pictures
By default the system allows for one picture per unit but you can add a Woo slider which will let you display multiple pictures. If you are comfortable working with HTML you can also add multiple pictures directly.
15 Rates/Prices
You can set a simple or refined rate structure based for example on seasons, occupancies, minimum/maximum stays, time of booking (e.g. last minute).
16 Reports
The system includes a range of predefined reports including revenue reports, arrivals, departures, invoices, occupancy and current guests. You also have the option to create custom reports. All reports can be saved as .csv files. Custom reports are also available for download as Excel or pdf files.
17 Setup and Customisation
Beds24 is a self service system. Set up is free of charge and you do it yourself. We have setup wizards which introduce the system and guide you through the setup process.
Almost all elements on the booking page and invoice have classes and you can apply custom CSS to customise them. You or your web designer can use Firebug or a similar tool to look up the classes.
18 System Status
We do have a public monitoring system. Even though our service is very reliable there will be occasional short outages due to necessary maintenance. Also we cannot except acts of God.
19 Support
Beds24 is designed as a self service system with context sensitive help, extensive documentation and a free-of-charge ticket support system. Our fees do not include telephone support so users who do their own setup get the best available price.
20 Widgets
Beds24 can be integrated into any website. Adding a booking widget to a website requires pasting some html code we provide to the source code. This will work with any systems as long as you can access the source code.
21 Wordpress
Beds24 provides a Wordpress plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/beds24-online-booking/) which makes it easy to add booking technology to any Wordpress site via shortcodes. The actual management of bookings and inventory is done directly in the Beds24 control panel.
