What’s the difference between Chain-Level and Hotel-Level?
In the Control Center, a user has the option to make edits to any of the following items on a hotel or chain level*:
PHG uses the chain-level settings for its brand and corporate website booking engines. Booking Engine Suite customization occur on the hotel-level.
Any change made to a hotel-level template, for example, will only show up on the hotel’s custom booking engine. More specifically, the change will only be visible when the hotel-level template is called via the “template” parameter in the URL.
If a change is made to the Preferred Travel Group, Inc. template, that change will be reflected on all hotels in the PH booking engine.
All changes that a hotel requests will 99.99% of time occur in a hotel-level setting.
Further to this, to ensure that the hotel is indeed using the right hotel level template on their website, they are required to pass their template ID in the URL (“&template=[property code]”) if they are not using the PH&R Redirect.
*More areas where this distinction comes into play may exist, but for the purposes of this answer, we’ll stick to this example.
What’s the importance of the template ID?
In our billing system, a reservation is billed to a hotel based off the template ID that we receive from SynXis in the superset. Because hotel website reservations are billed differently than PH&R website reservations are, it is extremely important that the hotel pass their template ID (if they are not using the PH&R Redirect) and that their hotel-level template is not set as default in the Control Center.
If it is not passed, a reservation made on the hotel’s website will be credited to PreferredHotels.com.
If the template is set to default, a reservation made on a brand website will be credited to the hotel’s website and billed accordingly.
Website vs. Booking Engine
It is important to understand where a PH&R website ends and the booking engine begins. Knowing this distinction will help you determine where you should submit your requests when using the submission guidelines available on the Front Desk.
Let’s look at PreferredHotels.com for example. As you browse around the site, you will notice that the address bar at the top of your browser displays “http://www.preferredhotels.com” (or in some browsers just preferredhotels.com or www.preferredhotels.com). This is the domain.
Once you navigate to the booking engine by either using a widget and entering dates, clicking on a “book now” link, or any other method on the site, you will notice that the URL changes to https://be.synxis.com.
Checking the address bar is your best way to tell if you are on a brand site or the booking engine so you will know how an update you would like to have can be made.
What is an Itinerary Email?
Normally when a guest books through a site using a booking engine, the guest will receive a confirmation email and potentially a cancellation email for a single reservation. The booking tool will use email templates to build emails.
With the Itinerary template, a guest can book multiple rooms with multiple confirmation numbers. The result is an Itinerary email that is distributed that displays the multiple reservations the guest has made.
Unlike the other two emails, however, this email type cannot be customized for the hotel. The only available level of customization for the Itinerary email is on the chain level (so, technically, only hotels who are on their own chain can have this customized – Leela Hotels, Harbor Magic for example). As such, the PH&R chain (10237) Itinerary email carries Preferred Hotels & Resorts branding.
How can my hotel build a widget?
Sample widgets are available at https://hotelphg.com/ and are free for a hotel to use. At the bottom of a website is a basic HTML widget that uses the jQuery datapicker function and passes information through the PH&R Redirect. There are comments in the code of the site for developers to use.
