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Custom Booking Channel option?

Status: Requested 2 Votes
Chuck K
Dec 23, 2019 10:39 AM
Joined Oct, 2019 83 posts

Any way to create/use a custom booking channel?

I left EVOLVE recently but am still honoring a lot of bookings I am managing in OR. I have entered all the details through either Excel imports or manual entry. But now, I have a need to differentiate an EVOLVE/VRBO booking (example) from my own VRBO booking to build some triggers and different email templates. But, I *want* to list channel as VRBO even if it came through EVOLVE as I want to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the different channels. I thought about using a CUSTOM FIELD but don't seem to be able to use that in some triggers AND I would really like to see EVOLVE reservations indicated in some of the reports and grids in OR.

Any ideas?

Rich S
Dec 23, 2019 1:32 PM
Joined Dec, 2018 301 posts

Chuck K said:

Any way to create/use a custom booking channel?

I left EVOLVE recently but am still honoring a lot of bookings I am managing in OR. I have entered all the details through either Excel imports or manual entry. But now, I have a need to differentiate an EVOLVE/VRBO booking (example) from my own VRBO booking to build some triggers and different email templates. But, I *want* to list channel as VRBO even if it came through EVOLVE as I want to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of the different channels. I thought about using a CUSTOM FIELD but don't seem to be able to use that in some triggers AND I would really like to see EVOLVE reservations indicated in some of the reports and grids in OR.

Any ideas?

Chuck - I think you might be talking about custom sources. I just emailed the OR folks and got a response that the way to distinguish (for example) expedia bookings from vrbo is to create a custom source for expedia. Otherwise the default is vrbo.

If you are just dealing with historical bookings you should be able to create a custom source where the Name is 'EVOLVE' and just leave the domain name field blank. You might need to update your past bookings manually, or hopefully you could do some kind of import from a spreadsheet where you update all of those bookings in one pass.

Chris Hynes
Dec 23, 2019 6:39 PM
OR Team Member Joined Oct, 2012 1400 posts

Right now there's only one listing site/channel per booking so there's no way to set a combination of VRBO and also EVOLVE -- you have to pick one or the other and key your triggers based on that.

We do have plans to rework this into a two layer setting with channel and source separately so the tracking can be more detailed. No ETA on that yet though.