Test booking: rehearse before real guests

Why	Walk the booking path — creation, check-in, payment, cancellation — before real guests arrive, using the same tools you will rely on in daily work.
Who	New hotels before opening sales; administrators using the system for the first time.
What you’ll get	A recognizable test booking on the grid, statuses and cancellation rehearsed, a test booking from your website — and a clear picture of how a test behaves with channels connected.
Limitations	A test booking is a real booking: with channels connected, both its creation and its cancellation are sent to the channels. Pick dates off-season or far in the future, and cancel the booking once the rehearsal is over.

Before the first real guest walks in, it pays to walk the entire booking path yourself once. A test booking is made with the same tools as a regular one — that is the point of the rehearsal: you practice the real actions, not some separate “training sandbox”. One run takes about ten minutes: creation, checking the day, statuses, cancellation — plus a booking from the website, if the Booking Engine is connected.

Why rehearse

Every booking in a hotel follows the same path: create → check in → take payment → cancel. A test booking lets you walk it end to end on safe material:

• creation — the booking form: dates taken from the grid, the room, the rate, the guest;
• check-in — the day’s queues and front-desk buttons;
• payment — the booking’s finances: how “Total”, “Paid” and “Debt” react to a payment;
• cancellation — a status instead of a separate button, and the room going back to free.

While no channels are connected yet, this is the calmest time to rehearse: the booking lives only inside your PMS. Once channels are connected, a test is still possible — but follow the rules in the “Important: a test booking travels to the channels” section below.

Create the booking on the Planner

1. Open the Planner and click a free cell in the row of the room you need. The “Create booking” dialog opens: the check-in and check-out dates and the room are already filled in from the grid.
2. Pick the dates for your test. Channels not connected yet — take nearby dates: you will see the booking in the day tiles. Channels already live — take dates off-season or far in the future; why this matters is covered in the channels section below.
3. In the “Guest” block, press “New guest” and create a placeholder: first and last name are required, the rest can stay empty. Make the name recognizable — for example, the last name “Test”: such a booking is easy to find in the list and hard to forget to cancel.
4. In the “Rate and price” block, keep any active rate — for a rehearsal that is enough.
5. Press “Create”: the booking appears as a bar on the grid, and a “Booking created…” confirmation pops up at the top of the screen.

Result: a recognizable test bar hangs on the Planner — dates, room and placeholder guest all in place.

If you need an agency, booking conditions, extra services or several rooms at once, that is the full-form path: the “Open full form” button in the same dialog. The step-by-step walkthrough is in Create a booking in 4 clicks.

Check the day: the bar, the tiles, the card

The booking will live on three levels — walk through all of them:

• The bar on the Planner. The test booking sits as a bar in the row of its room across its dates. The legend in the Planner toolbar decodes the bar’s statuses and marks: “Awaiting check-in”, “Checked in”, “Checked out”, “Tentative” and others.
• The day tiles. Above the grid sit the “Arrivals”, “Departures”, “In-house” and “Balance due” tiles. If the test is dated today, it lands in the day’s queues — and you can run check-in and check-out as a real working day: Check-in and check-out.
• The booking card. Hover over the bar and choose “Open”. The header carries the status and “Finances”; below are twelve tabs, from “Rooms and guests” to “Information from the channel”. Record a test payment on the “Payments” tab and watch “Total”, “Paid” and “Balance due” recalculate. The map of the card is in Inside the booking card; the overview of money in the system — Hotel money: where everything lives.

Result: you have seen the test booking where every booking lives — on the grid, in the day’s queues, and in the card.

Statuses and cancellation

1. Open the test booking’s card: the header has the status menu — the button showing the current status, for example “Confirmed ▾”. There are six statuses in total: “Confirmed”, “Tentative”, “Option”, “Offer”, “Canceled”, “No-show”.
2. Rehearse switching: “Confirmed” → “Tentative” → and back to “Confirmed”.
3. Now the cancellation. There is no separate “Cancel booking” button — cancellation is set as a status: in the “Confirmed ▾” menu choose “Canceled” and confirm the change.
4. When asked “Send the guest a voucher?”, answer “Don’t send” — the placeholder guest can do without emails.

Result: the booking is in the “Canceled” status and the room is free again. Cancellation is the same operation you will perform in live work — just on safe material.

Important: a test booking travels to the channels

This is the main thing to know about testing once channels are connected: a manual booking is not an internal drill. Creating a manual booking sends the connected channels an availability update (availability.update) and a booking export (reservation.export.create); a cancellation travels to the channels too (reservation.export.cancel). The outgoing sends themselves are visible in the Channel Manager — the “Events” tab, the “Outgoing” journal.

Two rules follow for testing:

1. Dates — off-season or far in the future. For the duration of the test, its dates will travel to the channels as taken — do not occupy dates that are actively selling.
2. Cancellation is mandatory. After the rehearsal, cancel the booking through the status menu: the cancellation notifies the channels, and the test dates can be sold again.

To keep things straight: a manual booking is marked in its card as a direct booking — that mark is how you tell it apart from bookings that arrived from channels.

Result: a test with channels connected is a real signal to those channels: keep the dates far out, and always cancel at the end.

Test from the website

If the Booking Engine is connected, rehearse the guest path too — from the website to the Planner:

1. Open your website with the widget — or a test link to the module — and act as a guest: the test dates, the room category, the room.
2. Fill in the guest form and press “Book now”. For a test, a rate with pay-at-the-property is the convenient choice: no real card has to go through the gateway.
3. The booking lands in the same Planner — a bar on the grid with the “Hotel website” source, next to the manual and channel bookings.
4. Cancel it the same way — through the status menu in the card: a test should not stay in the system.

How the guest path works and what a direct booking is — in How direct bookings work.

Result: you have walked the guest’s path from the website to a booking on the Planner — and cleaned up after yourself.

See also

• Create a booking in 4 clicks — the full booking form: conditions, extra services, several rooms.
• Inside the booking card — where everything lives in the booking and which actions sit in the header.
• How direct bookings work — the guest’s path from the website to a booking on the Planner.