What's the best way to implement date-level inventory opportunities?

Every property management platform has its own unique characteristics and constraints. That’s why there aren’t any specific rules for integrating date-level inventory opportunities. However, we do have suggestions for when, where and how you should display these opportunities to your properties. These best practices are based on the experience of our beta providers while developing stay_id based opportunities such as high_demand_dates.

Note: These opportunities are accessible by enabling the date_level_inventory_opportunities provider feature, after you’ve successfully integrated the Opportunities API with at least 10 non-test properties. If you still haven’t done so, you can follow these instructions to get started.

A few best practices in implementing date-level inventory opportunities on your system:

When should these opportunities be requested?
Because these opportunities are time sensitive, we recommend querying them every three hours, or every time a property logs in to your system or accesses the specific page where you’ll display these opportunities (i.e. inventory management pages for high_demand_date_inventory or HDDi opportunities; or restrictions management pages for blocked_by_min_length_of_stay or BBMLOS opportunities).

Where should they be displayed?
From our beta providers’ experience, we see that these opportunities are actioned most when displayed on the pages your properties typically use to manage their inventory or restrictions. This could be the calendar, inventory overview, dashboard or any other primary entry page. Alternatively, you could consider adding these opportunities on any existing notification/opportunity centre in your platform. Make sure that they are highlighted prominently on top of the list, and that the click-through redirects them to the relevant pages (as described above).

Be sure to always highlight the specific dates so it’s easier for your properties to take action

How should these opportunities be visualised?
Because we don’t have specific rules for integration, how you visualise the opportunities is entirely up to you. However, we do recommend highlighting them as urgent and adding a clear call to action, such as “Update availability” or “Lower restrictions”. An effective way of visualising multiple stay dates for a date-level inventory opportunity is in an accordion fashion, vertically stacked together under one opportunity card.

How should properties be notified of these opportunities?

When it comes to displaying these opportunities to your properties, we recommend either using a notification or opportunity centre in your channel manager, or displaying them as actionable modals/pop-ups in your dashboard or on your calendar page. In both cases, we advise visually distinguishing these opportunities from other notifications so properties can find and action them more easily. Both routes are illustrated below.

How will properties act on these opportunities?

Ideally, properties should act on these opportunities on their primary interface for inventory management. That gives us two scenarios:

If the channel manager is the primary system for managing inventory, the action will be taken on this platform. In this case, clicking on the opportunity notification should redirect users to their inventory management page (for HDDi opportunities) or restrictions management page (for BBMLOS opportunities) on the channel manager interface.

If the channel manager is the secondary system, the inventory management will happen on the property management system and sync with the channel manager (CM). In this case, a separate message needs to be placed on the CM platforms to inform users of where they should take action (for example: “Please go to PMS and add some availability”, or “Please reduce restrictions from your PMS”)