What Is Splitting?
Splitting is the division of availability of a group of matching physical room types.
For example, you have 10 rooms that consist of 1 Double Bed and 1 Single Bed. However, you sell those rooms on OTA websites as
Double and Single (known as a Triple on Booking.com),
Double,
Twin
Single
How do you divide 10 physical rooms between the four different configurations? Traditionally you would have divided the availability in your head and entered the number of rooms available for each of the four OTA rooms.
So you might decide to allocate 2 as a Double and Single, 3 as a Double, 3 as a Twin and 2 as a Single.That's all 10 divided or ‘Split’ between the four options.
You are giving percentages of the total availability to different room types on the OTA website.
You have given 20% as a Double and Single, 30% as a Double, 30% as a Twin and 20% as a Single. That's 100% divided or Split between the four options.
If you sell a room the availability of one of the room types is reduced. If you sell all your Doubles the remaining availability on the other room types doesn't get used to increase the Double availability.
To sell more Doubles you must manually reduce the other room options and increase the number of Doubles.
How the splitting works on GuestDiary.com
If we take the percentages above and apply them automatically to fluctuating availability, we remove the need to manually work out how much of the availability to give to each room option on the OTA. When the number of rooms available in GuestDiary.com changes, the allocation on the OTA automatically adjusts.
Below you can see a table showing how the availability will be split as the availability is reduced.
But you can't sell a fraction of a room!
That's right, you can't. Only the absolute value, or rounded down, availability is sent to the OTA.
What happens to the fractions?
You can choose one room option to get a rounded up value. We call this Prioritised Split. If we Prioritise the Double and remove the fractions of rooms we get the below table.
If we Prioritise the Single and remove the fractions of rooms we get the below table.
As the availability of your physical rooms reduces, the availability on the OTA for each room option also automatically adjusts.
I don't want to sell any Singles on the weekend!
No problem.Just close out your Single Occupancy Rate on the days you don't want to sell it.
0 availability will be sent for the Single.
You will notice with the Single Priority Split that closing the Single results in 0 Total Availability being sent, once your availability goes below 4. This is not ideal, so it is advisable for the priority split to be set on a room option you are unlikely to want to close out.
Please Note: You can have a different Split for each OTA.