How to configure your Internet Booking Engine (IBE)?

When setting up your Booking engine, you need to check a few places in the system, in order to make sure that all is set up.

Visual appearance

Banner picture, banner text, IBE logo, and all other settings related to visuals of IBE, can be found in Distribution / Internet Booking Engine menu.
Short descriptions of what can be set there:

Theme

Enable Internet Booking Engine - If the box is ticked, then your Internet Booking Engine is working correctly. By unticking the box your IBE becomes unavailable.

Sort order - You can choose in what order your room types are appearing on the IBE. The order can start with the cheapest one and ascend by price. Or the most expensive can be displayed first and the list is descending.

Colors - Primary color - This color will be set for the loading bar, the booking process bar, and some of the button's colors like My bookings, Show rates, Book this, and Book services.

Colors - Secondary color - This color will be set for some other buttons: Search, Check the calendar, Continue to booking, and Book now.

You can upload a banner picture. It will be visible on top of your IBE. The preferred size of the banner picture is 1280 x 540px.

You can customise the banner text which is devided into two lines. By default, the banner text will be Hotel X Official booking site. But you can either re-write the banner, have only one line or simply remove the text, leaving only a blank banner picture.

Note: If you are planning to use IBE in other offered languages, make sure to translate banner text as well.

You also have several other setting possibilities to modify the look of the banner picture and text.

1. Banner text1 font size - You can set up the size of the first line of the banner text in pixels. This value can be 1 as minimum and 100 as maximum. We recommend you to choose the value to fit the Booking Engine' look. Selecting too big font size will result in the banner text sticking out of the picture.

2. Banner text2 font size - You can set up the size of the second line of the banner text in pixels. This value can be 1 as minimum and 55 as maximum. We recommend you to choose the value to fit the Booking Engine' look again. Selecting too big font size will result in the banner text sticking out of the picture.

3. Banner opacity - There is an extra label on the IBE's banner picture which can make it darker/brighter in order that the text could be seen better. This is called opacity and it is measured in percentages. The minimum percentage they can set is 20%. This is needed because if you make this smaller the image will not be seen correctly, just a white background. For maximum, we do not have any limitations but if the opacity is too high then the picture is going to be very dark or even black.

4. Banner text positioning - This option you can use to set the distance of the banner text and the widget of the room type-date-number of people widget. The minimum amount is 5 pixels because if the distance is smaller than the banner text and the widget would overlay on each other.

5. Banner text color - You can set the banner text's color here which will be applied to both the first and second lines of the banner text.

If you would like to use a different logo on the booking engine than on the invoices or confirmation e-mails, you simply need to tick the following box: Use a different logo on IBE. You will be able to upload a new picture as your logo.

Other settings:

You also can select not to show any information about the breakfast service. By default, if breakfast is not included in the price or if it's not available, on IBE it will be written that Breakfast not available, but if you don't want this sentence at all, you can simply mark the box in the IBE settings.

If you are managing multiple accounts with SabeeApp, you might want your guests to check your other accounts as well. For this, we have the Suggest other accommodation option. If you tick this option we will display an extra section on your IBE on the bottom part.

Currently all of your SabeeApp accounts which has active subscription will appear here, there is no option to decide which accommodations we show here.

In the rates from section we display the cheapest price for 2 people on the given time period by the guest. If they click on the show property button then they are redirected to the IBE of the other account.

Languages

You can select languages that you want to use on your IBE from the Settings / Default settings / Languages menu. Be aware that if you marked any languages, later on, you need to translate your entered text into the given language.

Everywhere in the system if you see the possibility to fill in the text in more than one language, then you should do that for your selected languages.

Links

You can have several links on your IBE. Such as:

Your given links will be listed at the bottom of IBE page:

Not allowed booking for today

If you are not accepting same-day arrivals, you can close your booking engine for such reservations. This means that if someone is looking for a stay at your place with today's check-in date, a reservation won't be possible.

Required fields

you can select what information you are requiring guests to fill in when they make reservations on your IBE. You can choose which of those fields you want to see and which of them are mandatory to fill by the guest.

Make sure that all information is there

You might notice that there are more places in the system that allow you to fill in the information in other languages. If you see such a possibility, it means this part will appear on the booking engine as a description of some type. So most important places that need to be filled in in order to appear in IBE:

Property policies. Those can be found in the Settings / Property Policies menu. First of all, you will need to fill in the Cancellation policies. It can be 2 types: refundable or non-refundable. Then fill in the information about the payment types. Those also can be: advanced payment and non-advanced payment.

Other policies have more detailed rules such as: general policy, arrival/departure times, children policy, pet policy, and policy four groups.
As a very last step, you should upload a picture of your property. These do not really need to be a picture of the rooms because those will be displayed at every room type, but here you should rather upload pictures of the exterior of your property such as reception, lobby, or surroundings. The picture, which you will mark to be the default, will be always be displayed at the IBE next to Property info. The same picture will be in the confirmation e-mail, after the guest made a reservation on your IBE page.

Room types. Description of room types will be visible on your IBE. If you decided to use IBE in more than one language, don't forget to translate the room descriptions into those languages. The Room type's name will be the one, which will be visible for your guests on IBE. Your selected room facilities and room type pictures will be displayed on IBE, next to each room type.

Services. If you want to offer the possibility to pre-book services in your booking engine, you should make sure that they are created accordingly and marked in the correct way to appear on the IBE. Read more about services HERE.
Confirmation template. Once a guest completed the booking, the system will send an automatic confirmation. The system generates it automatically so most of the time you don't really need to do anything. But in case you want to have additional information on the confirmation e-mail, you should go to Settings / E-mail templates / Confirmation template. There you can add Useful info which will be included in the automatic confirmation mail. Don't forget to translate Useful info text to other languages, that you are using in the IBE. A confirmation e-mail will be sent in the language which was used by the guest during the booking.

Rate plans. If you are using rate plans in the booking engine, you might want to have their display names changed and descriptions added. For example, when you create a Non-refundable rate plan, of course, you can leave this name for the IBE, but you can do more, and have the rate plan displayed in more catchy or more detailed manner.