#6 Enable booking of a room type rather than a room

[Dub You]

First of all let me say this is an awesome piece of software. I have installed it from a git repository snapshot taken two days ago. I would actually start using this right away but I feel the tight relation between room and booking is a show stopper. So here goes my suggestion:

It should be possible to book a room type rather than a concrete room. This is a very common scenario. Imagine I have ten rooms which are all pretty much the same. Why should I bother the client with choosing between one of them? Imagine I have twenty such rooms. Do I really want to take 20 individual photos? And if I use the same photo everywhere what's the point of not letting the client just choose the room type with it's photo?

Further, this would make the planner much more usable when I want to move bookings to different rooms. The way the software works now, when the hotel is very full, it is not possible to change the room of a booking because of overlaps with another reservation. So I'm stuck with my original planning and at best could resort to deleting and recreating reservations in order to swap rooms between reservations. If I could un-assign a room from the booking (leaving only the association with the room type) I could get around this problem and moving bookings to other rooms would be possible.

Thanks again for your wonderful work. It looks very promising and I think if you get channel manager functionality this one can be a killer app.

[LabOpenSource]

Many thanks for trying and appreciating Locanda!
We are now on the verge of releasing v0.3, still fixing the last bugs.
Your suggestion is really interesting. For many reasons our initial choice was to associate a booking with a room rather than a roomtype, and we're stuck with it. However, this can lead to some problems like the one you reported.
Indeed, we are thinking about changing the planner interface, giving the possibility to group by roomtype, letting the system associate the booking with the first available room. In other words, the possibility to fold-unfold the planner view by roomtype, indicating how many rooms of that roomtype are still available in each cell, but still leaving the ability to manually assign a booking to a concrete room. This is just an idea that can probably fix these issues.
As far as the creation of identical rooms is concerned, they already inherit the images and facilities from their associated roomtype, and the possiblity to create a bunch of rooms in one step, only specifying their names is a feature we are working on (and almost ready).
Thanks again for your feedback, and stay tuned for 0.3!

[Anonymous]

Hi labos, this is indeed an excellent choice. If you are now moving away from rate seasons to transient prices you are close recreating regular and proven yielding strategies. I would be happy to assist in working on the requirements having previously worked with two large OTA on the same issue. Best, Martin