In this guide:
Why do you need a training hotel?
A training hotel is a test environment in which you and your team can learn and experiment without fear of making mistakes.
Here are some examples of how a training hotel can be useful:
- Your revenue manager wants to roll out a new set of seasonal rates. She's not sure how she wants to structure the rates - whether to derive it from existing rates, or create a new category. She uses the training hotel to try both ways.
- Your new front office manager needs to make a correction on a folio but has never done so before, and does not want to create incorrect accounting transactions. He uses the training hotel to quickly create a test reservation, and first practices the correction there.
- You have a trial subscription to a guest communications app in the Apaleo App store and you want to test it without risking that any of your team members accidentally use it to communicate with real guests. You connect the app to your training hotel and test it using test reservations.
Set up your training hotel
- Set your live hotel as a template property and then clone it.
- Your cloned hotel will have copied the unit categories and rate plans from your live hotel, but not units or rates. Create units and set prices to mirror your real hotel.
- Invite your team to the training hotel, ideally with the same user rights as they have in the real hotel.
Getting value out of your training hotel
A training hotel gives every member of your team the freedom to try things out for themselves, and practice any work processes they are not fully confident with.
- Communicate to your team the purpose of the training hotel: to freely use for their own learning and testing.
- Reinforce the use of the training hotel in order to promote independence: if a team member has a question, encourage them to first try to find the answer themselves in the training hotel.
- Use the training hotel to onboard new staff or to train your team on new workflows, including practice activities so that they gain confidence in executing the new process.