Dynamic Packaging System

Pre-defined packages

Our unique packaging system lets businesses create their own packages at a price available at certain times of the year or days of the week. Packages are displayed on the website with a description, imagery and pricing under categories such as getaways, spa, dining and tours — and clients can re-order pre-defined packages to suit their own schedule.

Make your own package

Website users can design their own package from as many components as they wish, for the ultimate choice — champagne on arrival, a therapeutic massage, a formal dinner, a luxury suite, gourmet breakfast and a winery tour, for example. Or a horse ride followed by a hot springs experience to soothe the muscles afterwards.

The stay, plus something

Bathing, a treatment and dinner, offered against a room that is already in the cart. Two things have to be true for that tap to work, and both are worth checking on any system you're assessing.

It has to know the guest's dates and party size already, so it offers only the sessions that exist while they're on site. And it has to check availability on the second element in real time: offering a 6pm sitting that's full is worse than not offering it at all.

Two elements, two times, one price

Bathhouse bathing at 9am and a massage at 11 on the same date. The guest sees one date, one price, one thing to remember.

Underneath, two separate pieces of inventory are being held: capacity in the 9am bathing session, and a qualified therapist free at 11. If either one isn't available, that combination is never offered in the first place.

Packages and individual services, side by side

Give a package a display category and it sits in the browse list under Packages, Bathing or Stay, wherever your guests would look for it, next to the rooms and treatments it's assembled from.

Or mark it suggestion only and it never appears in the browse list at all: it surfaces as an offer once someone already has something in their cart. The same product, sold two completely different ways, and the choice is a toggle rather than a rebuild.

Six elements, two days, one price

Every element in that list behaves differently. The room is a room for a night. The bathhouse entry is capacity in a window. Dinner and breakfast are seats at a sitting. The massage needs a qualified therapist and a treatment room, both free at 10am. Netbookings checks all of them together, as a unit: if the 6pm sitting is full, the package is offered at a different time, or it isn't offered.

The elements are also ordered, and the gaps between them are real. A guest coming out of the bathhouse needs time to dry off, change and walk to the restaurant. Netbookings holds a transfer time between every pair of areas and drops it in automatically while it assembles the itinerary, so nobody types those gaps in and nobody has to remember them when a guest asks to move something.

The guest can still swap the massage for a different treatment, or extend it with an enhancement, and the availability check simply runs again. That is the difference between a package and a fixed bundle nobody can adjust.

Built by your team, priced by season

That is the same getaway from the staff side. Its components run down the right, each tagged with the module it came from, and the switches on the left decide whether it can be booked by staff, booked online, or given as a gift.

Every line carries its own quantity. The bathing, the dinner and the room are all for two. The picnic hamper is one, because two people leaving together don't need two hampers.

One product, two rates. The same package is $450 for the season and $550 on a public holiday. You aren't building a separate public holiday getaway, advertising it alongside the standard one and remembering to switch them over at Easter: the package prices itself according to the date the guest picks.

You choose when it sells. Give a package an available-from and available-to date and a row of day-of-week tick boxes. Tick only Tuesday and Wednesday and it simply doesn't exist on any other day, which is how a midweek offer stays midweek without anyone policing it. The dates are day and month rather than a full date, so a winter package set up once comes back the following winter on its own.

Swaps keep it flexible. The queen room can be exchanged for a king at a $50 offset, the massage for a signature facial at no extra cost. The guest gets a choice, and you still control what the choice costs.

The whole visit on one screen

A guest who has pre-paid for six things has, in their own mind, made one arrangement, and will ask about it as one arrangement. "What time is our massage?" and "are we down for dinner?" are the same conversation, and it goes badly if the answers live in three systems.

At the counter that booking is 4487, and it appears as 4487/1, 4487/2 and 4487/3: the room at 2pm, the bathhouse at 4.30, dinner at 6. One booking, three components, each carrying the package name, with total, paid and owing underneath. A towel, a wristband or a round of drinks goes onto the same order, rather than being rung up as a separate sale nobody can connect back to the visit.

The guest paid one price for that getaway. Your accounts need to see six numbers, because accommodation, bathing, food and beverage, spa and retail each report to a different department, often a different revenue account, and sometimes a different tax treatment.

If those components live in separate systems, someone does that breakdown by hand, every month. In Netbookings the split is typed against each component once, when the package is built, and reported automatically on every sale:

That last column is the reason the split is a percentage rather than a set of fixed amounts. When the same getaway sells at its public holiday rate, every department's share scales with it and nobody redoes the arithmetic. Set it once when you build the package, and it stays right through every price you ever charge.

Reported, not reconstructed

Here is one of those getaways, sold on a single day, reported by revenue account. Six components, four accounts: accommodation takes $180, spa $90, bathing $54, and Food & Beverages takes $126, because dinner, breakfast and the picnic hamper all belong to the same department. Nobody sat down and worked that out.

The account numbers map to a real chart of accounts, and the report exports as data, xlsx or pdf, so this is the figure your bookkeeper works from rather than a starting point for an argument. The guest, meanwhile, paid $450 for a getaway and never saw any of it.

Everything downstream depends on that split being right: whether food and beverage had a good month or packages simply sold well, which components an agent's commission applies to, and whether one payment across several revenue lines reconciles at all.