Learning Objectives

At the end of this lesson you will know …  

1. What to do when you receive a rooming list from your customer

2. How to upload a completed rooming list 

3. What happens when you upload a rooming list in your PMS

Uploading Rooming Lists

When a booking has turned definite, and closer to the date of the event, your customer may want to send you a rooming list for you to forward to the reservations team, or upload it into your PMS. 

If you are integrated  to the PMS, in Thynk, you can upload the rooming lists yourselves, streamlining this process, as reservations are created in Thynk and in your PMS at the same time.  So, ideally, when your customer wants to send you a rooming list, tell them that you will send them a template spreadsheet for them to complete with guest name, email address etc. 

What is Individual Pickup?

When you are working with a booking, it’s important to determine if the booking will use individual pickup or not. 

With individual pickup, if the “Individual Pickup” checkbox is selected (checked) at the booking level, then reservations will be created in Thynk and sent to the PMS only as guest names are uploaded via the rooming list. 

With a standard rooming list (not individual pickup), reservations are created and sent to the PMS when a booking is definite. Note the status that defines when reservations are created would have been decided by leadership and configured in the original setup, so it doesn’t have to be ‘definite’, it could be ‘tentative’ or any other status. 

To mark the booking to accept reservations by ‘individual pickup’ in the booking, go to the ‘Rooming List’ tab and check the ‘individual pickup’ checkbox. 

To upload a rooming list, follow these steps: 

1. Search the booking and click into it.

2. Check if the reservations exist in Thynk before generating a rooming list. 

3. On the right of your booking screen, click onto the ‘Rooming Lists’ tab, where you can see a list of reservations.
   

4. Now, on the top of the booking screen, in the ‘generate Rooming list’ section, look for the checkbox called: ‘Generate Rooming List’.  If your org doesn’t show it here, look on the left side of the booking under Booking ‘Details’ scroll down to find the checkbox. 

5. Click on the pencil button to edit this field, and click into the checkbox to select it.

6. Now, ‘Save’.  

7. This is all you have to do to ‘generate a rooming list’.  Once you have generated the rooming list, the guest exists in both Thynk and your PMS.  

8. Now you can download the rooming list so you can email it to your customer. To find the rooming list you have just created, look at the right side of your booking and click onto the ‘Documents’ tab. 

9. Here, you see a list of documents specific to this booking. Find the ‘Rooming list’ document and single click on it.

10. Next click on ‘Download’.

11. Thynk will download a template spreadsheet onto your computer.

12. Find the rooming list spreadsheet in your download folder.  When you open it, you will see there are some blank columns (e.g. first name, last name, email etc.). The reservation numbers, room types, dates and ID will already be completed by the system, and it’s best to leave those as is.

13. You can send this spreadsheet to your customer to complete and send back to you. You could also complete the spreadsheet if your customer has already sent you a rooming list but obviously it makes more sense for the customer to do this! 

14. When sending to your customer, I recommend sending them some basic instructions. 

1. At minimum, they should enter the first name, email address or phone number (if available but not a must).

2. They can leave some columns blank. 

3. If they don't have all guest names, they can just complete the ones they have and add to the rooming list later. 

4. They can amend the arrival and departure dates, but be careful because Excel will save those fields in the wrong format!  

5. Don’t make changes to the Reservation number, Room Type, and ID columns. 

15. Once the spreadsheet has been completed and you’re ready to upload it, search and open the booking.

16. Go to the ‘Rooming List’ tab again, scroll down to where you see ‘Upload file’. You can click on the 'Upload File' button, find your spreadsheet and attach it, or drag and drop your completed Rooming List here. 

17. When you have uploaded the file, reservations will be updated instantly in both Thynk and the PMS. 

18. And, your Rooming List will be automatically saved in the ‘Rooming List’ tab, scroll down, under the ‘Files’ section, so you can always find it and refer to it if needed.

19. Note: If you need to make a change to the rooming list, or add new reservations, you must regenerate the rooming list and make changes in the newly downloaded spreadsheet, and upload it again. Repeat steps 4-16.

Every time you generate a rooming list, Thynk will save the spreadsheet in the Rooming List tab and you will clearly see the date of the file. So, you may want to refer to the latest version if you need to view it for some reason. 

Best Practices for Uploading Rooming Lists

• We recommend that you take the lead by asking your customer to complete the rooming list spreadsheet that you will email them.  As explained in the lesson, this is a better way to streamline your process; it will save you time, and eliminate the chance of mistakes copying rooming list names to another new spreadsheet. 

• For the completion of the rooming list, we recommend at minimum, to have the guess’ last name, an email or phone number.

• When a guest room has multiple adults (double/triple/quad occupancy), only one guest on the reservation is the primary guest. You’ll notice by viewing the Reservation that there is a related list of Reservation Guests. All guests in the room will be shown here.

Resources

1. Rooming List FAQ - Knowledge Base article