Specials: discounts & offers
Specials are the rules that discount or adjust a booking automatically — early-bird deals, long-stay discounts, agency rates, loyalty perks, and free-night offers.
Specials
Who can access this: Available to any signed-in staff member. Open Master Data → Special Prices.
The list shows each special's status, name, and validity dates. Copy an existing special to build a similar one. Open or create a special and set it up in three parts.
Specials list
1. Basics
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name / Status | The special's name and Active / Draft / Aborted. |
| For | Whether the discount is Per booking, Per person, or Per bed. |
| Priority (Sort) | The order specials are applied in when several match; the lowest number goes first (defaults to 99). |
| Add by default | Apply automatically to matching bookings without staff having to add it. |
| Valid from / to | When the special is available. |
| Is available for | The channels it applies to — bookings, agent direct, customer direct, OTA. |
2. Value — the discount itself: a value, a value type, a rounding rule, and one or more discount targets that decide what is changed.
The value type sets how the value is read:
| Value type | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Percentage | A percent off the target. |
| Absolute price | A fixed amount off the whole stay. |
| Absolute price (per night) | A fixed amount off per night. |
| Absolute price (per unit) | A fixed amount off per unit (dive day, night, …). |
| Fix price for accommodation / Fix price per night for accommodation | Set a final price instead of discounting. |
| Lowest value (multiplier) | Applies to the cheapest matching item — used for "cheapest guest free" style offers. |
| FOC / FOC (per unit) | Free of charge — give the item (or a night) away. This is how a free-night offer is built. |
The discount targets decide what the value changes (add more than one to hit several parts of the bill):
| Target | Applies the value to… |
|---|---|
| Apply to the room/cabin price | the room price directly |
| Apply to the room/cabin price, but subtract previous discounts | the room price after earlier discounts |
| Apply to the room/cabin price before commission, but subtract previous discounts | the room price before commission is worked out |
| Apply to total price of booking | the whole booking total |
| Apply to all commissionable prices | everything the agency earns commission on |
| Apply to products / Apply to supplements / Apply to product categories | the chosen extras only |
| Apply to included combination price | a bundled/combination price |
A room-price target can be narrowed further — only on nights above a set number, only on weekdays you pick, or only within specific date ranges you add.
3. Rules (conditions) — the tests a booking must pass. Add one or more rules with Create Rule; each picks a type, a match, and a value. Every rule must pass for the special to apply.
The match is one of: Equals, Greater than, Greater than or equals, Less than, Less than or equals, Is in, or Is not in.
The rule type is what to test. Types include:
- Timing — Travel Date, Departure Day, Booking Date, Days before travel date, No. of nights, Weekday in the period.
- Party size / value — Number of pax, No. of pax booked on trip, Number of pax in double room, Age, Customer Revenue, No. of stays, Last Stay, Number of Bookings.
- Who is booking — Agents, Customers, Group, Booking Source, Customer Type, Nationality, Country.
- What is booked — Resort, Vessel, Room type, Itineraries, Trip Dates.
Finally, a row of switches controls behaviour:
- Unique — the special can appear only once on a booking.
- Editable / Deletable — whether staff can change its value on the booking, or remove it.
- Add with quantity equal to 1 — collapse the special to a single line with quantity 1 (which raises the unit price if it would otherwise be added more than once).
- Exclude from Tax / Exclude from Commission — leave the discount out of the tax or commission calculation.
- Include previous specials with same ruleset — let this special stack on top of earlier specials that share its rules.
- Always add to deposit / Always ignore from deposit — force the discount into or out of the deposit calculation.
- Replace room price for matching persons — for Per person specials only, swap the matching guest's room price for the special's value.
Note: You can write the customer-facing text with placeholders —
%%VALUE%%,%%PRICE%%,%%BASEPRICE%%,%%TYPE%%— which Gurita fills in with the actual numbers on the booking.
Two examples
Early-bird 10%. You want 10% off the room for anyone booking well ahead:
- Basics — For Per booking; Add by default on; Is available for Bookings and Customer direct booking.
- Value — value
10, value type Percentage, target Apply to the room/cabin price. - Rule — type Days before travel date, match Greater than or equals, value
60.
A €750 room booked 90 days ahead now shows a −€75 line automatically (this is the special in the worked pricing example above). Booked 30 days ahead, the rule fails and nothing is added.
Free seventh night. A long-stay reward — stay seven nights, pay for six:
- Basics — For Per booking.
- Value — value
1, value type FOC (per unit), target Apply to the room/cabin price. - Rule — type No. of nights, match Greater than or equals, value
7.
On a 7-night stay at €150/night, one night becomes free of charge — a −€150 line. On a 6-night stay the rule fails, so the offer never applies.
Warning: A special only applies when every rule matches and the booking is inside the valid period and channel. If a special is not showing up on a booking, check the rules, the dates, and the Is available for channels first.
Special groups
Who can access this: Available to any signed-in staff member. Open Master Data → Special Groups.
A special group is a named list of agencies or customers that you reference from a special's rules. Instead of listing twenty agencies on every early-bird special, put them in a group once and point the special's Group rule at it.
Special groups list with expandable members
To create a group: click Create, give it a Name, choose the Type (agency or customer), and search for and add the members. Expand a group in the list to see who is in it — the status dot is green when the group has members and red when it is empty. When you add or remove members, every special that uses the group updates automatically.
See agencies in Master Data — Commerce and customers in CRM & Customers.