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 special can have only one room target. Once a room/cabin price target (including Apply to the cheapest room/cabin price) is used, the other room targets are no longer offered. Apply to total price of booking can't be combined with any other target.
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.
The nights setting skips that many nights from the start of the stay and discounts the rest. On a stay that is not longer than the number you set, there is nothing left to discount, so the special adds no discount to that booking.
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, Booking lead time (days), No. of nights, Weekday in the period.
- Party size / value — Number of pax, Number of rooms, Number of adults, Number of children, No. of pax booked on trip, Number of pax in double room, Age, Room total, Onsite spend.
- Guest history — Customer Revenue, No. of stays, Total nights stayed, Last Stay, Days since last stay, Number of Bookings.
- Who is booking — Agents, Customers, Group, Booking Source, Sales rep, Customer Type, Nationality, Country, Language, Booking widget.
- What is booked — Resort, Vessel, Dive Center, Booking type, Booking category, Price list, Room type, Itineraries, Trip Dates, Allotment contract, Terms of payment, Currency.
- Booking history — Combination booking, Rebooked / moved booking.
A few of these behave differently from the rest:
- Room total tests what the accommodation costs, including room surcharges and room discounts. It deliberately does not include products, add-ons or extras: the discount is worked out before those are added to the booking, so they are not yet known. Enter the amount with its currency, for example
5000 EUR. - Number of adults / Number of children follow your configured age bands. Every band that is not the adult band counts as a child.
- Combination booking and Rebooked / moved booking are yes/no tests, so the value is ignored. Use match Is in for "yes" and Is not in for "no".
- Booking lead time (days) counts the days from the day the booking was made to the day the guest arrives. It is fixed when the booking is made, so an early-bird discount keeps applying for the life of the booking. Days before travel date counts from today instead, so it shrinks as the arrival approaches — use that one for last-minute offers, and this one for early-bird offers.
- Days since last stay counts back from the arrival date of the booking being priced, not from today, so a win-back discount for guests who have not been here for two years means exactly that on the day they arrive. A guest with no previous stay never matches.
- Total nights stayed and Days since last stay read the guest's own history, so they only work on Per person and Per bed specials. On a whole-booking special they never match.
- Onsite spend tests what the guest has already been billed on site. Until the guest arrives there is no onsite bill at all, and a booking with no bill matches nothing — not even Less than.
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.
Alternatives ("or")
By default every rule must match. To say "either of these, and that", click + or at the end of a rule row. A new empty rule appears right below it, and the two are shown together in one outlined block, joined by or. To add a further alternative to a block, click + or on its last rule.
A block passes if any one of its rules matches. The blocks, and the rules that stand on their own, are then combined with and.
For example, to offer a discount to two particular agents on stays of five nights or more:
- Rule 1 — type Agents, value the first agent
- Click + or on rule 1, then set the new rule to type Agents, value the second agent
- Add a rule with Create Rule — type No. of nights, match Greater than or equals, value 5
This reads as (agent 1 or agent 2) and at least 5 nights. Before this, it needed two separate specials.
Delete rules from a block until only one is left and that rule becomes an ordinary and rule again.
Specials from supplier feeds
With Pool Inventory, a liveaboard feed's discounted prices become specials automatically — one per boat, discount and set of cabin types, limited to the discounted departures. They stack with your own specials and are kept in sync by every feed run. You can't edit or delete them: saving is refused with "This special is maintained by a supplier feed (its discount) and cannot be edited or deleted here." Copy one to get an editable special — the copy stacks with the original. See Supplier discounts.
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.