CheckIn Merchandising

Real-Time Performance Tracking and Leaderboard

Real-Time Performance Tracking on the left-hand side of Nor1 CheckIn Merchandising tracks and compares Upgrade Success Rate, Number of Upgrades, and Upgrade Revenue for individual and team performance in real time toward goals and against the rest of the team. The information always presents data for the selected timeframe. It is key to consistent agent motivation.

The Leaderboard on the right-hand side displays Upgrade Revenue performance of all front desk agents who are engaged with guests for an upgrade during the selected time period. You can click the Revenue drop-down to change the Leaderboard view to show Count or Rate. By default, the time period selected is This Month for Arrivals and for showing revenue in local currency.

Click an employee’s Upgrade Revenue within Leaderboard or Performance Tracking to display the employee’s successful upgrade details.
Click the team’s Upgrade Revenue in Performance Tracking to display the team’s successful upgrade details.
Click the View Upgrade List to also show the team’s successful upgrade details.
By default, Upsells are looked at from an Arrival perspective (all guests that arrived in the selected period). However, by clicking the Arrival’s drop-down, you can select two additional views:
- Departure: All guests that departed in the selected period.
- Transaction Nights: All guests that had transaction nights within the selected period.
To select a different time period, click the Date drop-down on the right-hand side. Additional options available are:
- Today
- Yesterday
- This Month (default)
- This Year
- Last Month
- Custom (to select any other period of time from either the calendar function or by entering the data in the respective fields)
Click Apply to apply the selected time period to Nor1 CheckIn Merchandising or Cancel to leave the default (This Month).

Arrivals

The Arrival List below the Performance Tracking and Leaderboard contains all arrivals for that particular day. A search function helps to easily and quickly find guests that are currently checking in, along with other relevant reservation data. It instantly identifies recommended action for each arrival.

The Arrival List is frequently updated and populates any new incoming bookings for the same day.

Note:

Day-Use reservations do not appear on the Arrivals List.

Use the Search function to search by Guest Name, Reservation ID, Rate Code, Reservation Status, Upgrade Agent, or Upgrade Status. You can sort the arrival list by clicking the arrows next to each column.

Name: The guest’s Last Name and First Name as found in the PMS.
Reservation ID: The PMS Reservation ID.
Current Room: The Room Type field from OPERA.
Rate Code: The reservation Rate Code.
LOS: The reservation Length of Stay.
Excluded: Excluded guests do not allow the agent to access the offer page. The Excluded column shows the exclusion reason for each arrival. Excluded Guests do not have any upgrade offers. Nor1 eStandby Upgrade and Nor1 eXpress Upgrade are color coded for the front desk agent to be fully aware of the status of the other request.
- Green: The eStandby Upgrade has been awarded or Nor1 eXpress Upgrade has been booked.
- Orange: The eStandby Upgrade status is still pending.
- Red: The eStandby Upgrade request has been denied.
Status: Shows status of reservation as guest checks in and/or out.
- In House
- Due In
- Checked Out
Agent: Displays the name of the agent that engaged last with the guest.
Upgrades: Shows upgrade status for each arrival:
- View: The agent can click to view and engage a guest with available upsell offers.
- Upgraded: The reservation is upgraded.
- Another Time: The guest declined the offer and the agent clicked Decline.
- Not Offered: The guest has not been engaged by the agent, but the reservation is already checked in.
- No Offer: The reservation is excluded from any upsells.

To view upgrade options for a reservation, click the button in the Upgrades column of this reservation.

Upgrade Offers

The Upgrade Offers Page presents a relevant dynamic list of upgrade offers to pitch to guests. These offers are directly linked to hotel real-time room inventory.

Relevant Reservation Data is available at the top of the Recommended Offers page along with user comments and any Property Management System (PMS) posting error messages.

By default, two offers appear as Recommended Offers. On the left-hand side, you find the image of the Upsell followed by the Extra price per night and the Total Amount. The number inside of brackets indicates the real-time minimum availability of this category for the entire stay of this guest. In addition, the Upgrade Start and Upgrade End date are presented.

Below the Room Code, a short description of the room is available.

The Accept and the Decline action buttons are available for each offer. On top of the right-hand side is a Show All button. This presents all other available offers for this guest’s stay based on PRiME calculations. The Show All button is visible only if there are additional offers available.

Upgrade Offer Types

Nor1 CheckIn Merchandising provides statistical precision with the PRiME decision engine generating offers that assure revenue optimization and flexibility based on an intimate understanding of the property and guest needs so that hotel can control the types of offers provided to a guest.

Recommended Offers: These include up to two PRiME recommended and priced offers using machine learning and artificial intelligence methodology. Recommended offers are configurable by business rules. Any forced-included offers can be added to the Recommended Offers section by using Pricing and Offer Configuration.
Show All Offers: These are additional available rooms priced by PRiME and offered on available inventory and add-ons; these include available room inventory offers not previously displayed for this guest as well as recommended offers already presented.
Add-on Offers: These are manually defined offers that are presented in the Show All offers and can be force-included in the Recommended offers and/or as Limited Inventory offers. These offers can be room features or non-room products, including Room Feature, Late Check Out, Early Arrival, F&B, Extra Day, Extra Room, Amenity, Parking, vouchers, spa or more.
Limited Inventory Offers: Limited Inventory offers appear if the reservation has a length of stay longer than seven nights, or if no room category is available for the entire length of stay. Limited Inventory Offers are configurable by business rules.

Guest Accepts or Declines Upgrade

Once an offer is verbally communicated to the guest and when the offer is accepted or declined, the hotel staff selects either the Accept button or the Decline button to save the results.

Click Accept to change the upgrade status for the offer to Accepted and the reservation to Accepted.
1. a. If the hotel is enabled on the full OXI 2-way integration with hotel OPERA PMS, click Accept and the application will automatically post a fixed charge schedule to the guest’s reservation in OPERA with the agreed price per night.
2. b. The agent needs to manually update the room type field in OPERA during check-in.
3. The upgrade is tracked in the performance tracker and reporting.
Click Decline to change the upgrade status to Maybe Another time and the reservation to Another time.
1. No charge or change is posted to the hotel PMS.
2. It is critical to track the effectiveness of the offer by recording the guest's decision so PRiME can access that information for future offer creation.

Modify Details (Price, Date, Comment)

Pricing Override: Click the pencil icon next to the price of each offer to change the offer price if required. The application allows you to go in both directions – higher or lower than the original price. When changing the price, you can insert an internal comment.
Comments: You can enter comments on a specific reservation. This is helpful in making note of special requests to serve the guest better later in the stay.
Partial Stay Override: If guests want a partial stay upgrade (second day or an in-stay upgrade), you can make changes to the Upgrade Start and Upgrade End date.

Print Upgrade Confirmation

If the Print Form is enabled, you can click the Print icon on the Upgrade Offer page to print the Supplement Rate Confirmation for guests to review and sign.

Upgrade Details

Upgrade Details shows summaries and details of all accepted upgrades for the selected time period on the Performance Tracking Dashboard. If a reservation has multiple accepted upgrades, each accepted upgrade for the same reservation is listed independently.

The Upgrade list is interactive with the Performance Tracking on the Leaderboard.

Clicking on an employee’s upgrade status displays that employee’s successful upgrade details.
Clicking on the team’s upgrade status displays the team’s successful upgrade details.
Clicking View Upgrade List displays the team’s successful upgrade details.

You can view upgrade summaries and details by Arrival Date, Departure Date, or Transaction Nights.

Use the Search bar to search for a specific upgrade by Name, Reservation ID, Upgraded Room, or Upgraded Agent Name. In addition, you can sort results by clicking the header of the respective row.

Use the blue download icon to pull incentive reports.

Auto Revenue Reconciliation - Data Sync

The Nor1 Data Sync synchronizes and reconciles the hotel Property Management System (PMS) data with CheckIn Merchandising. Four OPERA Simple Reports (OSRs) are set up during the implementation with OPERA to synchronize the data between PMS and the app:

5am: This report captures all data for in-house guests with an upgrade charge for the previous night.
10pm: This report captures the total revenue for all guests that departed on that day.
Recovery Report: This is an ad-hoc report that can run if any mismatches or periods of missing data occur. It synchronizes the revenue in OPERA and CheckIn Merchandising for the defined period.
User Activity Report: This highlights any manual postings completed by users in OPERA so they can be assigned to the correct user automatically in CheckIn Merchandising.

Data Sync does the following:

Automatically parses, processes, and reconciles hotel PMS financial transaction records overnight and applies them to previously awarded upgrades on the CheckIn Merchandising app.
Adds transactions from manual upgrades posted outside of the CheckIn Merchandising app to the application. It helps synchronize and display all front desk upgrades in one place for hotels to review, audit, and manage.
For the manual upgrades posted in the PMS directly without using the CheckIn Merchandising app, Data Sync can detect and assign credible agents who posted the upgrade charge.
When multiple offers are awarded for the same reservation, Data Sync can identify and reconcile to each upgrade if an agent accepted an upgrade in the CheckIn Merchandising App or upgrades have unique transaction codes. Even if charges were manually posted to PMS by an agent, Data Sync can identify the upgrade as long as the transaction code is unique for that upgrade.

Reconciling Team and Individual Upgrade Details

Revenue is automatically reconciled between the Property Management System (PMS) and CheckIn Merchandising.

Total Revenue

Total Revenue is the sum of the total upgrade revenue of an upgrade.

When indicated in grey, Total Revenue shows the Projected Revenue for in-house reservations or when the agent has just awarded the upgrade on the day of departure. Projected Revenue is the projected revenue from the Property Management System (PMS) or from the app if PMS revenue is missing.

When indicated in blue, Total Revenue shows the PMS Final Revenue for departing or already departed reservations.

Revenue Error Notifications

After synchronizing the property management system (PMS) data with the app data, CheckIn Merchandising can detect errors using the property management system (PMS) data from the data sync.

Table 6-1 Notifications and Descriptions

Icons	Descriptions
	Missing Revenue in PMS: occurs when a charge is missing or removed in the PMS but the upgrades was never changed from Accepted to Another Time in CheckIn Merchandising.
	Mismatching Revenue: occurs when an adjustment to the upgrade charge is made in the PMS. Generally, these will update in the app to the PMS value.
	Unassigned Agent: occurs when an agent charges the upgrade manually in OPERA without selecting Accept in the app. In most cases, these are auto-assigned the next day.
	Assigned Agent did not use the app: notifies when agent manually posted an upgrade charges directly into OPERA.
	Pending PMS revenue to reconcile: occurs when multiple upgrades for the same reservation are posted with the same transaction code and now need to be manually assigned in the app.
	Manually assigned PMS revenue: notifies the error was reconciled and revenue has been assigned accordingly.

Assigning Upgrades

Users with Property Manager roles or above can assign an upgrade to a different Agent. Click Unassigned to open a drop-down menu with agent names to which the program manager may assign an upgrade.

Download Incentive Summary and Print Upgrades

You can download the Incentive Summary report for Commission payout of all the displayed upgrades by clicking the Download Your Transactions icon.

You can print the list of currently displayed upgrades by clicking the Print Your Transactions icon.

Agent Commission Details

You have the option to pull agent commission details from the Nor1 CheckIn Merchandising application itself for any date/timeframe you prefer.

From the Leaderboard page, select either Departure or Transaction Nights, depending on your payout structure.
Click the revenue bar to review all upgrades that were completed in this particular period, scroll down, select the blue Download icon, and then download your transactions.
Once downloaded, the Excel-document Commissions report provides you with an overview of all transactions within the defined date range:
Three revenues provide the following information:
1. Projected Revenue: The presumed total amount for the upgrade at check-in or at the time the offer was accepted.
2. Total PMS Revenue: Reflects the charges that have occurred (so far) on the guest’s reservation to-date.
3. MTD PMS Charge: The charges that occurred in this particular month.
The second tab displays a breakdown of agent Upsell totals and commissions.

Exclusion Management

The Exclusion Module allows any user with a Property Manager role or higher to exclude certain guests from being upgraded at Check-in. An Excluded Guest does not allow the agent to access the offer page.

Exclusions can be set by:

Reservation ID
Booked Room
Current Room
Rate Code
Loyalty
Channel
Group Block
VIP Code
Source Code
Market Code
Special code

To set up an exclusion:

Click Add.
1. Choose a Rule. From the drop-down, select a rule this exclusion should apply to.
2. Choose Expression. From the drop-down, select to define the expression for this exclusion.
3. Codes: Add the code, press Enter to separate multiple codes.
4. Choose Effective Start Date: Select a start date for this exclusion to be effective.
5. Choose Effective End Date: Select an end date for this exclusion.
Click Exclude to save this exclusion.

By default, a new exclusion is Enabled. To disable the rule, click the enabled slider. Use the pencil icon to edit Exclusions or the trash bin to delete Exclusions.

Goal Settings

Property managers can activate and manage CheckIn Merchandising monthly or daily goals for hotels using the Goal Setting module. The App Goals setting are reflected on the Dashboard Goal.

Only users with a Property Manager role and higher can view and edit the Goals Setting page.

Account Managers will ask the Property Managers to set up Monthly Goals. Monthly Goals are reflected on the Dashboard and are key to motivating the team to reach the goal set. If a Monthly Goal is not set, the Property Manager can define a Daily Goal. The Daily Goal is used for those months that do not have specific monthly goals defined.

You can configure Monthly goals clicking Add and then adding the Month, the predicted revenue (Revenue), and the predicted Success Rate (Rate) for that month. You can modify any goal using the pencil icon. Also, you can clone goals to the next month or delete as needed.

Pricing and Offer Configuration

Property managers can view, create, and manage PRiME pricing and offer configuration rules for Checkin Merchandising properties. For any special pricing configuration, the Property Manager can select Pricing Configuration. For any offer related configuration, the Property Manager can select Offer Configuration.

Configuration allows users to:

View/change PRiME price ranges.
View/create/change special pricing constraints.
View/create/change special offer constraints.
Manage and prioritize constraints.

You can set Pricing Conditions and Offer Conditions per the following:

Date: Departure, Arrival, Stay.
Day: Departure, Arrival, Stay.
Code: Booked Room, Current Room, Rate Code, Loyalty, Channel, Market, Group Block, VIP Code, Source, Special Code.
Others: Length of Stay.

To set up a new Pricing Constraint, click Pricing Constraints and Add Constraint.
- Label: The label for the new constraint.
- Select Upsell: Select which upsell is affected by this Pricing Constraint.
- Offer Price Range: Select the price range for this offer by using the slider.
- Fixed Min Price: Add a fixed price if the Pricing Constraint should be set up with a Fixed Price.
Conditions when the constraints is in effect:
- Select Rule Type: From the drop-down, select which rule type that should be effective for this Pricing Constraint.
- Select Expression: From the drop-down, select the expression for this Pricing Constraint.
- Click Save.
Enabled, Disabled, and Deleted Pricing Constraints are listed. To change the priority of Enabled Pricing Constraints, click the number of the constraint and drag it to a different priority.

By default, a new Pricing Constraint is set to status Enabled. To disable it, click the Enabled slider. Edit the Pricing Constraint using the pencil icon. Delete the Pricing Constraint using the trash bin icon.
To set up a new Offer Constraint, click Offer Constraints and Add Constraint.
1. Label: Label the new constraint.
2. Select Constraint: Select the constraint:
  1. Never Recommend: This never recommends a certain offer for the constraint set.
  2. Always Recommend: This always recommends a certain offer for the constraint set.
Select Upsell: This selects the upsell. This constraint should be effective for Conditions when the constraints is in effect.
Select Rule Type: From the drop-down, select a rule type for this Pricing Constraint.
Select Expression: From the drop-down, select the expression for this Pricing Constraint.
Click Save.

Enabled, disabled, and deleted Offer Constraints are listed. To change the priority of Enabled Offer Constraints, click the number of the constraint and drag to a different priority.

By default, a new Offer Constraint is set to status Enabled. To disable it, click the Enabled slider. Edit the Offer Constraint using the pencil icon. Delete the Pricing Constraint using the trash bin icon.

Learn

Merchandising U, Nor1’s online, on-demand training portal complements the existing knowledgebase, support staff, and remote and in-person instructor-led trainings. Users can get certified to show their commitment and expertise in guest engagement and in driving incremental revenue.

You can optimize guest engagement and upsell revenue through quick but comprehensive tutorials covering:

At-booking offers
Pre-arrival offers
At-arrival offers (both e-Checkin and agent facing)
Applied pricing and merchandising using machine learning

Live Chat

For assistance, reach out to the Nor1 support team and/or post a message on the live chat in the Nor1 CheckIn Merchandising application.

Program Manager Report and GM Report

Every day around 7 a.m. local time, hotels receive the Program Manager Daily Engagement Report. The report provides useful insights to better lead the team. It is sorted into four sections:

Property Overview MTD

This area provides a general overview of the hotel’s performance and pace month-to-date compared with the goal set for the team.
On the right, the Program Manager Action List details actionable items, such as discrepancies between the application and Property Management System (PMS) (for example, reservations with missing revenue in OPERA and so on), as well as agents that have upgraded guests, but do not possess a login to the CheckIn Merchandising app to receive credit for their upsells.

Yesterday’s Review Actual

Actual KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) – upgraded revenue, number of upgrades, hotel KPI actuals.
This segment details how many arrivals were pitched an offer and how many of those guests were upgraded.
The number of complimentary upgrades details the upgraded room movements without an upsell in the PMS (which could also be a room movement to different bedding within the same category).
The Free Upgrade RevPAR Loss expresses the revenue these complimentary upgrades could have brought per available room based on the full supplement between the categories.

Today’s Preview Forecast

Upgrade revenue and number of upgrades property potential.

Whom to Praise and Whom to Coach:

Continuous team member development (7–day time window). This segment contains coaching insights: which agents are the top performers and which agents need to log in more often or need to make sure to pitch offers to the guest more often. Detailing exactly the areas of improvement or success for specified agents, this tool might be especially helpful in identifying the strongest performers on your team, as well as identifying which agents could use more development in their upsell techniques.
Twice a month, the hotel General Manager with the Program Managers in CheckIn Merchandising receive an email with the GM 60-Seconds Snapshot Report. The report offers a quick overview of the activities of CheckIn Merchandising and eStandby Upgrade. It shows the current progress of the goals and lists high performing team members.