Events

Event management systems streamline the planning, organization and execution of events such as weddings or conferences. An Events integration can pull live information about rates and availability, create availability blocks (also known as room blocks or group blocks), affect property inventory, push contracted revenue to the relevant guest’s profile in Mews, and allow users to manage the group reservations already pushed into Mews.

Enterprise information

To automate the onboarding of a new property as much as possible, use a combination of Configuration operations, Enterprises operations and Services operations to pull information about a property or enterprise, including, but not limited to, resources configuration (including rooms and other spaces), applicable tax rates, services and products, and company profiles.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to get property configuration	Get configuration
How to get rooms and resources configuration	Get all resources
How to get applicable tax rates	Get all tax environments, Get all taxations
How to get the list of services offered	Get all services
How to get the list of products linked to services	Get all products
How to get company profiles	Get all companies
How to get the list of supported countries	Get all countries
How to get the list of supported currencies	Get all currencies
How to get the list of supported languages	Get all languages

Rates and availability

Use Get all rates and Get rate pricing to pull data about rates offered in the property or enterprise. Use Get service availability to pull resource category availability and related adjustments from Mews.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to get rates	Get all rates
How to get the price for a given rate	Get rate pricing
How to get availability	Get service availability

Availability blocks: The Availabilities array returned by Get service availability refers to inventory that is available to the general public and therefore does not include inventory that has been reserved for Availability Blocks. Likewise, the array of adjustments are those not associated with Availability Blocks.

Managing billing

In Mews, billing is managed at the customer/guest profile level, instead of being charged to a specific room or reservation. If applicable, create a new company via Add company or find an existing company via Get all companies and attach the company to both the reservation(s) and the customer bill(s) for more accurate billing and reporting.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to add a new company	Add company
How to find an existing company	Get all companies

Paymaster accounts

Use a Paymaster customer profile to centrally manage charges and billing related to the company/event. This also allows any additional orders (e.g. F&B spending) to be added via the POS system, if needed. If the relevant customer profile does not already exist in Mews, first use Add customer to create a profile.

Mews tip: Make sure that only active Paymaster profiles exist in Mews.

In order to keep data clean in the Mews system, only mark a profile with the Paymaster classification when the event management system starts posting charges to the customer profile. Use Update customer to mark the profile as a Paymaster account. Similar to the concept of fake rooms in traditional Property Management Systems that are deleted at the end of an event, remove the Paymaster classification from the customer profile once the relevant event has concluded, e.g. event ended, all billing settled, and/or the event is canceled. Use the Update customer operation to remove the Paymaster classification. Refer to the Update values section on how to change or remove a value. You can also use Update customer to amend other customer profile details.

Should you need to retrieve a list of all customer profiles created within a certain interval, use the Get all customers operation with the relevant time filters.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to create a Paymaster profile	Add customer
How to update a profile to be a Paymaster	Update customer
How to remove the Paymaster classification	Update customer
How to get a list of profiles created over a period of time	Get all customers

Adding revenue and payment items

One of the expected functions of an Events integration is to push product order items to the correct customer profile in Mews. This can be done using the operation Add order. If the product item that is being posted already exists in Mews, use Product order parameters. If the product is a custom item that does not exist in Mews then use Item parameters. Note that in order to use Product order parameters, the property must first set up products under an Additional Service. Then, you will need to retrieve the products by calling Get all products. To ensure correct reporting, all revenue items posted into Mews using Item parameters must be associated with their correct accounting category by sending the unique identifier of the accounting category in the request. Information about all the categories configured at each property can be retrieved using Get all accounting categories.

Linking orders to reservations

When using Add order, specify parameter LinkedReservationId in order to link the order to a guest reservation. This will greatly assist the property when using billing automation.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to add a product order item to a customer profile	Add order
How to get the list of available products	Get all products
How to get accounting categories	Get all accounting categories
How to link an order to a reservation	Add order (use LinkedReservationId)

Recording external payments

In case payment was taken outside of Mews, or directly in the event management system, use Finance operations to record the payment items in Mews, so that all accounting items are centralised in Mews for further reporting and/or exporting to the property's accounting system.

Further automation possibilities

Call Get customer open items to review the revenue and payment items that have already been posted to a customer profile. You can then further automate the management of billing/invoicing by creating a specific bill using Add bill for a certain group of revenue and payment items. Use Update accounting items to redirect these items to the relevant bill and then use Close bill to finalise the financial document.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to review already posted items	Get customer open items
How to create a new bill	Add bill
How to add accounting items to a bill	Update accounting items
How to close a bill against change	Close bill

Attaching a company to a bill: Currently, attaching a company to a bill must be done manually in Mews Operations. If being able to do this via the API is important to your solution, please consider adding your vote to this feature request.

Managing group reservations with availability blocks

Availability blocks are used for reserving a certain portion of resource category availability in Mews for a specific group of reservations, as well as the subsequent management of reservations that are created in Mews for such groups.

Creating availability blocks

First call Add availability blocks to add a new block with the relevant parameters. Note the returned availability block Id, which is used as the unique identifier in all interactions with Mews. There is no expectation to create availability blocks and allocate inventory in Mews straight away for events in the early, tentative, stages of a sales cycle. It is up to the integration partner to decide at which stage of an event order to create an availability block and start allocating inventory in Mews.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to create an availability block	Add availability blocks

Allocating inventory to an availability block

Now that you have created an availability block, you can allocate capacity for different dates and resource categories, i.e. create room night blocks. Use Update service availability to push availability adjustments into Mews. Send a negative value for the UnitCountAdjustment parameter and include the aforementioned AvailabilityBlockId in the availability update parameter to reserve units of availability for the availability block you have just created. The availability adjustments must fall within the StartUtc and EndUtc of the availability block.

• Example: If you wish to reserve 10 units of availability for certain dates, send -10 in the UnitCountAdjustment parameter.

• Example: Original adjustment was -5 to reserve 5 units of availability for 1st of May. User now wishes to increase inventory for the availability block for that date by 2 (to 7 total). In this case, send adjustment -7 to override the original adjustment.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to update or amend service availability	Update service availability

Overbooking: Note it is possible to allow overbooking by allocating more inventory than there are resources physically available at the property, e.g. an adjustment of -10 when there are 9 units.

Adding reservations to an availability block

When a new reservation is created within the event management system, it needs to be synced with Mews, and vice versa. Reservations can be pushed into Mews using the Add reservations operation. To ensure that the reservations consume availability reserved for the availability block, instead of from the property's overall availability, include AvailabilityBlockId in the reservations parameters when you add reservations into an existing group block. It is also possible to place an existing reservation in Mews into an availability block with the Update reservations operation, by including AvailabilityBlockId in the reservations parameters. If applicable, you can attach a company to a reservation when calling Add reservations or Update reservations.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to push a reservation to Mews	Add reservations
How to place an existing reservation into an availability block	Update reservations

Availability block capacity: Note that it is currently not possible to exceed the availability block capacity, i.e. the inventory allocated to an availability block through the Update service availability operation. However, it is possible to add reservations with arrival or departure times that extend beyond the interval in a given availability block (see availability block parameters). Should there be a need to accommodate more reservations in an availability block, you must first update the adjustments to increase the allocated inventory in that block.

Managing reservations and guests

To ensure that the property can further manage individual guests linked to the group reservation, via the integration, use Add reservation companion or Delete reservation companion to assign or unassign guests to rooms.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to add a guest to a reservation	Add reservation companion
How to remove a guest from a reservation	Delete reservation companion

Terminology: Note that the API uses the term customer rather than guest. The term companion is used to indicate a guest profile linked to a reservation. For an explanation of all terms, see the Mews Glossary for Open API users.

Managing availability block inventory and pickup

Call Get all availability blocks to retrieve information about existing availability blocks, as well as all associated reservations and availability adjustments. To avoid the need of regular polling, you can make use of Webhooks for Service Order events to automatically receive information about reservation creation and reservation updates. Make a note of the AvailabilityBlockId in the reservation object to record pickup of the relevant availability block in your system and in Mews.

When a reservation no longer belongs to the availability block, follow the format described in Update reservation to remove the AvailabilityBlockId. When an availability block is no longer needed, remove it from Mews by calling Delete availability blocks. The availability adjustments associated with the availability block will automatically be removed. Note that is it not possible to delete an availability block containing active reservations.

'How to' use case	API Operations
How to get existing availability blocks	Get all availability blocks
How to listen for changes to reservations	General Webhooks (ServiceOrderUpdated event)
How to delete an availability block	Delete availability blocks
How to remove a reservation from an availability block	Update reservation

Testing your integration

Ensure you follow our general Usage guidelines for testing integrations. If you'd like to double-check that you are correctly creating all the reservations you want to retrieve, you can do so by searching for the reservation or related customer profile, or using the Reservation Report. To confirm you are relating any product that is not configured in Mews with the correct accounting category, you can review the Accounting Report. If done correctly, the product you've posted will appear under the relevant accounting category.

Additional help for working with the demo environment

Help Guides:

• Availability blocks and reporting in Mews

• How to create an accounting category

• How to create rates

• How to update rates

• How to manage rate prices

• Managing companions in a reservation

• How to manage group billing

• Manually add, move, or remove items from open bills

• Finding bills and invoices assigned to a company

• Create a Paymaster account

• Create a company profile