Hello Nicole,
Thanks for your message. We understand your concerns, but Vik Booking follows an OpenTravel standard model for the allotments and the calculation of the remaining availability. Our plugin is the main source of income of all reservations, that will be centralized on your own WordPress website, no matter if those are direct reservations placed by guests through the front-end, manual reservations placed by an administrator through the back-end, or OTA reservations downloaded by our Vik Channel Manager and E4jConnect service for your connected accounts.
That said, the remaining availability for a specific room-type or listing is automatically calculated by the system depending on the number of confirmed reservations that occupy the units of your room on some specific dates of the year.
On top of that, closures are particular types of bookings that are excluded from any financial report, and they serve as a way to immediately stop the sales for a specific room-type/listing on some dates of the year. Please keep in mind that a closure will always occupy all of your room units on the selected dates, so that by cancelling the closure, the availability will be back to the real one. For example, if you have a “Double Room” with 10 units in total, and you’ve got 3 confirmed reservations for next weekend, the remaining availability for those dates will be 7 units. By closing that room on the dates for the next weekend, your inventory will become negative, with 13 units booked in total, and so the remaining availability will be -3. For the Channel Manager, a negative availability is exactly the same as 0, it always means that the room is not available on those dates, but the good thing is that by cancelling the closure that occupies all units of your room, you will actually free up 10 units by going back to the effective remaining availability of 7 units for that weekend.
If you wish to book/occupy just 2 units of your room-type, then you should not close it, because that action will occupy all of your rooms. Ideally, if you need to occupy 2 units it means that you’ve got a guest that wants to reserve those 2 units, and so a real reservation will do the job. Instead, if the reason behind the need of occupying 2 units is different, like preserving some availability for “later”, then there are other mechanisms that you should actually use, but that requires our full solution composed of the plugin Vik Channel Manager and an active E4jConnect subscription for our certified Channel Manager service, with which you will be able to set up dynamic availability rules or define blocked dates. In any case, creating a simple reservation through the page Calendar in Vik Booking, or by using the admin-widget “Bookings Calendar” will do the job, because you will be able to select the number of units to book/occupy whenever the selected room-type has got more than one unit available. If you do not enable the close-room option, and if you do not assign any customer, rate plan or custom rate to the reservation, this will still be excluded from any financial report as the total will be set to 0.
In short, closing means occupying all room units. If you wish to occupy just some of the units of a room, then you need a regular reservation for 2 units of that room. As explained above, if those two units will be occupied by a real guest, then you better create the reservation properly, by specifying a cost for the stay, by selecting a rate-plan and by assigning a customer to the reservation.
We hope this helps!
The VikWP Team