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Quite a few plants have several overnight rooms on site: for service engineers who come in for a shutdown, for drivers taking their rest period, for visitors from a head office abroad. Who is sleeping in them is usually known only to a notebook at the gatehouse or a spreadsheet in HR, because hardly anyone keeps track of them in a system. In TraxSystem, guest room booking counts a stay in nights and opens the door for the whole stay, and the people staying overnight go into the same register as entries and passages.
The notebook works perfectly well until someone asks who slept in room three on the night from Tuesday to Wednesday.
Why a spreadsheet cannot cope with overnight stays
An overnight stay is counted in nights. A stay from Monday to Thursday is three nights, even though in hours it comes to seventy, so a spreadsheet that calculates the time difference will be wrong every time, and the person keeping the records will start doing the sums in their head.
A changeover day looks like a clash in a spreadsheet. One guest checks out at noon, the next checks in at two. These are two stays, but a calendar counted in hours shows one day with two entries, and at the first attempt at automation someone reports it as an error.
A key has no expiry date either. A service engineer who was given a card for three days still has it in June, and a slip of paper saying ‘key returned’ is sometimes the only trace.
A guest room in TraxSystem: booking in nights
In TraxSystem a guest room differs from a meeting room in that the booking is measured in nights. You enter only the arrival and departure dates, and the times are added from the room settings, usually check-in at 14:00 and check-out at 12:00.
The check-out time is earlier than the check-in time, and that is how it should be. It means one guest leaving and the next arriving on the same day fit side by side instead of looking like a double booking.
Access to the room covers the whole stay in a single window. If it were granted separately for each night, the guest would find the door locked every day at noon. Together with the room door, the access points on the way open too: the floor, the corridor, the lift, and all of them switch off on the day of check-out.
A guest without a card gets a code that works only at that room and only for that stay.
Overnight stays in the same register as entries and passages
In TraxSystem the record of overnight stays is part of the same register that holds entries and passages. The question of who was on site on the night from Tuesday to Wednesday then has a single answer, which includes the people who did not leave in the evening. That helps in an evacuation, during an inspection and in any dispute where you have to reconstruct who was where.
What room booking does not do
Room booking in TraxSystem is not a hotel management system. It has no room rates, billing, invoices or front desk functions. Nightly mode is a way of measuring the booking, and selling accommodation remains outside the system.
The room code does not open the gate: entry to the site is handled separately. Nor will the system check whether the guest actually stayed the night, because it only sees card swipes at access points.
Without a controller at the door, you are left with the calendar alone. It is still useful, because you know which room is free and who is in it, but the door is opened with a key.
Questions and answers
Are guest rooms and meeting rooms one module?
Yes, it is one module, Room booking. The rooms differ in their mode: meeting rooms are measured in hours, guest rooms in nights.
Who usually keeps these records?
Most often reception or the site administration. Security uses them when the question is who is on site after hours.
Does the guest get a confirmation?
Yes: an email with the full details and a text message with a summary, separately for each person.
How much does it cost?
The module is added to the base package, and its price depends on the number of rooms, in which guest rooms count together with meeting rooms. The pricing page gives the price for three, ten or thirty rooms.
See also: Booking meeting rooms and guest rooms · A meeting room booking that opens the door itself · How many people are on site right now