Property setup¶
Everything a new property needs before it can take a booking: your invoice and tax preferences, the listing guests see, and the rooms themselves.
Work through it in this order. Room types have to exist before you can add rooms to them.
1. Administration¶
Settings → Admin
One open card at the top — Start here — and below it a set of folded sections. The folded ones all arrive with sensible defaults, so the only part you have to fill in is the card. Open the rest when you want to change something, not because setup demands it.
Start here¶
The settings Zitlin cannot guess for you: your own times, and what your booking page shows a guest.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Check-In time / Check-Out time | Your standard times, in 24-hour format. |
| Photo gallery | Your photos. The first one is the main image guests see. Drag to reorder. |
| Property description | A welcoming overview of the property, shown on your booking engine and OTA listings. |
| Star rating | 1–5. Tap the selected chip again to clear it; leave empty if unrated. |
Removing a photo deletes it
Photos dropped from the gallery are removed from storage when you save. Keep your own copies.
Billing & Tax¶
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Invoice number prefix | First part of every invoice number. In ZIT/25-26/44311, ZIT is the prefix. |
| Auto-round invoice totals | Rounds the invoice total to the nearest whole number. |
| Merged invoices by default | Puts room and food & beverage charges on one invoice rather than two. |
| Prices include tax | Whether the prices you type in already contain tax. |
| Print property header | Adds your name and address to the top of every PDF. Turn it off if you print onto pre-printed letterheads. |
Set Prices include tax before you enter any prices
This one switch decides how every price in Zitlin is read. With it on, a nightly rate of 1000 includes the tax; with it off, tax is added on top and the guest pays more than 1000.
It also changes the labels on the price fields you are about to fill in — they read either (including tax) or (excluding tax) to match. Get it right first, then enter one room type, take a test booking, and check the tax line before typing in the rest.
Room Invoices¶
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Default meal plan | Pre-selected meal plan on a new booking. |
| Invoice header / Invoice footer | Text printed at the top and bottom of room invoices. |
Policies & Facilities¶
The rest of what guests see on your booking engine and on connected OTAs. Worth spending time on — this is your shopfront.
| Field | Notes |
|---|---|
| Facilities & amenities | Pick everything that applies. OTAs use these to filter search results. |
| Hotel policy | House rules, check-in and check-out policy. |
| Cancellation policy | Refund windows and cancellation terms. |
| Booking engine footer | Shown at the bottom of every page of your booking engine. Useful for a phone number or a direct-booking promise. |
The remaining sections — Direct Bookings, Housekeeping, Restaurant and Notifications — are covered in Booking engine, Housekeeping and Restaurant.
2. Room types¶
Settings → Property → Room Types
A room type is a kind of room — Standard, Deluxe, Suite. Not an individual room. Guests book a room type; you assign the actual room later.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Room Type Name | The kind of room, e.g. Executive, Suite, Standard. |
| Nightly rate | Your usual rate for this room type. Digits only — 200, not AUD 200. Labelled (including tax) or (excluding tax) to match your Settings → Admin choice. |
| Tax | Which tax applies to this room type. |
| Photo | Shown on your booking engine and OTA listings. |
One room type per kind of room — not per price
The most common setup mistake is creating Deluxe and Deluxe Weekend as two room types. Do not. A room type carries one usual rate, and dates change that rate — see Pricing for weekend and seasonal prices.
Duplicating room types splits your availability in two, so both show as bookable when only one room exists.
Advanced settings¶
Occupancy and extra-guest pricing, used by your booking engine to decide who fits and what they pay.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Base occupancy | Adults included in the nightly rate. Defaults to 2. |
| Max occupancy | Total adults allowed, including those covered by base occupancy. |
| Extra guest surcharge | Nightly charge per adult above base occupancy, up to max. Booking engine only — see the warning below. |
| Children occupancy | How many children the room type can take. |
| Infants occupancy | How many infants the room type can take. |
| Sync with Channel Manager | Pushes this room type's availability and rates to connected OTAs. Locked once the channel manager is live — see Channel manager. |
How the occupancy fields work together
A room type with base occupancy 2, max occupancy 4 and a surcharge of
500 sells at the nightly rate for two adults, and adds 500 per night for
each of the third and fourth. A fifth adult cannot book it at all.
The surcharge is added by the booking engine only
A guest booking three adults online is charged the extra 500 a night. The same booking typed in at the front desk is not — your staff see the plain nightly rate and have to add the surcharge themselves, as an add-on or a price change on the booking.
So the field is not a house rule Zitlin enforces everywhere. If most of your business is walk-in or phone, tell your reception what to charge, or build the extra guest into the room type's rate instead.
The surcharge is also added after any rate plan, so a discount plan does not reduce it.
3. Rooms¶
Settings → Property → Rooms
The physical rooms. Each one belongs to a room type.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Room Name | What your staff calls it — 101, C44, Apt 1, House 3. Commas are not allowed. |
| Room type | Which room type it belongs to. |
| Room condition or status | Its current housekeeping state — Clean, Dirty or Maintenance. |
Adding a lot of rooms
Use the bulk option offered at the top of the form. Enter the names comma
separated — 101, 102, 103 — pick a room type, and Zitlin creates them all
at once.
Linked rooms¶
Some spaces can be sold more than one way. A three-bedroom apartment might go to one family as a whole, or to three couples as three separate rooms. Two connecting rooms might sell individually or together as a family suite. A studio might be part of a villa.
Create every room you are willing to sell — the apartment and each of its bedrooms — then link them, so selling one takes the others off the market.
Settings → Property → Rooms, open a room, and expand Linked Rooms. Tick every other room this one shares space with.
Set the link from one side only
The app puts it plainly: booking this above room also blocks the below selected rooms, and booking any of them blocks this one. Link the apartment to its three bedrooms and you are done — you do not repeat it on each bedroom.
The picker lists every other room in the property, not just the ones of the same room type. Clear room names pay off here.
So, for an apartment A1 linked to bedrooms B1, B2 and B3:
| Sold | Becomes unavailable | Still bookable |
|---|---|---|
Apartment A1 |
B1, B2, B3 |
Everything else |
Bedroom B2 |
Apartment A1 |
B1 and B3, individually |
The second row is the useful one: selling one bedroom only takes the whole apartment off sale. Its siblings stay on the market, so you can still fill them one at a time.
It applies everywhere availability is worked out
The front-desk calendar, the room picker when you assign a room, your booking engine, and the availability pushed to connected OTAs all read the same figure — so a bedroom sold on Booking.com removes the apartment from your own booking engine too.
Linking blocks availability — it does not merge the rooms
Each room keeps its own room type, rate and tax, and each is booked and invoiced on its own. Selling the apartment charges the apartment's rate; it does not create three bedroom bookings, and nothing is added up across the link.
Note too that the parent's availability drops to zero the moment any of its children sells. That is the point, but it does mean a whole-property room spends most of a busy season unbookable. Link only spaces that genuinely cannot be occupied twice.
Linking is not part of bulk add. Create the rooms in bulk, then open the parent once and tick its children.
4. Add-ons¶
Settings → Property → Add Ons
Extras you charge for on top of the room — airport pickup, extra bed, laundry.
| Field | What it does |
|---|---|
| Name | What appears on the folio and invoice. |
| Default price | Follows the same (including tax) / (excluding tax) rule as room rates. |
| Tax | Which tax applies. |
Tags¶
Settings → More → Tags
Labels you define once and then stick on things. Each tag has a name, a colour, and one thing it applies to:
| Applies to | Useful for |
|---|---|
| Room | Sea view, Pet friendly, Smoking allowed, Accessible, Ground floor — the standing facts about a room that decide who you put in it. |
| Booking | VIP, Honeymoon, Group booking, Early check-in, Late check-out, Repeat guest. |
| Folio | Corporate invoice, Travel agent, Complimentary, Split payment, Needs follow-up. |
| Guest | Anything about the person rather than the stay — Allergy on file, Blacklisted, Owner's guest. |
A tag can only be put on the kind of thing it was made for, which is what keeps the lists short at the moment somebody is tagging.
Tags are for what you will look for later
A tag earns its place if somebody will one day scan a screen for it. Sea view does; checked does not — that is what a status is for. Half a dozen good tags beat forty.
Tags are colour-coded so they read at a glance on the calendar and on the guest list. Creating a tag and putting one on something are both Restaurant Manager and above; editing an existing tag — which changes it everywhere it is already stuck — is Accountant.
Next¶
Your property can now take bookings at its usual rates. To charge differently by season, weekday, or guest type, carry on to Pricing.
The fourth tab, Restrictions, sets date-range rules on when a room type can be booked — minimum and maximum length of stay, closed to arrival, closed to departure, and stop sell. A restriction can name one room type or apply to the whole property.
Restrictions do not stop your own staff
They are enforced on your booking engine and pushed to connected OTAs. Front desk bookings ignore them by design, so reception can always take a one-night stay inside a two-night minimum. Stop sell goes further and only ever reaches the OTAs — your own booking engine keeps selling.
Where two restrictions cover the same night, the most restrictive rule wins.
Restrictions are documented in full with the Channel manager.
Common questions¶
Should I create a room type for each floor or view?
Only if they sell at a different price or have different amenities. A room type is a group of rooms you are happy to treat as interchangeable when a guest books. If a guest would not care which one they get, one room type is enough.
I changed a room type's nightly rate — what happens to existing bookings?
Nothing. Bookings already taken keep the rate they were made at. The new rate applies to bookings made from now on.
Can I sell a whole apartment and its bedrooms separately?
Yes — create a room for each way it can be sold, put them in room types priced accordingly, and link them under Linked Rooms so the two cannot be sold for the same night. See Linked rooms.
Can I delete a room type that has rooms in it?
Move the rooms to another room type first. Deleted room types still appear struck through when editing a room, so older bookings stay readable.
A tax I need is not in the list
Add it under Settings → More → Taxes. A tax can carry several components, each with its own name and rate, so a combined levy still prints as separate lines on the invoice.