How Hotels Arrive Is Not What Kind of Catalogue It Is
One list can hold hotels added by hand, hotels from a file and hotels synced from a supplier. That is normal.
Hotel catalogues now come in two kinds: the platform’s standard catalogue and your own. Adding by hand, importing a file and syncing from your own supplier connection are all ways to put hotels into your catalogue; each row records its source, and sources mix freely in one catalogue.
An agency is putting together hotels for one market: half picked by hand, half meant to arrive through a sync from its own supplier connection. Our hotel catalogues used to come in three types: the platform’s standard catalogue, your own catalogue, and a catalogue synced from your own supplier connection. The three were exclusive and you picked one when creating a catalogue, so hotels sold together had to be split across two catalogues.
The mistake was treating a source as a type. A source answers how hotels got in, and it can differ row by row. A type answers who owns the catalogue and whose rules it sells under, and it has one answer per catalogue. Tie the two together and people end up organising their business by import method instead of by who they sell to.
Catalogue types are down to two: the platform’s standard catalogue and catalogues you own. Syncing from your supplier connection became an import setting on your catalogue, alongside file import and adding by hand, and every hotel row keeps its own source. Existing synced catalogues were relabelled as your own catalogues, with their hotels unchanged. Keeping three types would have left users to work around the split themselves.
The catalogue wizard still offers the supplier sync option; it now simply means filling this catalogue that way. Hotels added by hand, imported from a file and synced from a supplier can sit side by side in one catalogue, so you can build one catalogue per audience or market, with each row’s source recorded on that row.