Top Tip - How to Troubleshoot Pricing Engine Rules

If you configured pricing engine rules, but they're not behaving as expected, the article below might help you fix the issue causing the problem.

Please note - these solutions involve updates to configuration in the booking management module and can only be carried out by users with certain administrative privileges.

Before you get started with your troubleshooting, why not going back to the basic principles of the pricing engine module by reading this article?

Pricing engine troubleshooting checklist

1. First of all, check that the settings related to the pricing engine module are correctly configured by logging in and reading this article.

2. As a general rule, aim to have no more than 4-5 active categories (namely, categories that are not deleted and include at least one active rule).

3. Think about in which order the categories should be processed. For example, you might have a rule to add a pricing line to a hotel item (rule A) and then another rule to calculate a mark up on this pricing line (rule B). These two rules must be included in two separate categories. To ensure that Dolphin applies rule A before rule B, the category including rule A must have a higher priority than the category including rule B.

4. Each category includes specific conditions that allow you to target different levels of data (folder, items, pricing lines, etc.). So it is important that the correct category is selected when creating a rule.

5. When prioritising rules the more restrictive should be applied first and the broader 'catch all' rule should be at the bottom of the priorities.

6. Every piece of reference used to configure a rule (such like pricing profile codes, contract mark up codes, contract cancellation codes and vendor profiles mark up codes for hotels, hotel chains and hotel package vendor types) must be active (not deleted).

7. For conditions related to a vendor profile, make sure that there are no duplicates for the same vendor profile. Having duplicates means that one or more users might use a different vendor profile and therefore the rule would not apply.

8. For conditions related to a pricing description, make sure that the pricing description is consistently used by your BMM users as that will affect the correct working of the rule.

9. Rules calculating vendor Pay Now amounts will not apply unless the Allow Pay Now Amount check box is ticked in Options > Branch Details for the required branch code > General 1 tab.

10. Rules calculating vendor deposits will not apply unless the Use Pricing Engine check box is ticked in the Financial 1 tab of the relevant vendor profile.

11. Preferencing rules (applicable to the reservation module only) must include the Item Booked Via condition, which refers to the Booked Via field stored in the item Booking Details tab. You can obtain the correct Booked Via value by quoting or booking a product in the RM with the relevant connector and checking the value entered in the item Booking Details tab > Booked Via field once the folder is retrieved in the BMM.