Holiday homes

The Holiday homes section holds two screens: Bookings and Calendar. Your website asks for a stay, you accept it, decline it or propose other properties, and the guest pays on their stay page. Majali is the booking system: no other channel manager is needed. The rules below apply to every property you list as a holiday home.

The calendar

The Calendar shows every holiday home on one screen, in a month or a week view, one row per property.

One bar holds the arrows, the month (or week), Today, Month or Week, the property and operations contact filters, and Block dates, which opens a window to block days.
Under it, the legend of the statuses and the share of nights booked in the period. Click a status in the legend to show only those stays (All shows them all again). Each property’s row shows its own share; click its name to show only that property.
Each stay is a bar running from the middle of its check-in day to the middle of its check-out day, coloured as its status, so a departure and an arrival on the same day sit side by side. Blocked dates are hatched grey, weekends shaded, and today marked.
Click a stay to see its guest, dates, number of guests and total, with Open the booking.
On a phone, choose one property at a time: its month shows as weeks with each stay a band, and its stays are listed below.
The arrows move a month (or a week); Today returns to the current month or week.

“Today” follows your company’s own day, not the browser’s.

Booking requests from the website

Your website sends a request for a property, dates and a number of guests. The request appears as a booking with the status Requested and holds the dates for your company’s hold period (48 hours by default). When another stay already holds the nights, the request is still kept, marked Taken, and does not hold them: see “Requests and other properties” below.

The guest receives an email saying the request was received. Nobody on the team is emailed: new requests show in the sidebar count and on the dashboard, which also lists the next seven days’ arrivals and departures and counts the requests waiting and the confirmed bookings still unpaid.

A request that breaks one of the property’s rules (see “Booking settings and rules” below) is refused and the rule is named.

Confirm or decline

Open the booking on the Bookings screen.

Confirm gives the guest a payment deadline: now plus the property’s payment window, or the company default. The guest is emailed a link to their stay page with that deadline.
Decline asks for an optional word for the guest, frees the dates and emails the guest with it.

A request nobody answers before its hold ends expires by itself, within ten minutes of the deadline. So does a confirmed booking the guest has not paid by its deadline. Both free the dates and email the guest.

Phone and walk-in bookings

Add a booking by hand from the Bookings screen for a guest who called or came in. The same rules apply. The guest’s consent is recorded as given by phone, and you can confirm the booking at once.

Requests and other properties

Above the Bookings list, a strip shows the bookings by status in the colours of their labels, then all bookings, those Waiting for an answer (their count is also beside Holiday homes in the sidebar), arriving today, departing today, arriving in the next 7 days, and booked this month against the same days of last month. Each filters the view you are on. From and To beside the search show the stays on any night between those dates (the filters’ stay dates are the same two values). The List, Grid and Map icons beside Filters switch the view, keeping the search and the filters: Grid shows a card per booking (the property’s photo, status, dates and nights, guests, total), and Map a pin per property with its number of bookings; clicking a pin opens the property beside the map with its coming stays, Its bookings, Calendar and Open the listing. A booking’s page opens with a header card: the property as its title, the status, the property’s reference and source, the total with the dates and nights, the guest, how to reach the guest, the property and the guests, a warning while it waits for an answer, when its dates are taken or while payment is due, and the next action first. Open a request to answer it:

Confirm accepts the request and gives the guest the payment link (see “Payment after confirmation”).
Decline asks for an optional word for the guest, frees the dates and emails the guest.
Propose other properties is for a request whose dates are taken. It lists the published holiday homes that are free on those dates for that many guests, the same area first, then the same city, within a quarter of the nightly price; Show every free property widens the list. Tick the properties to offer, add a word for the guest and send.

A request for taken dates cannot be confirmed: its page says the dates are taken and offers only Decline and Propose. If the other stay lets go of the dates before you answer, the request becomes an ordinary one and Confirm appears.

Proposing closes the request as declined and emails the guest once: each property, its total for their dates and a Request this property button. The button opens a page of its own, valid for seven days, where the guest asks for one of the properties with one click. That makes a new request for the same dates and guests (its source is “From a proposal”), checked again for availability, and the usual steps follow: you confirm it and the guest pays. Nothing is charged before you confirm.

Quotes and fees

A night costs the property’s nightly price, unless a seasonal price covers it; the most specific seasonal price wins. A quote lists:

every night and its price;
the fee lines of your Booking settings, each a percentage of the nights or an amount per night, named in each of your content languages;
the deposit;
the total, in your company’s currency.

The quote is frozen on the booking when it is requested. Your website can read a property’s availability and price a stay before the guest asks: it sees blocked ranges and the booking rules, never who booked.

The guest’s stay page

Every guest email links to the booking’s stay page. It needs no sign-in, its link cannot be guessed, and search engines never index it. It shows the booking’s status and every quote line, the Pay button while payment is due, and, once paid, the stay details, the house rules and the name and phone of the property’s operations contact.

While your company’s guest space is published (it starts so; Settings, then Embeddings), the stay links you send lead there. The guest signs in with a single-use email link and sees their coming stays, requests and history, with quotes, fees, payments, deposits and refunds, in English and Arabic. A booking opens only to the exact email it was made with.

Payment after confirmation

Money moves only on your company’s own accounts. Majali records the result and never holds funds. You set the methods up once under Settings, then Connections, then Payment connectors (see Finance).

Each booking carries the payment method the guest may use. Pick it from your ready connectors; a company default can fill it in for you.

Method	What the guest does	What you do
Card through Stripe	Presses Pay on the stay page and pays on Stripe’s page. Every line of the quote is its own line there: the nights, each fee and the deposit, in your currency.	Nothing. The booking turns Paid once Stripe confirms the account, the booking, the amount and the currency.
Card through Network International	Presses Pay on the stay page and pays on Network’s page, by card, or by Apple Pay or Google Pay when Network turns them on. An order left unpaid for an hour is closed, and Pay opens a fresh one.	Nothing. The booking turns Paid once Majali reads the payment from Network and its outlet, booking, amount and currency match. A guest paying right at the deadline gets 30 minutes more.
Bank transfer	Presses Pay by bank transfer on the stay page, which opens the bank’s payment page, and transfers the money.	Attach the bank’s link to the confirmed booking. When the money arrives, mark the booking paid with the bank’s reference; this asks for a fresh code. The deposit is recorded as paid the same way.

Rules the product enforces:

A guest can only pay while the deadline has not passed. One checkout is open at a time; a payment that arrives late never revives an expired booking.
Marking a booking paid freezes the property’s owner and commission rate in the booking, so the owner’s statement for that month never changes afterwards.
Every payment, deposit and refund becomes a row on the Payments screen under Finance, with its status: processing, failed and paid are distinct.
The guest is emailed when the booking is paid.

The confirmed and paid emails list the same lines, with the total.

The guest terms

When your company fills in its guest terms in Booking settings, they show beside the Pay buttons in every language you wrote them, the guest’s first, with a box the guest must tick: I have read and accept the booking terms. Without the tick, no payment starts. This applies to every payment, on the stay page and in the guest space. Addresses in the terms become links, so you can point to the full terms on your website.

In Abu Dhabi, DCT’s holiday homes guide asks for the terms in Arabic and English before the booking is confirmed: fill in both. Each acceptance is recorded in the booking’s History, with a fingerprint of the exact text the guest was shown and their language. If you change the terms later, the record still shows which version was accepted. With no guest terms, there is no box.

Under the Abu Dhabi rules the guest also sees the booking agreement before paying, as DCT’s holiday homes guide lists it: the property, its address and its DCT licence; the guest’s name, email and phone; the check-in and check-out dates and times; every line of the quote; the payment method; and the most guests allowed. The guest gives their residential address there and ticks the box to accept the agreement and your terms. The address is kept on the booking, encrypted, and shown only to staff who may see contacts; it is erased with the guest’s data.

Refunds

The deposit is refunded, in full or in part with a reason the guest reads, from the check-out record in the operations app. A cancelled paid booking is refunded by staff with an amount and a reason. A refund has three steps: the release is approved, the refund is started, and the repayment is confirmed. A card refund follows the provider’s own status (Stripe or Network International); a bank refund is confirmed only with the actual repayment reference. Every refund is audited and emailed to the guest.

Cancellations

You can cancel a paid booking from its page. The dates are freed, the guest is emailed, the booking’s check-in and check-out tasks are dropped, and the refund follows the rule above. Declined, expired and cancelled bookings stay in the list for the record.

Booking statuses

Status	Meaning
Requested	The dates are held until the hold ends.
Confirmed	You said yes; the guest has until the payment deadline.
Paid	The stay and the deposit are paid.
Checked in	The guest has arrived (recorded in the operations app).
Checked out	The stay is over and the deposit decision is taken.
Declined, Expired, Cancelled	The dates are free again.

Blocking dates

Dates can be blocked by three things:

A booking blocks its own nights while it is requested, confirmed or paid.
An owner block is an owner’s own stay. You add it from the Calendar or the property’s blocked dates; an owner adds it in their owner space, within the property’s rules, and may remove it while no booking covers the dates.
A maintenance block comes from a scheduled job that blocked the property’s calendar (see Maintenance). It disappears when the job is cancelled.

Blocked nights never count as available in the Occupancy report.

Booking settings and rules

Settings, then Holiday homes, then Booking settings holds the company-wide defaults: the hold period in hours, the default payment window in hours, the currency, the default deposit, the default check-in and check-out times, the fee lines and the guest terms in each language.

Each holiday home has its own rules on its listing. Blank time and window fields fall back to Booking settings.

Rule	What it does
Season (available from and to)	Stays are accepted inside these dates only.
Closed arrival days	Weekdays on which a stay may not start.
Minimum and maximum nights	The length a stay may have. A seasonal price may raise the minimum for its dates.
Advance days	How far ahead a guest may book.
Notice hours	How close to arrival a guest may still book.
Check-in and check-out times	Shown to the guest after payment.
Deposit and payment window	Override the company defaults for this property.
Seasonal prices	A nightly price and minimum nights for a date range.
Blocked dates	Owner and maintenance blocks, listed inline.
Operations contact	The team member whose name and phone the guest sees.

The quote, the request and the website’s availability answer apply all of them. Nothing on this screen is a warning: a stay outside the rules is refused.

The guest terms

Open Settings > Holiday homes > Guest terms. Your terms are a list of sections, each a title and a text in English and Arabic. Your company starts with the sections of its region (in Abu Dhabi, every point DCT asks for); edit any of them, drag them into order, switch one off, or add your own. Preview shows the terms as the guest gets them.

Words in braces are filled from your Booking settings when the terms are shown, so the text never goes out of date:

Word	Filled with
`{cancellation}`	The cancellation policy: each line says how many days before arrival and what share of the stay is refunded, plus the no-show line.
`{charges}`	The extra charges: lost key, late check-out and the like, with their amounts.
`{company_details}`	The trade licence and tourism licence numbers, office address, contact phone and email.
`{check_in}`, `{check_out}`	The check-in and check-out times.
`{deposit}`	The default deposit, or “as shown in your booking confirmation” when each property sets its own.
`{contact}`, `{emergency}`	The guest contact and the emergency phone.
`{company}`	Your company’s name.

A section made of a list you have not filled in yet is left out, and the Guest terms screen says what is missing. The same terms show everywhere: on the stay page before paying, and in the confirmation after payment, in small print and as a PDF on your letterhead (your logo, name and colour).

Guest privacy

A booking holds the guest’s name, email and phone, encrypted and masked for staff who do not hold the property. It never stores an identity document or a card number; the guest’s identity is checked in person at check-in. After your company’s retention period, the guest’s details are removed and only the dates, the amounts and the counts remain.