How can guest information be overwritten?

It’s possible to unintentionally change guest information. How this can be prevented and resolved is explained in the article.

Guest ID’s

Every guest has a unique ID number. We use this number to find the guest no matter what the name or contact details are.
So even if you change information for that guest (because they’ve moved, or changed their name, etc), the number stays the same:

It’s also possible to set and change a guest number, but that’s only a number to make it easier to find your guests within your administration. The Guest ID number can’t be changed and is always unique.

Email address as a unique identifier for a guest

When a guest has an email address filled in, we automatically link the Guest ID number and the email address. And we update the guests information based on the information that was filled in with the last reservation.

Whenever a new reservation is made with an email address we already have connected to a Guest ID number, we add the new reservation to the excisting Guest ID. So all the reservations a guest has made can easily be found under the reservations tab of the Guest info. That way you know exactly which reservations the guest has had in the past.

Unintentional consequenses

If you fill in your own email address while making a backoffice reservation, this means that the reservation is linked to the same Guest ID that already exists for that email address:

So you might be adding unrelated reservations to the same Guest ID:

We then update the guests’ information, to match the latest information:

Which in turn also changes the Guest information for all the reservations connected to the same guest:

The same will happen if a guest makes a reservation with an email address and then makes another reservation with the same email address, but a different name. Both reservations will now have the contact info of the last reservation.

How can I fix this once it’s happened?

You’ll have to change the main traveller of the reservation. Luckily, unless someone has already edited it, the contact info on the invoice will still be the previous contact information:

And since the previous contact info was overwritten, you’ll have to click on the “search guest” button:

Because the guest you’re looking for doesn’t exist yet, you’ll have to add a new guest, and fill in the information of the previous reservation:

After that the reservation will have its own new main traveller, with a seperate Guest ID:

And the new guest will only have this one reservation attached to its email address/ID: