Manage event logistics
In Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys, you can set up and manage vendors, logistics, and hotel reservations. You can register local hotels, record their contact information, allocate sets of rooms that are made available to attendees, and make reservations for the allocated rooms. Additionally, you can register airlines, car rentals, food caterers, and more.
Logistic features are mostly informational; they're not exposed directly to attendees. For example, you can enter hotel reservations in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights - Journeys based on communications that you have with attendees. You still need to contact the hotel to let them know about the reservations.
Open the Events work area and go to Logistics. The following entities are available: Event Vendors, Hotels, Hotel Room Allocations, and Hotel Room Reservations.
Event vendors
Event vendors usually represent companies or organizations that you partner with to help implement your events. Because event vendors are independent of a specific event, you can use them for multiple events.
Typically, you would create an event vendor so that you can associate it with other logistics. For example, a hotel group is a company that operates a chain of hotel properties under the same name. In this instance, the hotel chain represents the event vendor. Later, you could associate the individual hotels with the hotel group when managing the hotel allocation logistics for your event.
Note
You need to associate each event vendor with an account that's already in your system, so you need to create an account record for your event vendor before creating the vendor record.
Hotels
You can associate the hotel record with a hotel group (event vendor) if the property is part of a group. If defined, the hotel group and contact details show in the Hotels section. You can also view and add room allocations for the current hotel in this section.
Note
You should always specify the hotel's address as part of its record.
Hotel room allocations
Room allocations represent a block of rooms that the hotel agrees to make available during your event. Each room allocation record specifies the number of rooms that are allocated and the room types (single, double, or suite). Make sure that you associate each allocation with a hotel that's registered in your database. If you allocate several different room types in the same hotel, you need to set up a separate allocation for each type.
You can create a hotel room allocation record from the Events work area by going to Logistics > Hotel Room Allocations, or you can do so directly within an event record.
Hotel room reservations
After you create a hotel room allocation record for your event, you can allocate event attendees to the rooms by selecting the appropriate hotel room allocation record (as previously outlined) for your event. Then, select the Room reservations tab on the Hotel Room Allocation tab.
On this tab, you can reserve rooms for attendees from among your allocated rooms. You can fill out reservation details, such as the guest type (attendee, speaker, or event team member), the related event attendee for the event, and special requests for this specific hotel reservation.
Additionally, you can create a Hotel Room Reservation record from the Events work area by selecting Logistics > Hotel Room Reservations.
Note
Notice the format of the attendee record. It's a link to the event attendance record for this attendee.
For more information, see Manage attendee logistics and accommodation availability.