Holiday homes

The Holiday homes section holds two screens: Calendar and Bookings. Your website asks for a stay, the request holds the dates, you confirm or decline it, 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 home 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 home.

Each stay is a bar coloured by its status. Blocked dates show in grey.
Filter by one home, or by the homes of one operations contact.
Click a bar to open the booking.
Select empty days on a row to block them.

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

Booking requests from the website

Your website sends a request for a home, 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). Two requests can never hold the same nights of the same home: the second one is refused.

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 home’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 home’s payment window, or the company default. The guest is emailed a link to their stay page with that deadline.
Decline frees the dates and emails the guest.

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.

Quotes and fees

A night costs the home’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 home’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 home’s operations contact.

Once your company sets up its guest space (Settings, then Embeddings), the stay links you already sent lead there instead. 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. The stay and the deposit are two lines, in your currency.	Nothing. The booking turns Paid once Stripe confirms the account, the booking, the amount and the currency.
Bank transfer	Follows the bank payment link shown on the stay 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 home’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.

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 Stripe’s own status; 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 home’s blocked dates; an owner adds it in their owner space, within the home’s rules, and may remove it while no booking covers the dates.
A maintenance block comes from a scheduled job that blocked the home’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 home.
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.

Guest privacy

A booking holds the guest’s name, email and phone, encrypted and masked for staff who do not hold the home. 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.