Q174: What's the difference between additional products and additional fields defined in 'reservation form layout'?

checkin24-7 supports two mechanisms of asking users about additional products or services they want add to their reservation.

The first is additional products (see more here) and the second is through additional fields of the reservation form (see more here). The differences are:

• Pricing: in case of additional products you can specify the price in product properties. This will be clearly listed next to each product. Additional reservation fields have no associated price, although you can use a custom pricing script or pricing manager to calculate the total price based on choices in the reservation form.
• Placement: additional products are listed on a second (separate) page of the reservation process. Additional reservation fields are listed on the initial reservation form (page).
• Recurring services / products: allowing users to select or unselect the product for every individual day of rental is only possible when using additional products. On the other hand, if your product can be added only for the entire duration of the rental and not for single days and the price depends on the duration, then you must use a reservation form item.
• Invoice: additional products are clearly listed on the invoice with their price and quantity.
• Additional products can have a number of images associated with them.
• Reports: additional products have their own report types which can be very important if you need daily information about the products chosen by all customers.
• There are two different tags you can use in your emails to the customers: $(additional_products_url) and $(modify_reservation_data_url). Both will let the end customer modify their original choice BUT in case of additional products you can specify the exact time before reservation when a product can still be selected.