When you book a hotel with Pilot your reservation goes through different levels of confirmation.
Often these stages come with different confirmation codes with different uses. In this article, we’ll briefly explain the code you will see and which ones you need.
1. Confirmation of a successful booking:
Payment verified, hotel verified, inventory checked, and data processed.
Upon checkout, Pilot immediately connects with the hotel’s inventory and reserves the room on your behalf. The transaction is then processed and your room reservation is submitted into the hotels payment system for confirmation. Once this is completed, you will see the screen above. This means that you have successfully booked a room from the property.
At this point you’ll receive a Pilot Reference Code. This code is to provide a reference when speaking to a member of the Pilot team to quickly identify your booking. The Pilot support team can assist in modifying your reservation such as a name change, add in special requests such as late checkout, and assist in contacting the hotel on your behalf.
This reference code is only for Pilot’s use. The hotel will only issue a confirmation code once the reservation has been added into their system and assigned a room number.
2. Confirmation of the booking being placed into the hotel’s local system:
While a hotel confirmation code was previous the industry standard for communication, you do not necessarily need this code anymore.
When a booking is made through Pilot the communication is direct with the properties payment, reservation, and inventory systems. However, this is still considered a “third-party booking” since the reservation process came with professional assistance.
Often, hotels will treat third party bookings by making the reservation for Pilot on behalf of an individual, then update that reservation with the guests name closer to the check-in date.
Hotels often wait until within a week of check in time to add the reservation into their local system. When the guest details are transferred they will issue a hotel confirmation code.
This code is purely for transactional reference, indicating that the hotel has ingested the details and that the record can be accessed via this code if there is any system failure.
If you book on Pilot well in advance of checkout, any assistance on your booking should go through Pilot’s support team until a week prior to check-in. At that time the front desk should be ready to handle any support requests.
The hotel confirmation code serves as an extra resource for the hotel’s internal communications. You do not necessarily need this code when contacting the front desk of the hotel. All bookings are accessible by name, but only after the hotel has added it to their local system.
If you still wish to receive your hotel confirmation code, send a request to Pilot Support who can obtain the code once it is generated by the hotel. Please note that while Pilot will make every effort to expedite this process, we cannot override the hotel protocol and manually add it into their local system.