Dive Centre and Resort, One Front Desk: The Small Changes That Give Back an Hour a Day
Big features make headlines, but a front desk's day is mostly small tasks: the airport pickup nobody planned, the two families who want to trade bungalows, the agency transfer that pays for twelve bookings at once. The latest release of Gurita, our property-management system for dive resorts, liveaboards and dive centres, goes after exactly those tasks.
The dive centre sees what the resort has planned
Many dive centres sit on a resort's grounds, or work hand in hand with one down the beach. In Gurita, resort guests already appear on the dive centre's guest list automatically. Now the dive centre can also see the resort's transfers and activities on its own transfer and activity boards, each marked with the resort's name. The dive team knows which boat-dive guests arrive on the afternoon shuttle, and the resort's snorkel trip no longer clashes with the dive briefing because nobody saw it.
New plans made by the dive team stay the dive centre's, the resort keeps its own records, and staff only see the resorts they have access to. It is one switch per company, off until you want it.
A transfer inbox that never forgets a pickup
The transfer planner has been rebuilt around one idea: a booked transfer should never depend on someone remembering it. The new Inbox lists every airport or jetty transfer guests have booked that has not been planned yet, with a suggested pickup time worked out from the flight. Two clicks attach it to an existing run or create a new one. Beyond the Inbox, dispatchers switch between list, day, week and month views, see one lane per vehicle or per driver, combine several vehicles on one transfer, and get a warning about double bookings or full vehicles before they save.
Swap two rooms with one drag
Two guests want to trade rooms, but their stays overlap. Until now that meant moving one guest into a spare room, moving the second, then moving the first back, assuming a spare room existed. On Gurita's timeline calendar, staff can now drop one booking straight onto the other, and the two swap rooms. Each stay keeps its own dates. Before anything is saved, Gurita shows what the move does to the price and lets staff keep the old one.
Twelve payments in one click
When an agency settles a whole month with one transfer, someone used to type twelve payments. In the redesigned booking list, staff now tick the bookings and click Mark as paid. Each booking receives exactly what it still owed. Bookings that cannot be settled are skipped and listed with the reason.
The invoice goes out with the payment
When a payment arrives, a deposit is paid or a booking is paid in full, the confirmation e-mail can now carry the invoice as a PDF, so no one has to send it by hand afterwards. New-booking confirmations can attach the invoice too, and include a personal guest-form link for every traveller, so pre-arrival data starts coming in the day the booking is made.
Smarter guest forms
Pre-arrival forms now handle the questions operators really ask. A single rule can show a follow-up question when a guest ticks any of several boxes (allergy, diet, special request), and fields can depend on the booking's language or property, or on whether the guest is a diver or a snorkeler. Fewer forms to maintain, fewer irrelevant questions for guests.
None of these changes will make a headline on their own. Together they take a noticeable share of routine work off the front desk, and remove a few of the reasons staff keep a notebook next to the keyboard.
All of it is rolling out with Gurita 2.5 now. The full list of changes is on the Gurita blog, and you can explore the product at gurita.app.
Curious what this would look like for your operation? Talk to us. We answer every inquiry within 24 hours on business days.