Technical Support Policy
Last updated: Jan 15, 2025
Customer Satisfaction is one of Lighthouse’s highest priorities. Our Customer Satisfaction score has been at or above 95% for many years. Our response time to requests for help via chat are between 2 and 3 minutes, often faster. As we grow, we find expectation management is also critical to ensuring continued Customer Satisfaction. The following technical support policy is intended to ensure you understand the conditions under which we provide you and your team with technical support.
Lighthouse will continually update and enhance all products with the following:
Application updates, fixes, security alerts and critical patch updates
Tax, legal and regulatory updates (availability may vary by country and/or program)
Integrations with most new third-party products/versions (availability may vary by program)
Integrations enabled, through direct agreement with you, to your products such as your PMS
Major product and technology releases, if and when made available at Lighthouse’s discretion, which may include general maintenance updates, selected functionality releases and documentation updates
Additionally, Lighthouse will provide the following Customer Care services:
Assistance with chat requests 24 hours per day, 6 days a week
Access to product and new feature tours and searchable library of help articles
Third party vendor-specific support terms
You must remain in a supported environment – including applications and platforms – to receive technical support. If a vendor retires support for its product, you may be required to upgrade to a current certified and supported product, application, hardware platform, framework, database, and/or operating system configuration to continue receiving technical support services from Lighthouse.
Additionally you must maintain all third-party integrations and connectivity required to deliver your data to Lighthouse. This includes third-party APIs which can be subject to access modifications and changes or technical restrictions that can impact or stop the continued extraction of data.
For clarity, this means that Lighthouse can not help where issues are caused by third party products in your environment. These may include, but are not limited to, network errors, hardware faults or reboots, report failures, access changes, scheduled outages, minor data discrepancies caused by ingestion of both summary and reservation level PMS data, failure to follow vendor best practices*, and in rare circumstances unusual third party (e.g. PMS) configurations or use cases requiring further custom development by Lighthouse. Similarly, when you make changes to your non Lighthouse systems, such as data updates or other structural changes** to your PMS for which Lighthouse has provided the integration, this may cause the integration to break and the flow of some or all data necessary to the continuous operation of the Lighthouse system to fail. Where possible, when issues are found to be caused by third party vendors, Lighthouse will make its best efforts to suggest workarounds or alternate configurations. Likewise, when issues are found to be caused by changes you have made, Lighthouse will make its best efforts to suggest workarounds and update the integration to accommodate your changes where commercially reasonable. Whenever possible, please notify Lighthouse of planned data updates or other structural or changes in advance so both parties can plan and set expectations.
*Not Following Third Party Best Practice Examples:
Lighthouse Business Intelligence receives daily transactional data at an individual reservation level from the Opera database. If reservations are deleted no further transaction or activity is recorded against them. As a result, Revenue Insight will not receive an update about the deleted reservations, therefore they will permanently remain in a deducted status in our system and be included in our figures. This means we will show a discrepancy between our data and Opera reports, such as the History & Forecast, as this will no longer include the room nights and revenue of the Deleted reservation. Requests to “fix” this issue caused by you or your users will not be accepted. We advise hotel users to adhere to the standard Opera PMS procedures of using the cancellation functionality to ensure data integrity and accuracy are maintained.
You transition to a new PMS without notifying Lighthouse until after the transition is complete. In some cases, we will be unable to make a transition to the new system without losing the historical data from the prior system. An initial report pull from the outgoing system is recommended to prevent data loss.
You utilize a PMS for timeshare and hotel units can cause issues with the way data is displayed and are typically unable to exclude specific inventory types (room codes).
**Data updates or other structural or changes examples
You update your Marriott room types and do not inform Lighthouse, this will result in inaccurate data within Lighthouse Business Intelligence because the reporting needs to be reconfigured
You change your server email domain and don’t inform Lighthouse, this will result in failure to process data
You change the file type within the report scheduler to a file Lighthouse does not integrate with, this will result in failure to process data
You add special characters to a reservation, this will result in failure to process data
You change the date range on the Lighthouse reporting in the PMS and do not inform Lighthouse, this may result in failure to process data
You update the database your data pulls from, causing changes to your reporting, this will result in failure to process
You delete the Lighthouse scheduled reports from the PMS, this will result in failure to process
You update the forecast parameters within your RMS and do not inform Lighthouse, this will result in failure to process
You add yourself to the distribution list of Lighthouse scheduled reports and respond with notes for your team, this will result in Lighthouse Business Intelligence Pipeline errors
Data Validation (during implementation and production)
The Lighthouse Business Intelligence tool is a workflow automation tool designed to create efficiencies, it is not meant to mirror the PMS. Thus while Lighthouse BI is designed for accuracy, data variances between the PMS and Lighthouse Business Intelligence of up to 5% may occur. Background:
Data accuracy means the data matches the PMS data (or equivalent source) at the time of extraction. A data variance is a discrepancy between the Lighthouse Business Intelligence data and the data in the PMS at time of extraction.
Data variances related to changes in the PMS after extraction (refunds, adjustments, redemption revenue) are Lighthouse Business Intelligence expected variances. Expected variances are not an error and will not be accepted as a support issue.
Common causes of expected variances:
Lighthouse aggregates data. Aggregation logic may not align with every PMS report.
ADR
BI ADR is a calculated value.
BI ADR does not come directly from PMS reporting.
BI ADR Rooms/Revenue values are rounded.
Rooms and Revenue may have exclusions that cause a variance between some PMS reports such as PM room nights or deleted reservations.
Revenue adjustments (Fire alarm went off in middle of night, property gave $50 refund for good will) may not be included within the Lighthouse platform or exports.
If the PMS updates more frequently than Lighthouse PMS data syncs, there may be a variance.