This guide goes over the necessary steps to set up your hotel on Monta, so your guests can start charging! Whether you have purchased Monta directly, or you are being set up by a service provider, this guide will is a useful read for you.
Please note that the guide below assumes that you already have charge points installed, connected to power and internet.
1. Your Hotel in Monta
In the Monta universe, everything is tied by the central entity of Team. Your Hotel parking lot is represented as a Team in Monta. In the Team, you can:
- Add and connect your charge points
- Manage the charge pricing for your hotel guests
- Invite hotel employees to manage the access and pricing, troubleshoot and manage finances
- Manage a virtual Wallet, where all payments and transactions go
- Control the charge point access to hotel guests and other EV drivers
2. Fill out your hotel’s information
Begin by finding the Team and filling out your hotel’s company information in your Team settings. These company details will be used for charging receipts when your hotel guests charge on your charge points.
- If you are using a Trial account, then your account will already have a Team created.
- If you purchased Monta via a service provider, they should already have created a Team for you.
- If you need to create a Team, here is how you can do this.
3. Connect your charge point(s) to Monta
Now it’s time to add and connect your charge points to your Monta account. This means that the charge points will be operated by Monta and the revenue from guests charging will be collected in your Team’s Wallet. Here is a list, where you can see if your charge point model is supported by Monta.
The process to connect a charge point to Monta includes physical installation of the units, integration with Monta and pairing the charge points to your Monta account. We are now going to focus on the pairing process.
If you have a couple charge points, you can add them one at time to your Team. In this process, you need to consider the following:
Charge point access – If you want hotel guests to be able to charge straight away, select Public. If you want first create and test your set up, select Private.
Set charge point active – We recommend to switch the toggle on, so you can experience the full functionality of the charge point, like paid charging. If you want to test at first, you can leave the toggle off.
When you have added the charge point, click on Connect to pair it to your Monta account. Once the charge point shows as Active, it is time to move to the next step.
4. Set up charge access and pricing
As a hotel parking lot can get busy, we encourage you to carefully manage the charge point access you give to EV drivers.
We recommend setting the charge point to Public visibility, which will give access to EV drivers to charge. You can also show the charge point on the Monta map, which will make it visible for all Monta users. In order to keep it Public only for your hotel guests, you should keep the map toggle off.
For hotel guests to pay, you need to create a Public Price Group. This Price Group is applied per charge point and will apply, as long as it is set to Public visibility. You can set a price per kWh, to build on top of spot price, or per minute of charging. Monta offers a flexible pricing solution and you can read all about it here.
5. How can your guests charge
QR stickers
The easiest way to offer charging to guests is to purchase and connect QR stickers to the charge point. This will allow your hotel guests to access your charge point, even if they do not have a Monta account. They just need to scan the sticker and they will be able to regulate the kWh to charge, input a payment card and even their email, if they want to receive a receipt.
Monta Charge
When you set your charge points to Public visibility and showing them on the Monta map, EV drivers can find them in Monta Charge. Your guests can start charging via Monta Charge.
Charge key (RFID)
Charge keys (RFID)s are an easy way to offer charging to your guests. What you can do is connect a charge key in your Team Wallet, which can be used to start and stop the charging for free. The charge key can stay at reception, where an employee can hand it to guests to start charging. With this set up, the charging is free for the guest.
Another option could be to connect a charge key to each hotel room, so that the guest can use it during their stay. Before the guest checks out, you can filter and export their charges and add the charge to their bill.
We recommend connecting at least one charge key to the Team, that stays at reception, in case a guest is not able to start charging, for any reason.
7. Managing funds and payments
Monta uses it’s own Wallet system. Your hotel has a virtual Wallet, where all payments for charging will be collected. This is also where you pay for services provided by Monta or a solution provider every month, automatically.
You can withdraw your earnings at any point to your hotel’s bank account. If you need to cover any operational costs in Monta, you can also deposit money in your Team Wallet.
If you have Business or Enterprise Monta plan, and your company is VAT registered, you can request to be invoiced by Monta and handle your billing that way. When you are invoiced by Monta, you can export a csv file with all the Wallet transactions throughout the month.
You can export your charges or your Wallet transactions, in order to keep track of the charging activity and revenue from guests charging.
7. Test your setup
Amazing work! You are good to go now!
We recommend to test your setup, by performing a few charges on your charge points. Once you have seen how the system works, you can follow up with more advanced setups – we have included a few links bellow.
Always feel free to browse our Help Center for finding detailed how-to guides and troubleshooting advice.
If you need to contact Monta Support, you can create a ticket at support.monta.com and our Support Team will look into your enquiry as soon as possible!
8. Advanced section
Invite your hotel staff to charge
You can give charging access to your employees, by inviting them to the Team as Team Members. When the employees are invited to the Team, they automatically get charging access to all charge points. You can restrict this from their Member settings.
If you want your employees to pay for charging their car at the hotel parking lot, you have to set up a Member Price Group. Here is how they can start the charge from Monta Charge.
Appoint a Team Administrator
You will need an employee who has Admin access to the Team. You can enable them to edit the pricing, export transactions, troubleshoot the charge points, etc. As hotel guests may have questions and may require assistance with starting a charge, we recommend giving Admin rights to a person working at reception
Additional charging fees
You can set up additional fees when your guests are charging. These fees can be applied at the start of the charge, during or after the charge is done.
For example, if you want to encourage guests to free the parking spot with a charge point, so other can charge, you can apply an idle fee. This fee is applied when the charge is done and the EV driver does not unplug their car from the charge point, after a specified time.