Newsletter 15/3/2011

Another release today, with some more new features:

• When you edit and save anything in the site config, e.g.  email formats, the save is now faster and you don’t lose your place on the page (AJAX for those technical people who like to know…)
• An additional email to guests and members after their visit.  You set the number of days after the visit ends, and the email is sent automatically.  Use it to invite feedback or to link to a survey, for example.

• Booking reports have an additional option, to only report non-member bookings with outstanding amounts.  The reason this option doesn’t apply to members is that payments aren’t allocated to individual bookings when members pay their balance in full.  Payments for guest bookings however are always linked to a specific booking.  Motivation for this option is to allow you to find outstanding guest bookings, in case you are not using TENTATIVE and CONFIRMED as equivalent markers.  This gives you some flexibility to set bookings as CONFIRMED and still know that the booking is not paid in full.
• Some other minor bugs have been fixed, as reported previously, i.e.  if you reported the bug you will have already received an email saying it is fixed in the next release.

Did you realise?

If members enter the names of their children or partner via “Manage account” -> “View my details”, then when making bookings, typing part of the surname will bring up an auto-suggest when filling the names of guests on page two.    Just a little thing to make life a bit easier.

Coming soon

Our final major enhancements for this year will be:

• a waiting list system.  If you switch it on, cancellations are put into a pending state so that you can offer the room(s) to somebody on a waiting list.  Once that is accepted you can complete the cancellation and make the new booking.  In the interim, the room appears to members and guests to be booked but the mouseover seen by members says “pending waitlist”.
• An option to automatically generate a credit for a member on cancellation of a booking.  You will be able to set the number of days and the amount of credit to two levels – if the booking as closer than the smaller of these two settings, then no credit will be given.  Only available to members.  Useful if a member is cancelling and rebooking at the same time – the credit is available to them when they rebook.