Newsletter 27/8/2008

More improvements going LIVE today

The payment page (the fourth page of the booking process) is now fully integrated.  All pages show 1-4 pages in the navigation.  The booking is no longer TENTATIVE after page 3, and no booking is recorded until page 4 is completed.  If “pay later’ is selected on page 4, an email is sent with a TENTATIVE status (the same email that was previously sent after page 3).  If “Pay online” or “pay deposit” are selected then the email is sent after the Paypal transaction, with “CONFIRMED” or “TENTATIVE” depending on the payment success and your rules for this.  This change eliminates the sometimes misleading “TENTATIVE” email which was sent before the Paypal transaction, and also includes details of any payment that was made – removing confusion for the customer.

When you get reports of booking data (these are the reports that go into a spreadsheet), you can now select the data by booking status, exactly as you do when managing a booking.  We have also put some help text on that page so you can work out which report to use.  Take a look at this page, and the suggested uses of the reports, ranging from reporting room occupancy, gross takings and lists of email addresses.  Note that unlike the other reports, Report 0 “arrivals and departures” always shows CONFIRMED and TENTATIVE bookings and doesn’t change when you select from the status values.

You can now specify a Paypal surcharge, separately from the existing credit card surcharge, and each will be applied as appropriate.  If accepting a deposit and a later final payment, the surcharges are applied to each payment separately.

We have generalised the 2/5/7 rule to be more flexible.  You can now specify (per season) which nights can be the first or last night of a booking.  This caters for rules like “bookings that include Friday must also include Saturday and vice versa”, etc.  Look for this under “start/finish control”.

When members look up their bookings (if they are logged in) they see a list of all their bookings.  There is now a tick-box which restricts the list to this year and later bookings.  This is ticked by default – to see earlier years’ bookings the member unticks the box.    When viewing their list of bookings, they now have two choices for each booking: display guest details, or link to the page which allows cancellation or payment for that booking.  This is an easier way for members to cancel or pay for a booking than before, where they needed to type in the booking ID and contact name.

Coming Soon

Possibly included in today’s changes, or else later this week, the Configuration menu will include two fields for the names of your room types.  You can change from “En-suite” and “Shared Facility” to any names that are more appropriate and these will be used throughout the site and in emails.

The home page will show a different colour and an appropriate mouse-over text for periods when the lodge is unavailable.  Currently these periods show as “CONFIRMED” with no mouseover text.  We are thinking of using a yellow colour – any other suggestions?  At a future date, not this year probably, we want to give you a colour pallete which you can choose from for all the colours, but for now they have to be fixed.