Revolution Manager - New Look

The first thing you will notice is that Revolution Manager has a new look! The color scheme has changed, and the layout is now wider, giving you more space to administer your Revolution configuration.

Revolution Manager - Now Speedier!

For release 1.7, we focused heavily on improving Manager’s performance. You can now load and edit your information with greater speed and ease. We will be continually optimizing Manager’s performance, but we’ve made a huge leap forward with this Release.

Discounts and Rate Codes Report

In Manager, you can view a report of reservations that were made using special rate codes and discount codes.

Find it here: Reports » Other Reports » Discount Report

Module Enhancements

Vehicle Sales Program

You can now choose “call for pricing” instead of setting a dollar value for each vehicle.

Find it here: Revolution » Modules » Vehicle Sales

Corporate Program

You can now edit the email to which your corporate applications are delivered.

Find it here: Revolution » Modules » Corporate Program

Affiliate Program

You can now customize the service agreements that your affiliates agree to when they enroll in your affiliate program.

Find it here: Revolution » Modules » Affiliate Program

Reservation Phone Number

You can now create a phone number exclusively for your reservation confirmation email (a call center #, for example). This will replace your location and company default phone numbers.

Learn By Example in Manager

Revolution™ Manager is a large administration system, with many powerful features to help you configure Revolution™ to your business’s requirements. You can now learn by example, with a one-click option to view our demo company “Basic Example Agency”.

In Manager, you will see a link in the sidebar “View a Demo Company”. Click on the arrow icon, and you will be taken to the same page as you are currently editing, but with the demo company’s data. You can navigate through the demo company, preview their Revolution pages, view reservation reports, etc. When you want to switch back, simply click on “Return to Your Account”.

Find it: Manager » [sidebar]

Daily or Weekly Rate Instead of “Rental Rate”

Revolution now allows you to show your renters the Daily or Weekly rate on the rate search results, instead of the calculated Rental Rate. Revolution chooses the largest rental period, and will display this to the renter (e.g. a 9 day rental will show Weekly, whereas a 2 day rental will show Daily).

Find it: Manager » Revolution » Rental Center » Rental Center Options » Rate Options

Reservation Reports and Notifications

Reservation requests now have a unique subject line: REQUEST FOR RESERVATION - REPLY IS REQUIRED to differentiate them from regular reservations.

The reservation report in Manager now paginates your reservations, and holds the correct page after canceling or replying to the renter. You can also now search from reservations over any date range (ignoring the calendar filters)

Find it: Manager » Reports » Reservations

Support Phone Call Report

If you are subscribed to our telephone support service, you can view you phone call log in Manager.

Find it: Manager » Support » Phone Calls

Revolution™ and Email Marketing from Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the web’s leading email marketing solution, enabling you to send high-impact e-newsletters to your customer list. Revolution™ now integrates with Constant Contact, making your mailing list maintenance completely automatic:

• Export your Revolution™ customer list, for easy import into Constant Contact
• New emails addresses from Revolution™ customers are imported nightly to your Constant Contact account
• Send e-newsletters to your customer list through Constant Contact’s secure and powerful admin panel

If you use Revolution™ on your website, and are interested in activating the Constant Contact Module, contact our support department.

Have Your Customers Read Your Rental Policies?

Misunderstandings at the rental counter are frustrating for everyone. Now you can ask your customers to read your rental policies before they submit their reservation. If you enable this option, on the renter information form, the following message will appear

“I have read, understand and agree to the Rental Policies”

with a checkbox, and a direct link to your rental policies page (in a popup, so they don’t navigate away from the reservation). The renter is required to check-off this field in order to submit their reservation.

Find it: Manager » Rental Center » Rental Center Options » Messages

Kayak Program: Free Clicks for your Clickbank

If you are part of our Kayak Program, you will now receive 3 free clicks for every 100 purchased. This allows you to periodically test your Kayak listings, and click-thru to your landing pages without incurring the click cost.

Find it: Manager » Network » Kayak Program

Updates for WebLink Clients

There are a couple of notable enhancements available for WebLink clients.

Rental Length Restrictions and Pickup Time Margin

Create minimum and maximum rental length restrictions for selected vehicles. Renters will be informed of the restriction when they submit their itinerary, so they understand why a rate quote is not being returned.

Find it: Manager » Rental Center » Rental Length Restrictions

You can also now set a minimum pickup time margin; the length of time the renter must book in advance. If the renter’s pickup time is under this cut-off, they will be prompted to call your rental location for rates and availability.

Find it: Manager » Rental Center » Rental Center Options » Itinerary Options

Policy Conditions

Rental policies can now be given location and vehicle conditions. When after the renter has chosen a their rate quote, only the policies matching these conditions will display.

Find it: Manager » Rental Policies

ExpressITech’s Application Development Division is a small, innovative team of developers, working together to build powerful and usable reservation applications for the rental industry. We are looking for a Junior Developer to join our team, who is passionate about working in the LAMP stack and keen to develop in a distributed architecture.

The people of ExpressITech work virtually: we communicate continuously through our IRC channels, phone, email and the occasional social meet-up. Fluency in written and spoken English is a must for this environment. You can work from home or wherever you feel most productive, as long as you get to job done like a superstar, and have a good time doing it! Prefer VIM over an IDE? Still hanging onto Windows 2000? No problem! Your development environment is your choice, as long as your work product meets our expectations.

Being a small company, each position comes with considerable responsibility and challenge. Even as a Junior Developer, your ideas are valued, and your contributions will turn into marketable products in a short development cycle.

ExpressITech has been profitable for 8 years. We have a large and expanding client base, and a bright future. As an employee, you can expect stability, flexibility and challenge; these are immeasurable qualities of any position. You will also receive benefits after 3 months of fulltime employment. Our company has a very high employee retention rate. We are looking for an individual who will grow with our company.

If you like what you hear so far, check your skills against our requirements.

Do these statements describe you?

• You are a creative, quality conscious, and responsible developer
• You are highly motivated and able to focus in an independent, remote office environment
• You are a keen communicator, contributing ideas and asking questions
• You are a fearless multi-tasker, with superior time management capabilities
• You take pride in your work, and will see each task through from conception to finalization
• You are excellent at troubleshooting and are able to problem solve with little supervision
• You are fluent in conversational and written English

Do you possess the following qualifications?

• 2+ years of active PHP development, Object Oriented is a must
• 2+ years of SQL development (MySQL is DBMS of choice)
• Comfortable working in Linux from command line
• Javascript, AJAX
• XHTML
• Cascarding Stylesheets (CSS)

(Also a plus …)

• Subversion
• Web service protocols (SOAP, REST, etc)
• SimpleTest

If the answer if yes, we’d like to hear from you. Send your resume to Rike Wedding.

Seasonal Hours of Operation

Do your locations’ hours of operation fluctuate from winter to summer? In Revolution Manager, you can create multiple hours of operation for each location, and specify date ranges for each. When a renter has submitted their itinerary, Revolution will first try to find a set of hours that matches their pickup date. If there are no special seasonal hours, it will use your “Base Hours”.

Drop-off hours can also be made date specific.

The Locations Module will show your current hours of operation (based on today’s date) and will also look forward to the next set of hours in the future, and display those to the renter.

Find it here in Manager: Revolution > Hours of Operation

Manager Site Map

If you find yourself lost in Manager’s extensive configuration menu, you can now turn to the “Site Map”, found in the top-right of the navigation menu. The Site Map will show you your current page, as well as previous pages that you have visited recently.

Rate Code Date Range Spans

Need to know what rate codes will apply on a particular pickup date? See you seasonal rate codes at a glance in Manager’s Rate Code editor. A colored graph is displayed showing each date range and the rate code it relates to.

Find it here in Manager: Revolution > Rental Center > Rates Admin > Rate Codes

View Modified Reservation History

Now in Manager, while viewing a reservation, you can see if the reservation was modified from a previous reservation, or whether it has since been modified. The reservation view panel now contains a “View Modification” link that will click through to the modification details.

Find it here in Manager: Reports > Reservations

Renter Vehicle Preference

In previous versions of Revolution, when the renter choose a vehicle preference, they were shown a detailed quote for that vehicle only. In Manager, you can now choose to show the renter other vehicle options, but “highlight” their preferred vehicle at the top of the search results.

Find it here in Manager: Revolution > Rental Center > Rental Center Options > Rate Quotes

Location Module Enhancements

Now renters can see all hour locations at a glance on a dynamic Google map, and search for the location nearest to them. Click here to see an example.

When a Week is not a Week

Instead of the default time unit for each rental period (per week = 7 days) you can now override this setting, and set the number of days and hours for each rental period’s time unit. Recommended for advanced users only…!

Find it here in Manager: Revolution > Rental Center > Rates Admin > Rental Periods

Not using Manager yet? It’s time to switch. You can easily set up your Manager account through the CRX Administrative Workstation.

"Revolution has grown organically from real-world suggestions from independent rental operators. We’re proud to offer it to other rental industries."

It’s a common saying among Internet advocates that the web has “leveled the playing field.”

ExpressITech helps small agencies zoom ahead.

In theory, it works this way: thanks to search engines like Google, information has been democratized. The big companies in every industry are no longer guaranteed preferential treatment over the smaller players. Every website can be found, and every service will find their audience eventually.

In reality, recent developments in the online marketplace paint a much different picture. Just ask Jesse Hubbard, owner of Rugged Rentals in Salt Lake City. After 15 years in the car rental industry, he knows the difficulty of getting his website and inventory to be noticed on the web.

“It’s difficult to compete with the big franchises,” says Jesse. “They have huge budgets to guarantee visitors to their websites.”

In addition to marketing his website, Jesse must compete with the custom reservation systems that cost tens of thousands of dollars to build from scratch.

Big players like Budget, Avis, Enterprise and Hertz, with their thousands of franchises, can afford that sort of price tag. Jesse is faced with developing his own system for his specific market, mostly SUVs, vans and pick-ups that travel through the tough country around Salt Lake City, Utah.

This scenario is familiar to Stanley Levy, who faced exactly the same dilemma over 10 years earlier. As the owner of his own independent car rental agency, he wanted to break out of the mold, and gain greater exposure to a broad client base. At the time, there was no efficient way in which this elusive clientèle could be accessed on the Internet.

How could Stan, and other independent rental operators like him, gain wide-spread representation on the web? And how could he make it easier for prospective renters to access rental information, and ultimately make a reservation?

Stan’s answer was to create Car Rental Express.com, a forerunner in the online reservation business in Y2000.

The assembly of a wide range of network associates, all of whom offered their rental inventory online at the Car Rental Express.com website created a highly profitable, independent rental market that previously did not exist. Suddenly, any independent rental agency owner could add online reservations and tap into the wide reach of the Internet at a fraction of the cost.

Jesse knows how the quality of reservation system is vital. Rugged Rentals relies on Car Rental Express’s custom Revolution reservation system to make sure his vehicles are accurately represented online.

All seven of their vehicle categories can be shown on their website with photos of the “real” thing. Renters are assured that the vehicle they are shown is exactly the one they are renting, not just one that is similar (a common practice on larger agency websites).

“Our customers complement us on how easy it is to reserve a vehicle with us. In their words they say the search (function) on the main page was quick and that completing the reservation was slick, concise, and that the process works well,” says Jesse. “For me that means my customers come back to us.”

Now Car Rental Express is entering a new evolutionary phase.

The company has been relaunched as ExpressITech.com, in order to offer their reservation technology as a standalone application. Officially dubbed “Revolution” the technology will be available to all industries that need a effective online solution for reservations, including hotels, boats, and equipment rentals.

“At ExpressITech, our mantra is to serve both the rental company and the renter,” says Stanley Levy, reflecting on the road taken since he founded the company. “Revolution has grown organically from real-world suggestions from independent rental operators. We’re proud to offer it to other rental industries.”

About ExpressITech.com:

ExpressITech.com is a private company dedicated to provided innovation for the online reservation industry.

If these skills describe you:

• You are a creative, quality conscious, and responsible developer
• You are extremely motivated and able to focus in an independent, remote office environment
• You are a keen communicator, contributing ideas and asking questions
• You are able to see a task through its lifecycle from conception to production
• You are a fearless multi-tasker, with superior time management capabilities
• You are excellent at troubleshooting and are able to problem solve with little supervision
• You have a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and/or related experience

And you possess the following qualifications …

• 3+ years of active PHP development
• MYSQL
• LAMP architecture
• Javascript
• XHTML

(Also a plus …)

• Linux experience
• CVS or SVN
• SOAP, web service architectures
• worked with SimpleTest

Send us your resume along with your answers to the following questionnaire:

http://www.expressitech.com/jobs/software-developer-questionairre.doc

Combined Rates Administration: Seasonal and Rates Matrix

Does your company need the flexibility of tailoring some rates for a competitive market, while other rates can remain constant over longer periods of time? It’s now possible to administer speciifc rate codes under the Rates Matrix, which varies by calendar day, yet have the other rate codes as Seasonal Rates.

You must be using Revolution Manager to take advantage of this new feature. On the rate code administration page, choose which rate codes you want to administer under each management tool. If you are not using Manager yet, contact us and we will setup up your account.

Maps and Directions in the Locations Module

The Locations module now includes a location overview map, and interacting driving directions to each location (provided by Google™ maps). All Revolution Core and Pro clients that use the locations module will see this addition to their websites in the upcoming weeks.

Reserve a Vehicle or Request More Information

In Manager and the Workstation, you have had the option to allow vehicles to be reserved, or for the renter to request for information, or both.

Now on the detailed rate quote page, the renter will see either/or/both buttons, and continue to submit their reservation or inquiry.

Participating car rental agencies will be listed on Kayak.com and Sidestep.com’s search results.

Read about our Kayak Program and it’s advantages.

According to Kayak, the conversion rate from clickthru to reservation is between 10% - 12%. The cost of the program starts at $2.25 per clickthru, and there are no further charges. You pay only for the clicks to your website, or standard reservation page (if you do not use Revolution on your website). You receive 100% of the revenue from all Kayak sourced reservations.

If you sign up before Monday July 14th, we will credit your click bank with 25 free clickthrus with a minimum purchase of 25 clicks.

Click here to get started.

The site is the culmination of many years of disparate knowledge being accessed from different industry professionals and combined to inaugurate an advanced level of rental industry information and solutions. The rental knowledge base for ExpressITech is from the car rental industry.

Renting is defined as providing a service or an article for a definite or indefinite time period in exchange for payment. The rental industry prospers in most economic situations, allowing expansion in good times and replacing capital outlays in slower periods. To optimize rentals, the Internet needs to be used in its entirety to market and secure reservations. Prospective renters are best served with complete information, and a user-friendly interactive reservation system. ExpressITech’s applications actualize these goals, and we’re continually working to improve our systems to bring you more online business.

At ExpressITech it is our mantra to serve both the rental company and the renter. Our years of experience jointly in bricks & mortar and online rentals provide you with an exceptional outlook on the rental industry.

Let us supply your company with Internet products that will result in a better top line.