KeepMeBooked Blog

Find your own country more easily, and spot the date more easily

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Tue, 01 May 2012 13:01:00 +0000

Two little changes went live this morning.

1. Your own country now appears at the top of the country list when you are entering a guest's address. Same with online bookings: guests will see your own country at the top of the list, along with USA and UK, then the full list of other countries:

This should make it quicker for many of your guests (and for you) to find the right country.

2. Dates repeated every 10 rows on long calendars
If you have more than about 20 rooms, you might find the dates across the top are not visible as you scroll down (depending how big your monitor is). So that you don't have to keep scrolling up to check the date, we now repeat the date every 10 rows:

********* Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.

More languages available

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:50:00 +0000

We've just put live several new languages.

Full list of languages which you can use to take online bookings from guests is now as follows:

Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Español (Spanish)
Deutsch (German)
Português (Portuguese)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Svenska (Swedish)
Íslenska (Icelandic)
Русский (Russian)

Click here for instructions on how to setup your account to handle bookings in other languages

*********
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.

Improved pricing types for extras

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 09:19:00 +0000

We've released some improvements to how extras can be priced.

1. New 'per day' price type
This works exactly the same as 'per night', except we describe it as 'per day' instead. This means that things like bike hire or surf lessons (which generally happen during the day) make more sense:

2. More control over per person extras
Previously, if an extra was priced per person per night (or week), we'd automatically calculate the total based on all nights and all guests on that booking. Now we show you a little box for nights and guests, so if only one guest needs this extra, or it only applies to some of the nights of the booking, you can fine-tune accordingly.

For example, maybe you offer a dinner package which guests can select. But if they don't want the dinner package every night, you can just enter the number of nights they do want it:

Guests booking online can do this too. By default, when they check the extra it'll apply to all nights and all guests, but if they want to over-ride that they can:

Or if only one guest needs surf lessons, then the guest (or you) can adjust the number of guests for that extra:

3. New price type of 'variable'
There is also a new price type of 'variable' which allows you to type in any amount for that extra. This is useful for drinks or food bills, where the amount could be anything. You have always been able to record those types of items as adjustments, but having them as extras makes it easier for you to report on how much revenue you got from food, how much from drink, etc. (rather than having everything lumped together as general adjustments)

4. Limit extras to some rooms only
Sometimes an extra is only available with a certain room. You can now set this up if you need to. Guests booking online will then only see that extra if they have booked the corresponding room. And you can only add it to a booking if the booking is for that room.

*********
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.

Evacuation report and printer-friendly dashboard

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 11:11:00 +0000

We've added two new buttons to the dashboard:

Print dashboard generates a PDF version of the dashboard which will is more easily printable than the on-screen dashboard

Print guest list generates a PDF list of guests currently staying, and highlights those guests due to arrive or leave today. In some countries, it is a legal requirement to be able to produce an up-to-date list of guests in the event of an emergency, and this report makes it easy to comply with that.

Sales tax percentage to 3 decimal places

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:25:00 +0000

Users in Minnesota, and other jurisdictions with extremely precise sales tax percentages (in MN, state sales tax is 6.875%), will be pleased that you can now store sales tax % in KeepMeBooked to three decimal places:

__________
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.

New feature: registration card

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:18:00 +0000

Lots of you had been using the booking invoice as a registration card for guests to sign on arrival. We just released a new feature which lets you print a proper registration card for each booking. You'll see a new button on the Dashboard which lets you print registration cards for all upcoming arrivals:

And also on the booking details screen:

Either button will produce a simple printable registration form, like this:

_____________________
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.

New email placeholders: booking number, departure date and internal room name

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:24:00 +0000

We've added three new placeholders this morning, to give you more control over your automated email content:

[booking_id]: the booking reference number for the booking
[departure_date]: guest's departure date (being the day after the final night of their stay)
[internal_room_name]: where you have assigned your own physical room name, this shows the specific name on the email (rather than just the room type)

Need more information? Learn how automated emails work.

********* Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.

Take online bookings from Daily Deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:33:00 +0000

We've just put live a new function to allow you to manage online bookings from Daily Deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial.

These sites can generate a huge volume of bookings for their partners, and it can be overwhelming to handle those by telephone.

We've been working closely with Groupon in the UK, for the past few months, to develop functionality within KeepMeBooked to allow you to easily configure a deal and to validate bookings coming in for that deal.

With this new function, you can:

- Upload voucher codes
- Set the validity period for the deal, and any exclusion dates
- Set the max number of rooms on each day that you wish to allow to be booked using this deal
- Have a "multi-deal" where different vouchers offer different lengths of stay, or are for different numbers of guests (some guests may have bought a 2-night voucher, others a 3-night voucher, and you can configure both those in the same deal)
- Set supplements for certain rooms

You'll find it all under Settings > Daily Deals, and full step-by-step instructions are on the forum here.

*********
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.

Customisable 'additional comments' field

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:59:00 +0000

Useful little change released this morning: you can now use your own label for the 'additional comments' box which appears on the last page of the widget. So if you want your guest to enter their estimated arrival time, or a flight number, or any other specific information, you can label the box accordlingly.

If I want to ask for 'Flight number', for example, then I'll put that as my custom label under Settings > Online Bookings > Customize:

Then on the last page of that widget, guests will see a box labelled 'Flight number':

Whatever they type there will be recorded as a note in their booking.

*********
Take online bookings for your B&B or guesthouse using KeepMeBooked. Get your free trial here.

Two new payment gateways: MoneyBookers and SecureHosting UPG

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:55:00 +0000

We've put two new payment gateway integrations live this morning: Moneybookers and SecureHosting UPG. (So we now provide support for PayPal Website Payments Standard, PayPal Website Payments Pro, Authorize.net (USA only), SagePay (UK only), Moneybookers and SecureHosting UPG.)

Moneybookers has very wide global coverage, so is particularly good for our users who are based in countries where our other gateways don't operate. They also have a very compact payment page which can stay in your widget iframe, so the guest doesn't have to leave your website to make their payment. PayPal Pro has this option too, but with other gateways the guest leaves your website to make payment, then returns back afterwards. Keeping the payment page within the widget iframe offers a smoother experience for your guest. (The payment page is still hosted, and secured, by the gateway. But it appears within the iframe on your website, so the guest's experience is that they stay on your website, even though they are typing their card number onto a page on the gateway's site.)

SecureHosting UPG is good if you want to see the actual card number the guest used to make a payment, as you'll find this within SecureHosting's interface. This is useful if you want to charge further amounts to the guest without needing to ask them again for their card number.

Keep payment page within widget iframe

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 13:27:00 +0000

We've just released support for a useful little feature in PayPal's Pro gateway ("PayPal Website Payments Pro") which allows you to keep PayPal's payment page within the iframe on your website. This provides for a smoother experience for the guest, everything can take place within your website (even though the actual card details are still entered by the guest directly onto PayPal's servers), rather than having the payment stage take place on a new page altogether.

If you have a PayPal Website Payments Pro account, check the box "Keep payment page within iframe" under Settings > Online Bookings > Require payment with booking:

Then your guests will see a compact payment page, which will stay within the widget iframe, like this:

The smallest size which will accommodate the payment page (without scrolling) is 540 wide by 570 wide, so you need to use a custom-sized widget to fit even this small PayPal payment page (our default widget size is smaller, at 300x370 pixels). To set the size for your widget go to Settings > Online Bookings > Customize.

(This only works with PayPal Website Payments Pro, not Website Payments Standard. With Standard, the
guest is always sent out of your website to a whole new page to enter their card details).

Deactivate (rather than delete) old rooms

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:22:00 +0000

You can now deactivate rooms, rather than having to delete them completely. If you deactivate a room, it won't count towards your rooms for subscription purposes, you won't see it on your calendar, and guests won't see it when booking online. But old bookings in that room will still show the room name when you view the booking details screen.

And you can reactivate a room later if you need to.

Here's how it works ... on the room you want to deactivate, click 'Delete', and click OK when prompted.

If there are bookings associated with that room, it will be deactivated, rather than deleted. You'll see a new link at the top of the page to view inactive rooms:

Click there, and you'll see all your deactivated rooms and you can reactivate them if you need to:

This makes life much easier if your inventory changes from time to time, if you take on new units and drop others. You can still keep a full history of which bookings were in which rooms, but you only need to pay for (and see on your calendar), your active units.

Merry Christmas to all our users!

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:34:00 +0000

Merry Christmas to all our users from everyone on the KeepMeBooked team.

We hope you have a lovely Christmas and a prosperous 2012!

Unexpected intermittent outages

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 21:26:00 +0000

We appear to be suffering some intermittent outages at the moment (around 9pm GMT / 4pm EST). We are investigating.

Update @ 9:32pm GMT: Service seems now to be performing normally, but we will continue to monitor closely.

New widget look-and-feel, plus option to show availability grid in widget

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:02:00 +0000

We've released more booking widget options this morning. If you go to Settings > Online Bookings > Customize, you'll now see a choice of widget types and widget styles:

Widget Styles:

Default
This is the neutrally-styled widget that you are familiar with:

Modern
A bolder, more colourful style:

Use my own CSS
You can still use your own CSS if you have the skills to create your own widget stylesheet.

Widget Types:

Date Selector
Here, your guest searches for available rooms by picking a date, and will then see a list of available rooms. Here's the Date Selector in the Modern style:

Simple Calendar
As with the Date Selector style, your guest picks a date, and then sees available rooms. But in this version, the guest can see if a particular date is full or closed. Here's the Simple Calendar in the Modern style:

Availability-by-room
This shows the guest a grid, similar to the one you see as owner, showing availability and price for each room on each day. Here it is in the modern style:

More styles will follow over the next few months. Enjoy.

KeepMeBooked really is just like using pen-and-paper!

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 17:32:00 +0000

We occasionally describe KeepMeBooked as being "almost as easy to use as a pen-and-paper reservation book". Which is true: you run KMB from a calendar screen which looks like the kind of layout you'd have on paper. And you can write bookings directly onto that screen, just like you would with a paper reservation book.

But no-one has yet mistaken KeepMeBooked for actual paper. Until today:

I think our enquiror was probably looking at this page, where we compare KeepMeBooked with a traditional pen-and-paper reservation book. Fortunately, I know the book photographed on that page came from Out of Eden, so I was able to direct the enquiror there, while making a (probably fruitless) attempt at persuading her of the merits of going digital:

Reminds me of the time someone mistook our direct mail for a booking enquiry.

20.12% discount for the London 2012 Olympic games

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 15:49:00 +0000

If you are in the UK, you may have heard about a plan to offer a 20.12% discount to visitors staying in the UK during the London 2012 Olympic Games.

The details of this plan are a little sketchy, but if you want to offer this discount to your guests during the Olympics, then it is easy to set up in KeepMeBooked. Just go to Settings > Discounts and create a new discount looking something like this:

That would give everyone staying during the Olympic and Paralympic Games a discount of 20.12%.

There is some talk of using a special booking code to validate the discount. If that's the case you can link the discount to a promo code too, like this:

Then anyone staying during the Olympics AND entering the correct promo code would get the discount.

_______________
Looking for a booking system which is easy on the eye and easy to use? Try KeepMeBooked for free now.

New option in revenue report: totals by type

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:01:00 +0000

We've added another option in the revenue report to let you show revenue by type (room, extras, or adjustments):

When you select to total by Type, you'll see one line in the table form "Rooms", then a line for each extra, and a line for adjustments.

This will make it much easier to track spending on different types of extras.

*****

Get your free one-month trial of KeepMeBooked here. Sign up in 60 seconds, no credit card needed.

New report: list of bookings by date, room, etc.

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 09:00:00 +0000

You'll find a new report called "Bookings" under the reports menu. This lets you show a list of bookings, filtered by various criteria:

- Arrival date
- Deparature date
- Date the booking was created
- Room
- Status of booking (provisional, confirmed-but-not-paid-for, confirmed-and-paid-for, or cancelled)

This replaces the old Outstanding Balances report - you can still list bookings with balances outstanding by filtering for Confirmed (not fully paid), but the report now lets you list other types of bookings too.

(RESOLVED) Unexpected outage

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 16:53:00 +0000

Update at 1915: KeepMeBooked back up again at about 19:06 UK time, after down time of 1hr 40mins. That's the first time in two years we've had a full-on outage affecting all users. See final update below for detailed explanation of what happened

We are aware that KeepMeBooked is has been unreachable since about 1730 UK time (20mins ago). There is a problem at our host, BrightBox. They are aware and investigating.

Updates soon.

17:55: Update from BrightBox: It seems as if a switch stack has crashed – we’re getting it rebooted. ETA is currently 30mins. http://status.brightbox.co.uk/2011/10/internet-outage/

18:24 Still waiting for more info from datacentre

18:46 Update from our hosting partner, BrightBox: "We’ve ruled out the possibility of this being due to a DoS or a power failure. We’re still waiting on the switch stack reboot, which we now expect to be done within another 30 minutes (due to a communication failure regarding availability of the engineer – our apologies for the miscommunication)." http://status.brightbox.co.uk/2011/10/internet-outage/

19:07 Back up!

19:09 OK, connectivity has been restored. Two firewalls had crashed at the datacentre. More details to follow when we have them.

Update Monday 10th October:
Here's what happened, and why it took so long to resolve:

One firewall crashed. Ordinarily, that shouldn't be a big deal, because there is a secondary firewall in place to take over if the primary firewall fails.

But the secondary firewall crashed too.

Again, that shouldn't be a huge disaster, because BrightBox engineers should be able to access it remotely and restart it.

But BrightBox didn't have "out of band" access to the firewall. That is to say, their only way of remotely accessing the firewall to work on it was through the firewall. No firewall, no remote access.

(With other parts of our hosting system, BrightBox do have 'out of band' access, so even if the primary internet connection to the servers fails, they can still get in remotely through a backup connection. Not so with the firewalls.)

So BrightBox needed to rely on an on-site engineer in the datacentre to restart the firewall. That's what caused the delay - raising someone on-site to go and manually hit the restart button.

BrightBox will now put in place out-of-band access to the firewalls, so if both firewalls crash again, they will be able to remotely access the firewalls and fix them quickly, without needing to wait for someone physically at the datacentre to do that.

They have also updated some software on the firewalls, but are still investigating what caused them to crash in the first place.

(BrightBox's own explanation is here.)

Guest addresses now better organised

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 10:38:00 +0000

We've added some new fields for storing guest addresses. Before, you just had Address (for all of the address lines), Postcode / ZIP, and country.

You now have:

Address line 1
Address line 2
City / Town
State / Region
Postcode/ZIP
Country

These appear on the booking widget:

And on the booking details / guest details screen:

We've also done some clever jiggery-pokery to display local names for the City / State / ZIP fields depending on the country of the guest. So if your guest's address is in the USA, those three fields are labelled City, State, ZIP (as above). If they are in Canada, though, those fields are labelled City/Town, Province, Postal code:

And Town, County, Postcode for UK:

And City, State/Territory, Postcode for Australia:

Elsewhere, we use generic City/Town, State/Region, Postcode/ZIP:

(This doesn't work perfectly for all countries. Lots of European countries put the postal code before the town name for example, but it is a start. Hat-tip to Luke Wroblewski for those localisation tips)

You can also now set the guest's language from with the booking details screen (previously, you could only do that from the Guest screen).

Reminder to save changes, better support for unusual currency symbols, long weekly stays bug fixed

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:12:00 +0000

A few little changes released this morning:

1. We now warn you if you change something on a booking and try to navigate away without saving. We've had that warning on the accommodation settings screen for a while, but not on the bookings screen. It's now on the bookings screen too, so if you change something on the booking screen (and don't save) you'll be prompted to save when you try and leave that page.

2. Some currency symbols, e.g. for the Thai Baht, were not displaying correctly on the PDF invoice for a booking. That's fixed now.

3. Finally, there has been a long-standing bug whereby if you were taking weekly bookings only, a guest couldn't book on the widget for more than 4 weeks (even if your max stay setting was, say, 90 nights which is about 12 weeks). That's fixed now.

New Dashboard screen (summarising checkins, checkouts, available rooms)

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Fri, 23 Sep 2011 08:54:00 +0000

You'll notice a new menu item this morning:

Click on that and you'll get a screen showing you who is checking in today, who is checking out, who is staying another night, and which rooms are free for tonight. Plus a list of new bookings entered on the system today.

It looks like this:

If you have any suggestions or ideas about other information you'd like to be able to see on this screen, just fire away in the comments below, thanks.

New server status page

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Thu, 22 Sep 2011 11:43:00 +0000

We recently started using a service called Pingdom to monitor our uptime. Pingdom use servers from many locations around the globe to check that KeepMeBooked is up and reachable:

Historical uptime statistics are published here on our new server status page.

What happened to our man's right arm?

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 09:55:00 +0000

We've tweaked our logo slightly, because HostelWorld complained it was too similar to theirs and was causing confusion in the marketplace:

Our view is that if you base your logo on the internationally-recognised symbol for lodging (as HostelWorld have done) you are going to get other people with similar logos. You can't very well stop the entire world using an image of a chap in a bed in their logo.

But they have scarier lawyers than we do, so we happily caved in and chopped off our man's right arm to make our logo even less like theirs. Our logo now looks like this:

I already prefer it.