KeepMeBooked Blog

(Resolved now) Email problems at SendGrid

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:00:00 +0000

Update @ 2030 GMT: SendGrid are back up and running, and emails from KMB should now be going out as normal.

KeepMeBooked uses SendGrid to despatch all emails that we generate (booking confirmations, etc.)

SendGrid are currently experiencing problems which is causing a delay in sending emails. They'll no doubt have it sorted soon. You might want to hold off on sending any manual emails from within KMB until SendGrid is back up and running smoothly. Their own status update is here:

http://support.sendgrid.com/entries/23417077-21-Mar-Website-Down-Refusing-Mail

Major problem at PayPal, payment notifications are not being sent

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 13:05:00 +0000

Update @ 0730 GMT Jan 29th: PayPal have fixed the issue and are sending out IPNs now from transactions completed yesterday, although it may take until the end of today for the backlog of IPNs to be cleared:

https://www.x.com/content/update-8-issue-receiving-instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27

Update @ 1830 GMT:PayPal continue to work on the issue, but they have not fixed it yet:

https://www.x.com/content/update-3-issue-receiving-instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27

They plan to send out any missed IPNs once they have fixed the problem. This is unfortunate, really, as it is likely that users will already have entered payments manually by then. So when PayPal send out the IPNs, you will end up with a duplicate payment (one which you entered manually, then another once the IPN comes in). There really isn't much we can do, it is all in PayPal's hands. While PayPal is often maligned, their tech is normally good. It is highly unusual for them to have such a serious problem continue for many hours.

Update @ 1445 GMT: PayPal have now acknowledged that IPNs ("Instant Payment Notifications") are not working:

https://www.x.com/content/notification-issue-receiving-instant-payment-notifications-ipns-jan-27

Update @ 1400 GMT: No further news from PayPal, but Twitter is awash with other users reporting problems with PayPal IPN:

https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=paypal+ipn&src=typd

We appreciate this will cause our users a lot of inconvenience, but it is out of our control, everyone is relying on PayPal to fix this a.s.a.p.

Original post: We are aware of a problem that PayPal are having sending "Instant Payment Notifications". Currently, these are not being sent, so we cannot fully process payments from PayPal.

Guests booking online can complete a payment, but PayPal is not sending us the payment notification so the booking on KMB expires (because it appears to us that the payment was never completed).

PayPal are working to resolve this. Their latest update shows it as resolved:

https://www.x.com/content/follow-major-impact-express-checkout-paypal-apis-virtual-terminal-and-website-payments-pro

but we think it is not resolved and we have advised PayPal of this.

As a workaround, you will need to manually mark PayPal-paid bookings as confirmed when you receive the payment confirmation email from PayPal. Remember that even if a booking expires due to "non-payment" you can still find it from the Guests section of the KMB and manually mark it as confirmed.

We will update here when we have more information from PayPal. Other gateways are not affected.

Showing rooms in price order

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 13:44:00 +0000

We've put a new option on the Customize Widget page to allow you to display rooms in price order when a guest books online:

You can select from "Same as Calendar order" (which will show the rooms in the same order you see them in your calendar) or "Price (Low -> High)" (which will show the rooms with cheapest at the top) or "Price (High -> Low)" (most expensive at the top).

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

Calling tax 'tax'. Or VAT, or GST, or whatever you need to it be called

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:49:00 +0000

You can now give 'tax' its own name, suitable for your location. In the UK, that'll be 'VAT', in Australia, 'GST', and so on.

To change how 'tax' is labelled, go to Settings > Your Details > Sales Tax and check the box 'Use custom label' and type the label that you need. For example, if you are using one percentage rate to cover tax and service, then put 'Tax & service' there:

Tax will now appear as "Tax & service" on your booking widget and on the PDF invoice which you print out for guests.

It'll still show on the booking details screen (that you as owner see) as simply 'Tax', but that's just because there isn't much room on that screen for anything longer. The important thing is that guests will see a familiar label when booking online and on their invoice.

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

New feature: reorder your rooms on the calendar screen

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:34:00 +0000

We just released a useful new feature. You can now re-order the rooms on your calendar screen (previously they just appeared in the order in which you first created them). Just click the "Reorder rooms..." link:

Then you'll see a pop-up screen appear where you can drag each room name to reorder it:

Just click-and-drag on a room name to move it to a different spot. Click save and you'll return to the calendar with your rooms in the new order.

Note: if you like to have the calendar open in multiple tabs, then close the extra tabs before you reorder rooms. Otherwise you might temporarily end up with different tabs showing a different room order which would be confusing.

Planned maintenance: 7am Tuesday September 25th (UK time)

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Thu, 20 Sep 2012 10:37:00 +0000

Update @ 7am: Just starting maintenance now

Update @ 7.20am: Progressing well, hope to be done within the hour

Update @ 7.29am: Maintenance complete, we are back up

We are planning to take KeepMeBooked offline for a short time to perform some essential maintenance.

KeepMeBooked will be unavailable for approximately one hour starting at 7am BST on September 25th. That's:

San Francisco: 11pm Monday 24th

Sydney: 4pm Tuesday 25th

(Click here to see other timezones)

We hope to have the work done in less than 1 hour, we'll obviously come back online just as quickly as we can. Thank you in advance for your patience.

[Resolved] We are currently experiencing unplanned outages

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Thu, 26 Jul 2012 07:26:00 +0000

We are currently experiencing unexpected, intermittent outages. We apologise for this and are investigating urgently.

Update 0924: Problem was resolved at around 0830, details to follow.

Update 1040: One of our two application servers went down at around 1am UK time on July 26 (that's 8pm July 25th in New York; 10am July 26 in Sydney). That left the other healthy server handling all our users, and that one server got frequently overloaded until we got the other server back up again at around 8.30am UK time.

KMB wasn't totally down for that whole time, many users will have been able to connect, but service was slow and often not available at all for several minutes at time. I am very sorry for this, I understand how much you all rely on KMB to run your businesses.

The reason it took so long to resolve was, embarrassingly enough, that we actually hadn't realised that one of our servers had gone down, despite a myriad of alerts telling us that it was.

We use Pingdom to make a simple "Is KeepMeBooked reachable?" check every five minutes. And we have NewRelic to give us detailed insight into what's going on on each of our servers.

The problem arose because we also use Pingdom to monitor SiteMinder PMSXchange, which is an external service that many of our users use in conjunction with KeepMeBooked. (We use Pingdom to check SiteMinder so that if our own application cannot reach SiteMinder, and nor can Pingdom, then we know there is a SiteMinder issue, not an issue with our application.)

Our developer in Indonesia got an alert from Pingdom saying that KeepMeBooked was down, but misread it, and thought it related to SiteMinder's PMSXchange. SiteMinder being unavailable would not have been a big deal, that doesn't really matter for short periods.

Only when I got up and saw a stack of Pingdom alerts on my phone did we know we had a problem. We then restarted the dead server and got back on track pretty quickly.

We've now added SMS alerts to our development team in Indonesia if Pingdom reports KeepMeBooked to be down. That means there will be much less risk of confusing a run-of-the-mill Pingdom alert with a panic-now-site-is-down Pingdom alert.

Again, I am very sorry for the trouble and uncertainty this will have caused, especially to our Australian users who suffered most of the day with terrible service.

Customer says that KeepMeBooked "is like Facebook, easy to navigate and versatile"

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 11:04:00 +0000

Just received this lovely, uplifting email from a customer down in Namibia. I especially like the "KeepMeBooked is like FaceBook" bit!

"Good evening
It's Johan from The Village Courtyard Suites, Windhoek Namibia.
I started using KeepMeBooked July 2011.
Difficult times starting up a new business, and KeepMeBooked was like Facebook, easy to navigate and versatile. Today I am starting a new trial with your program for a new venture of mine. Going through the motions and remembering where I was last year. I can hardly believe what I see! You have made so many improvements and so many features. I can customize just about every little detail to my pleasure.

TO THE GOOD PEOPLE FROM KEEPMEBOOKED, YOU ROCK MY WORLD!

I have never felt this passion in any online UID [User Interface Design], KeepMeBooked is like a friend and a valued employee, making my life easier every day! Thank you from the bottom of my heart!"

To Johan and everyone at Village Courtyard Suites in Windhoek, Namibia: Thank you!

To everyone who hasn't yet joined the KeepMeBooked family: If you want to booking software that makes you feel like this, then try KeepMeBooked for yourself! Find out more here.

You can now edit the tax rate on a booking

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 09:15:00 +0000

You can now manually edit the tax rate for a particular booking. Bookings will default to the tax rate set for your property under Settings > Your Details > Sales Tax, but if you need to change the rate for a certain booking, just click the little pencil icon next to the tax rate on the booking:

That will allow you to enter a new tax rate for that booking only:

Untaxable or taxable extras will behave as before. Taxable extras will contribute to the tax line; untaxable extras will not.

Customisable invoice and registration cards

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:59:00 +0000

We've added some more options to customise your invoice and registration cards.

Go to Settings > Your Details and click 'Invoice Settings' or 'Registration card settings'.

You can specify whether you are printing onto US Letter size paper, or A4 paper. You can specify the title for the document (so if your invoices have to have the words "Tax Invoice" on them, you can now add that). And you can show or hide most elements on the page as required:

(You won't see your old logo and footer text on this page when you first view it. But don't panic, we'll still use your old logo and footer text unless you update with new logo / text on this new settings page.)

HTML emails, and new reminder and cancellation emails

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 08:54:00 +0000

Some changes to email templates released this morning:

1. HTML emails are now supported, giving you much more control over the appearance of your emails. Under Settings > Emails, select "HTML" and save. Then paste your HTML into the template for each email to generate HTML emails.

(Tip: Consider testing your HTML layout on the new cancellation email first (see below). That only gets sent when you manually cancel a booking, so you can tinker with that template without accidentally sending a guest a badly-laid-out email. Or just create yourself a new trial account to test your HTML layouts with.)

2. New arrival reminder and cancellation emails.

Arrival reminder can be set to go out automatically a certain number of days before the guest is due to arrive. Perfect for sending directions and that sort of thing.

Cancellation email can be sent after you cancel a booking. On cancelled bookings, you'll see a new button called 'Email cancellation'. Once you've enabled the cancellation email template, clicking that button will send the guest an email to confirm that their booking has been cancelled.

KeepMeBooked Does What it Says on the Packet

noreply@blogger.com (Bruce Greig) — Mon, 11 Jun 2012 09:04:00 +0000

One of our users just sent us this (unsolicited) review of KeepMeBooked:

“KeepMeBooked Does What it Says on the Packet”

Three years ago Alison and I were setting up our B & B with 2 rooms and we wanted some simple, low cost software to manage online bookings. With no clear idea what we were looking for I typed a question into Google and Keep Me Booked popped up in No 1 position on the search. Well that impressed me for a start!

A free trial and a few questions later and we were up and running with KMB Lite. We have gradually used more features since then and we have expanded rapidly to our current 24 rooms, some B&B , some self-catering, advertising through a number of commission channels, managed through some very good Channel Manager software. We now run the full KMB Pro version.

Since starting we have reviewed a number of competitor products and have trialled one other piece of software. This was something more heavy duty and long established in the market, however continue to use KMB, not because it is all singing and dancing, but because it does what it says on the packet and does it well.

KMB positions itself as a low cost, easy to use, cloud based system for small businesses and does this well. The system has always been reliable and outage free. Bruce Greig has always answered my questions personally, swiftly, helpfully and honestly. The software has been steadily upgraded and we have gradually taken on more of the features provided. KMB integrates seamlessly with the third party (Siteminder) channel manager software.

I have no hesitation in recommending KeepMeBooked.

Roger & Alison Foster
Rectory Farm B&B

Cambridge

United Kingdom

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If you'd like a simple, easy-to-use reservation system for your Bed-and-Breakfast, you can get a free month's trial of KeepMeBooked here.

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

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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!