TourCMS blog

23rd August 2010 - New release - Setup widgets on your own website plus other tweaks

TourCMS team — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 08:03:02 PDT

A real hotch potch of small tweaks on TourCMS this week!

API / Widgets
* Newly rewritten documentation and examples (with sample code) including two hotel live availability search examples. Now very easy to do a hotel/villa search with you just needing to buy a few hours web design services (from your own web designer) to integrate into your site. Very limited development required by you.
* .net client library (similar to the existing PHP client library)
* Tour search API method - can now search on location keyword (previously you could search by geocode and other criteria but searching by location keyword can be helpful if you want to create a structure based on regional names)
* Setup API for your own (supplier) account over multiple website channels (previously could only do over a single channel). i.e. you don't need a Marketplace account to use the API.
* Create widgets to put on your own website (without travel agent tracking). See the widget builder for details.

Bookings
* Nationality can now be defaulted to blank
* New token for deposit per person
* When you delete a booking you can now see it is deleted (and who did it) within the system log (from system management section). Ideal if your auditors want to know WHO deleted a booking and when.

Tour/Hotel setup
* Blank room/rate names - ideal if you have 90 rooms and don't really mind what they are called
* Able to setup upto 100 rooms/rates at the same time
* Rates that control rooms now exclude whole chalet rooms. i.e you can have a "whole chalet room" for booking an entire ski chalet. You can also have a single rate plus 10 sub-rooms all controlled by the single rate. Makes setting up ski chalets that work like hotels very easy indeed.
* Set fixed / fixed per person deposits (rather than the previous % based deposits). These are also editable within an individual booking

Data export
* Able to export all invoice values - including invoices issued on now deleted bookings (for audit purposes)

Agent email
* Can setup an additional agent email address to receive automated booking emails.

Free trial accounts
* Now restricted to 20 tours/hotels that can be setup (and 1 user). Remember these are free trials. If you are using TourCMS to run your business you ought to upgrade....

Thats it!

12th August 2010 - New release - Changes to hotel products and a few other tweaks

TourCMS team — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 05:56:11 PDT

Good release this week with lots of new tweaks

Hotel products
* Display infant / child ages (for a property) in the online booking engine. Can be set by the property
* Able to configure "free infants" for hotel rooms - they count as children for occupancy rules but are priced free
* New hotel price rule - 1-2 adults per person then 3rd adult, 4th adult
* Show multiple durations on step 1 of the booking engine - i.e. show 2 night, 3 night, 4 night. Handy for some fixed duration type products where you want to show alternatives without the customer having to change duration to see something else exists
* Rates can have start / end day of the week rules (that work alongside the main hotel ones). Now easy to do weekend rates!
* Rates can be used to control room prices. Handy if you have a 20 pitch campsite and want to maintain availability for the 20 pitches individually but you only want to maintain a single price (rather than 20 prices). When no "rooms" remain on a date, the rates are then offsale.

Tour search API method
* Results order - now takes into account your unique visitors to book ratio when used over multiple accounts. Those with the best conversion will be listed first
* Results order - now takes into account the display order setting

i.e. the results order is now as follows:

Commercial priority order (highest commercial priority order first), unique visitors to book ratio (best performing first), display points (lowest numbers first), the product name

If you are just using the API within a single account then this will therefore order by commercial priority order then display points - i.e. you have full control of the order of the results. If you are using the API over multiple accounts (like a travel agent partner might) then they, pretty much, get the best performing products first but still with an element of control by the supplier.

Reports & Data extracts
* Export customer data - now has address broken down into several columns (easier to send to a brochure distributors)
* Export customer enquiry data - now has column headings on address breakdown (easier to send to brochure distributors)
* New options report - useful to see what options you have sold. Intended to be helpful operationally

Other
* Entry level TourCMS account now called Budget Plus
* Moved some fields around in tour setup / content descriptions - making it easier to find the tour descriptions / image upload areas
* New per person price token - divides the total sale value by the number of people in the booking

Thats it! Here is what we have planned coming up in the rest of August
http://community.tourcms.com/forum/topics/august-2010-development-plans

Thanks

29th July 2010 - New release - More hotel price logic, new APIs and single occupancy rules

TourCMS team — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 01:45:09 PDT

Lots to report in the latest release

Booking engine
* Zero priced options on step 2 of the booking engine now show their prices as blank (rather than showing zero price)
* Turn options into questions - e.g. useful for pickup points, accommodation choice, t-shirt size etc. Can be an input box or a dropdown. The customer provided answer will be added to the end of the option name so will appear in your reports / booking documentation etc
* Additional logic added for options to determine when shown (min / max tour quantity). Previously this was (and still is) possible using the complex price tables (for upto 30 in a booking) but when you have larger bookings (groups in a big coach size range) then the price tables don't go that far. You can use this new switch on option setup to still permit size based display restrictions

API
* Lead in prices by the month added. Use this to create a nice seasonal overview showing how your prices fluctuate over time
* 2 new hotel search API methods - one to show a range of availability (useful if you are using hotel product for ski chalets - you can show an entire season on one screen and, on a week by week basis, show what you have remaining for multiple properties). The second API method is for specific availability - so you supply a date, number of adults/children - and you are returned the prices, board bases etc. From that you can link straight into a booking engine to take the reservation.
* Tour search - can now search for accommodation only
* Homepage URL (and tracked version) now are returned in the tour search XML

Marketing
* New marketing audit - analyse how well you are using the TourCMS features to help you sell more product. For example are you asking customers where they heard about you? Are you tracking your PPC Google advertising using TourCMS?
* Marketplace partners can now "ignore" suppliers. This will take suppliers out of their widgets (and XML from the API) but maintain the connection.

Hotel product types
* 2 new pricing rules for hotel product types - x1 rule and a per person rule. If you have struggled to get your contracts loaded previously we expect now that one of these rules will exactly match your contract style - so you can load a contract without having to recalculate the individual 1st adult, 2nd adult prices
* Single occupancy pricing - you can load a single occupancy price
* Report by the night by the room - who is in which room on what night.

Tax
* New switch to hide (from customers) sales tax breakdown when priced tax inclusive. This removes the display of tax from the online booking engine and customer facing documentation.

Thanks !

14th July 2010 - New release - Agent login and other tweaks

TourCMS team — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 02:21:26 PDT

Many tweaks to notify everyone.... all good news (hopefully!)

API, Marketplace, agents and tracking
* Tour search - products are automatically removed from the tour search API reply if they have error 404'ed more than 10 times in a row. This normally happens when you haven't set up a URL for the tour information page. Products automatically are returned again once the issue is resolved.

* Now showing average marketing statistics from suppliers to Marketplace partners. This includes average transaction value, average unique visitors to book, number of pax per booking and leadtime between booking and travel date. You can turn this off in the Marketplace setup (supplier side) but as this is not totals or anything like that this data won't disclose how big / small a supplier is, only how efficient their website is in converting customers to book.

* Pickup point no longer mandatory in the Marketplace content fields (makes it easier for all the ski chalets now in the system)

* Agent records that come from Marketplace partners now start with TOURCMS (uppercase) (previously it was mp lowercase). This keeps these agents clearly visible from your other agent records you may have setup

* Moved to first click attribution for tracking - meaning that tracking sources up the food chain (at the start of the research phase) may get more bookings assigned to them than sources nearer the end of the process. Means you can also safely use tracking scripts from your newsletters etc without fear of overwriting initial marketing sources.

* Single check availability widget now opens in a new window (rather than same window)

* Widgets - possible to use on your own site without overwriting tracking. We are going to make this easier to configure (right now you have to set mp=0 in the url of the widget and have setup your API password in Configuration & Setup) but technically it works and you can put widgets on your own site if you wish.

* New clicks report - supplier side - see number of clicks from various sources. Bear in mind this is clicks when most of the other reports are unique visitors from clicks. The goal of the clicks report is to compare these numbers to other sources (e.g. clicks report from Google).

* Improved the agents statistics page (well we hope it is an improvement !)

* Marketplace partners can now see clicks and booking data in their login. This includes access to historical bookings, bookings made by the supplier member of staff (and assigned to their agent).

Languages and localisation
* Korean now live (online booking, widgets and customer / supplier communications)
* Can turn off decimal display if .00 - required for Korean as there is no monetary subunit in Korea. Others may find this setting handy as well though as it makes number display nice and clean

Booking engine
* Addressed issue with Paypal occasionally not working in booking engine (it was our load balancers timing out before Paypal replied to our API calls). Hopefully that problem has gone away now

* Can make it so that, for hotel product bookings, the customer MUST enter dates / occupancy before they see any availability (step 1). This will stop customers jumping through the first screen without thinking about what they are booking.

Whole chalet (hotel)
* If whole chalet room set on a hotel (e.g. a ski chalet that is wholly bookable as well as having sub rooms) the lead in price now comes from the whole chalet (if set)
* More logic applied to step 1 booking engine - won't show in the calendar as available when the whole chalet was booked but a single room was still available (really this is a bug fix as it wasn't logical before)

Other
* Email addresses can now have a + in
* Booking summary report - can now have agent name on
* Option detail report - can show supplier name, booking status and agent name

Phew!

25th June 2010 - New release - Focus on changes to help you market more effectively

TourCMS team — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 15:45:40 PDT

This week's release....

Marketing
* The widgets are now available in 14 languages - if you take a look at this page - near the bottom - you can see an example in Dutch and another in Spanish.
* Pay Per Click performance report (PPC) - you can now adjust report dates. A new column added to show leadtime by marketing partner. You will probably see that guide websites have long lead time and other travel websites a shorter timeframe....
* In Marketplace you can email your Marketplace partners - please do keep them informed with interesting things - but please don't spam them or we will get grumpy.
* Your Marketplace partners (and potential partners) can also now email you with an invitation to work with them
* Your Marketplace partners can now rebrand your booking engine to their design. i.e. this makes it super easy to give a partner booking capability on their site, to their design, but the booking comes into your account.

Bookings management
* Multi-customer removal - you can now remove multiple customers at once - rather than individually. We are still working on the multi-customer add :)
* Booking notes can now be added to custom report templates

Tour products
* You can see an overview availability table showing the next 12 months. This uses the same data that powers the tour search API method. Use this table to quickly see what you still have on sale and perhaps where you haven't loaded all your dates & prices!

Thought for the week.... you can use the tour search API method to put a quick availability search on your site... e.g. search by keyword, location and filter by just those tours / hotels that have availability in January. You can put a search like this onto your site in about 2 hours work....

Thanks!

16th June 2010 - New release - Improvements and tweaks everywhere!

TourCMS team — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 06:52:13 PDT

New release this week........ lots of small changes!

Excel export
* Enquiry export - country name - includes the full country name as a new column
* Enquiry export - address now split into multiple columns (easier to mail merge)
* Booking export - includes the workflow note
* Booking export - can include / exclude bookings that have any staff member on

Online booking
* If you are taking credit card payments in the booking engine you can now, on the last screen, show a different message depending upon whether the payment has gone through or not. In both situations the booking comes into your account but now you can either thank the customer for their payment or give them another message
* HTML top / HTML base can now have conditional comments in the HTML

Staff bookings
* Arriving soon tab now shows bookings arriving in the next 4 weeks
(rather than 2 weeks) (upto a maximum of 200 bookings). Quite a few
accommodation contracts need to be checked at a 4 week to arrival point
and this saves running a separate report to find these bookings.
* Hotel product - can now booking on start / end days of the week that can't be booked online
* Hotel product - duration now defaults to the minimum duration of your onsale hotel products (should be a better default than the previous 2 night default)

Product configuration
* Hotel - if you have limited the arrival days of the week then it will show in green just those days
* Hotel - can set "no arrivals" for individual dates. Ideal when you need to leave a date onsale (because perhaps a booking should be permitted to end on that date) but you don't want new bookings on that date. Or if you have one off scenarios where you want to stop bookings for. Generally though the onsale / offsale will do the trick
* Quantity pricing - moved up to 50 price points (up from the 10 before) for tour departures. That should do it :)
* Option name can be upto 150 characters (up from 50)

Lead in prices
* When using tour departure quantity based pricing the lead in price now takes into account that it can get cheaper the more is booked. Also is based on the minimum booking size (with the aim of removing situations where a zero lead in price is generated)
* Hotel lead in price now takes the number of adults from the default adult number (on setup). Previously it was calculated on 1 adult (causing zero priced lead in prices where the sale prices was loaded against the 2nd adult)

Navigation
* Jump straight from creating a customer record to using that customer record in a new booking
* Booking quick jump - in top right hand corner - if you know the booking ID you want to jump to that is now the quickest way to it

Marketing statistics
* Removed robot (non-human) clicks from the click statistics. Will be interesting to see if this makes some of the marketing sources turn out to be more useful than initially considered (once non-human clicks are removed from the conversion statistics). As the conversion statistics are done on a rolling basis this won't be known for a while.

Reports
* Villa availability report - it is still there! Just we have renamed it to the "no overlapping" report. The reason for this is because we now advise that people setup villas / ski chalets as hotel products rather than tour freesale. Much more flexibility.
* Booking workflow note can be added to advanced report templates

Currency display
* New logic - if the currency is a symbol (e.g US$ or $) then there is no space between the symbol and the value. If the currency is an abbreviation there is a space between the currency and the value. Apparently this is how it is meant to be....

API
* Tour search API - now can search whether each month has something on sale. Use this to build a very basic (but useful) tour availability search on your website. The same values are in the CMS tags as well and the single tour API call
* Search by currency (e.g. if you just want to feature tours in GBP)
* New _display version of all the price values. This includes an HTML entity version of the currency symbol, a space (if appropriate) and the price (without decimals). Handy if you are taking that value and putting it straight on a screen (without you having to know what all the currency symbols are)

Thats all folks!

7th June 2010 - New release - Beanstream payment gateway and some other minor tweaks

TourCMS team — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 14:54:52 PDT

Many small tweaks this week.

Booking engine
* Set default adult numbers for hotel product online bookings
* Able to hide the adult number dropdown on hotel product bookings
* A couple of language tweaks to the Greek language
* Step 1 - better focus on form elements when iframed - meaning that there is less jumping around when iframe is incorporated into your own website
* Link the image at the top of the booking engine to your website
* Can add TourCMS logo / SSL security logo to your booking engine. This could give extra reassurance to your customers
* Footer text now shows even if an iframed booking engine (previously it was hidden in iframed booking engines)

Booking management
* Super users can see - and delete - temporary bookings. E.g. if a customer starts down the booking engine but then decides to phone you to complete the booking - previously a member of staff wouldn't have been able to make a booking on exactly the same product if no availability remained. Now they can, from bookings, in super user mode, delete bookings that are incomplete
* Credit card fees can now be automatically added to manually entered sales ledger entries (if you have set a credit card fee up)

Product setup
* Set max capacity for a hotel chalet product type (alongside the existing maximum adults / maximum children). So you could have maximum 15 in the chalet - but maximum 15 adults, maximum 5 children)
* Extra logic rule for hotel chalet product type - so you can take a single room offsale but still keep the whole chalet onsale (previously the whole chalet wouldn't have been available if any individual room was offsale / booked on the dates requested)
* Tour departure schedule generator - easily make an entire season of dates in a couple of clicks

Other
* Beanstream payment gateway (USA / Canada)
* Addressed Google Chrome issue with calendar popup (Missing August 2010). Although currently the JavaScript file is stuck in cache for some users but it will fix itself over time

Thats it!

27th May 2010 - New release - many changes, tweaks and improvements...

TourCMS team — Thu, 27 May 2010 07:00:00 PDT

We have been so hard at work improving TourCMS that we have somewhat neglected to publicly announce all the good things we have been building. Time to catch up!

Email sending
* Default email sending from TourCMS now goes via a different outbound route than before. You shouldn't notice any difference although we hope it gets through better to various email services where they are more active at filtering for commercial style emails
* You can set up your own SMTP email route if you wish meaning that all outbound email could be routed via your office. This means that you can configure all the headers etc and it will look just like any email sent from your office
* Email size (for new booking / provisional / confirmed booking) upto 200k (from 20k)

Enquiry handling
* Now shows 100 enquiries on the latest enquiries page (up from 30)
* When you save an enquiry you can now go back to the enquiries page (rather than going to the customer record). Handy if you are going through all out outstanding enquiries as keeps that process efficient

New languages
* Booking engine now available in Greek, Catalan and Russian

Reports
* Supplier report - can now report on provisional / confirmed bookings together in one report
* Year on year chart - see outstanding quotations
* Agent / customer totals on the outstanding financial balances report (there were totals before, now there are totals of totals!)

Flags on bookings
* Can now see all future flags from everyone. Should make working in small teams more efficient as you can clearly see what other people are doing on the same booking

Booking engine
* Fixed a bug with missing end date text on step 1 of the booking engine
* Can add a message for tour departures on step 1 (just like you could for other product types)
* Fixed a bug with option filter on hotel room types
* Increased session timeout for entering credit card details to 3 hours (from 45 minutes). Seems customers slow down at that point and can sometimes sit on credit card entry page for a long time (too long really and sessions were expiring)
* Able to configure default country (for customer record) to blank
* Change whether temporary bookings (non complete online bookings) reduce availability or not (tour departures)
* Hotel / freesale products are now released back to being available if the user goes back to the first step of the booking engine (should make it easier for customers to choose, go into booking process, revert back to selection phase, and choose what they previously selected, even if that was the last product that was available)
* Calendar to step 1 of the booking engine for hotel products. Ideal if you are using hotel products for campsites, ski chalets or villa rental
* State is now mandatory if postal address is mandatory
* Can turn off title (Mr / Mrs etc) in the booking engine
* Fixed bug with payment express and online payments (hopefully!)
* Able to add a message on the booking engine (step 4) if the booking is last minute (e.g. for special instructions)
* Able to rename the address fields - e.g. Postal Code/Zip code instead of Zip code.
* Able to add JavaScript into the page for step 1 of the booking engine. Will be useful for integration with Google Analytics (which we are still testing and documenting)

Hotel product type
* Temporary bookings now show on the hotel room bookings chart (so you can see why you can't book that slot even if you can't see the booking itself)
* Able to set whole chalet rooms. These are rooms that hold the price for booking an entire ski chalet (rather than just booking a couple of rooms). When the entire ski chalet room is booked, no other rooms are bookable. When an individual room is booked, the entire ski chalet room is not available.
* And don't forget the new availability calendar on step 1 of the booking engine (that just mentioned above!)

Marketplace
* Ticker widget can now have upto 10 products in (up from 5)
* Ticket widget now 220 high (previously 210)

Passwords
* TourCMS can now email you when you change your login password

Thanks!

5th April 2010 - New release - tweaks to booking engine price display

TourCMS team — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 02:31:38 PDT

A couple of tweaks gone live recently that we haven't announced so best we mention them :)

Booking engine
* Step 1 - New switch to hide prices
* Step 1 - New switch to hide product codes
* Step 2 - New switch to hide prices
* Step 2 - New switch to hide product codes

Documentation tokens
* Can turn off product codes for all multi-component bookings (go to Configuration & Setup, Tokens to turn off)
* End date automatically hidden if a 1 day booking

i.e. You can now use product codes for accounting purposes without having to disclose the codes to your customers.

JavaScript widgets
The widget system is now fully up and operational. Further information from this page
http://www.tourcms.com/support/api/mp/widgets.php

* Widget wizard now working within Marketplace partner and normal TourCMS accounts
* New Marketplace partners automatically accepted i.e. you can use the Marketplace system as a key part of your agent system

We will be sending an email around shortly (to account owners) with additional information about the widgets

20th March - New release - Change in payment gateways, flags and the API

TourCMS team — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 07:43:47 PDT

Big release this week....

Credit cards / payment gateways
* Now implemented that payment gateways only configurable in the booking engine for paying TourCMS accounts (as announced a week ago).
* Laid foundations for adding more payment gateways into TourCMS. We have a long list of gateways we want to work with. One requirement for new gateways is that they must have a hosted payment page (to ensure we and you do not need to be audited for PCI compliance - which is an expense neither you nor us want). Most do work this way.
* Sales tax on credit card transaction fees now correctly calculates
* Change the booking engine order - the credit card payment page is now the last page in the process
* If a payment creates an email in the booking engine (e.g. because as a result of the payment the booking status changes to provisional or confirmed) then the new booking email will not be sent (except for PayPal because we wait for the IPN data from PayPal before checking the booking status which can be upto an hour later due to the time it takes PayPal to send through the data)
* Payment Express gateway now does a sale transaction in the booking process rather than an AUTH then REBILL. This should save some % transaction fees with some banks where due to the rebill not sending the CCV number an insecure transaction fine was being applied

Flags
* Able to take over an individual flag from someone else (in a booking)
* Default you can see interesting flags on a booking. An interesting flag is either a flag set to you or a non-system set flag set to anyone else. If you have restricted bookings permission you will only see your own flags
* Tweaked the text so change deleting a flag to completing a flag

Booking engine
* Changed the screen order (as mentioned previously)
* Text for tracking script (on thank you page) now can be 100k (rather than 2k)
* Able to add a question to customers about whether you can contact them with offers / promotions etc. This will adjust the marketing permissions on their customer record

API
* Departure / Freesale data now also contains a booking engine URL link
* Tour search - able to exclude a country from a set of results
* Tour search - able to exclude returning tours that include accommodation
* Channel list comes back in alphabetical order
* Tour list comes back in alphabetical order
* Tour list now contains the tour name

Thanks!

Minor price change to free, budget and entry TourCMS accounts

TourCMS team — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 03:00:00 PST

Minor price adjustment made today and effective immediately to 3 account levels:

Entry level accounts (20 GBP / 40 USD per month)
Changed from 40 to 30 bookings per month limit

Budget level accounts (10 GBP / 20 USD per month)
Changed from 20 to 15 bookings per month limit

Free accounts
No longer support payment gateways such as PayPal or other credit card systems. Payment gateways take considerable development resources to build, manage and maintain and are therefore not sustainable within the free accounts.

Prices are as published on this page
http://www.tourcms.com/prices/

Overall we calculate that very few existing customers (less than a handful) will be impacted by this tweak and we have communicated with them personally before announcing this change.

Thank you for your support of TourCMS!

8th March 2010 - Many improvements to agent setup and marketing tracking

TourCMS team — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:32:12 PST

Big release last night with many tweaks / improvements

Languages
* Emails and booking documents (invoices / letters) can now fully take correct language settings. Now possible (without any incorrect language words creeping in) to take a booking in French, manage in English and send to a supplier in Spanish. Note that as a result of this change the language setting for a document / email is now set to a website channel - not to a language. This ensures that channel specific words can be used as well.

* Where hear question - can now setup to have different answers depending upon website channel. This is useful if you are wanting to use a translated version of the answers in different language situations.

Bookings management
* Can now see flags / tasks from other users (on an individual booking). Handy if you want to check what other people are doing on the same booking.

* Hide the NO BOOKING EMAIL SENT warning. Go to Configuration & Setup, Bookings, and tick to hide the warning. Handy if you, for staff made bookings, send a personalised email to the customer rather than the standard new booking email you have setup.

Agent manager and marketing tracking
* Step 5 of the booking engine - all documentation tokens can now be used in the JavaScript section of the confirmation page. This means you should be able to do complete Google Analytics integration taking all the data you wish.

* Agent manager - new navigation mechanism - easier to distinguish between your agents, affiliates and agent records used to track direct marketing

* Cut down the complexity of the agent tracking setup page

* Agent commission value now excluded from invoices raised in bookings management.

* New PPC advertising performance report. See sales revenue / margin vs clicks. Handy as this will give you a very good guide as to how much you can afford to bid on advertising networks such as Google.

* Can now set your own Misc ID in a tracking link without setting it up first. This ID can be used for campaign tracking within a single agent record.

Booking engine
Last week we conducted some usability testing on the booking engine. This has resulted in a number of areas that we have found we can improve on. A couple we have implemented and are live already:

* Individual departure links - no longer shows the "choose a date" heading or the month dropdown.
* Individual freesale season links - defaults the month dropdown to the start of the season

If you have freesale on your website make sure you use
<$TourCMSfreesale output="f_book_url"$>
rather than
<$TourCMStour output="f_book_url"$>
to take advantage of the improvements.

Training
Had a well attended webinar / online training session last week. Now got 4 more dates in the diary.
See http://www.tourcms.com/company/events_training.php for details

26th February 2010 - New release - Agent sales ledger controls and other tweaks

TourCMS team — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:17:55 PST

New release live

Bookings
* Only users will full bookings management permission can now download / create documents (such as letters etc). Read only users will not see them

* Can accept payments onto the sales ledger in the a non sale currency. e.g. if you have an account with a base currency of GBP and you sell a specific booking in USD, previously you could only add payments in USD to that booking. Now you can add GBP as well as any other configured currencies.

* New report - booking source analysis - for a quick summary of how your marketing is working

Agent balances
* Individual agents can have a different balance due setting than customer made, direct, bookings. You can also set that an agent doesn't have to pay a deposit for bookings they make. This will make the overdue sales ledger reports clearer as you can now setup so that these reports are a true reflection of who owes what, based on your trading terms with your partners.

Template engine
* Internal note / title (name) of text content can now be accessed

Google
* Fixed a bug with Google analytics and the TourCMS tracking script. Wasn't "broken" just they were not playing nicely together. Now they are, hopefully.

Thanks!

19th February 2010 - New release - Quite a few updates to bookings management

TourCMS team — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:45:48 PST

Latest updates

Pricing & product management
* Round sale prices up to the nearest 5, 10 etc. Handy if you are using a % markup - or selling in non loaded currencies so the sale prices uses an exchange rate. Now you can make nice looking prices!
* Can now adjust onsale / offsale for a hotel by date band without resetting the sale prices to zero

Bookings
* New multi tour itinerary functionality - including able to edit / update it on a per booking basis within a booking. This will be very handy for
itinerary based tour operators. New token to match it
* More logical ordering of customers when shown within a booking. Now mainly goes oldest to youngest.
* Alerted if you haven't sent an email (to the customer) that you should have done. Lets see how this goes
* Able to edit multiple sale prices at the same time - handy if you are tailor making a tour and want to make all your prices add to a certain value

Booking tokens
* Cancellation token (date)
* Most tour/hotel marketplace fields now have a document token

Reports
* Year on year chart now has cancelled bookings by date entered booking system

Labelling
* Realised that some of the labelling that said markup should have said margin. Back to accountancy lessons for us. The data was all fine though.

API
* Couple of tweaks - e.g. you can now search by country code.
* Won't bore you with detail on other tweaks!

Progress continues.......

Final note - please continue to raise support questions in these forums. If your question contains commercially sensitive (or customer data) aspects please use our helpdesk. That is the best way of getting our attention!

Minor price change to free TourCMS accounts

TourCMS team — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:46:35 PST

Minor price adjustment made today and effective immediately

Free accounts previously could make upto 50 bookings without requiring to upgrade to a paying account. We have now adjusted that number down to 25.

The idea of the free account is to permit easy no obligation evaluation. You can also list in the TourCMS Marketplace with a free account (company listing only, no product distribution).

25th January 2010 - New release - Tweaks to enquiries, emails and bookings

TourCMS team — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 02:37:24 PST

Few changes to report this week

General
* No longer can supply special offer prices when entering quantity based pricing (i.e prices for 1-10 people based on how many people in a booking). Logically it didn't make that much sense to have the special offer loaded just on bookings with 1 person.
* Feedback wall is removed - we love your feedback - but no one was using the feedback wall as originally intended. Please continue to use these forums to tell us what you think!
* Year on year report / chart now can show cancelled bookings

Web booking engine
* Introduced another "catch" to stop a particular overbooking scenario for tour departures. Previously it was tricky to overbook on tour departures, but not absoutely impossible. One more scenario has been addressed.
* Where did you hear about us? question can now be made mandatory.

Enquiries
* New field - follow up date. Rather than having flags and to do lists on each enquiry, this date is a mechanism to know when to revisit an enquiry for a followup. Enquiries with followup dates that are in the past will show in red on the enquiries list.
* Easier to enter a customer record at the same time as an enquiry - you can now save address on that form. This is a handy form if a customer phones you up and you just want to take down all the details you can without fiddling around with lots of screens.

Bookings
* Quote and provisional bookings that are historical (28 days after travel end date) are now automatically expired (unless a payment has been made on that booking). Some TourCMS users have set the default quote request expiry to 365 days (so in effect they don't expire) but that has meant many bookings have been left in the system visually clogging up the screen showing which bookings you need to be thinking about right now. Hopefully this addresses that problem
* New section on the sales ledger (money) section - showing you historical bookings that are quote / provisional. Really you shouldn't have any of those - they should either all be cancelled or confirmed. So now it is easier to see what bookings you need to tidy up to keep your data nice and organised

Booking emails (advanced note entry)
* Depreciated (finally) a number of old documentation tokens. We announced we were going to remove them in 2008 so *hopefully* no one is using them still (for those with a long memory this is when we moved from being able to have a single tour in a booking to multiple tours - which meant a redesign of how the tour / option tokens worked)
* From name / address - can now select from an alternative from name / address (if configured from your automated booking email settings). Means you can keep your staff user email address to be your email address, but send generic email to your customers if you wish.
* Can now preview an email before you send it
* Add an email address to an email (cc) in free entry - rather than having to be stored against a supplier, customer or agent record
* Can now send component (product specific) emails from the email note entry screen. e.g. if you are setting up emails to go to a specific supplier. These are %comp_ style tokens. If you have any of those style tokens in your email templates a product selection shows. Select a product and the %comp_ style tokens will become product specific

Thanks!

12th January 2010 - New release - Many tweaks to hotel functionality, online booking

TourCMS team — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:56:13 PST

First big release of the year - focus has been on usability and introducing a few new price configuration capabilities

Configuration & Setup
* The MS-Word / RTF documenation setup (for creating custom documents such as invoices, pre-departure information packs etc) - has been moved to one place - in Configuration & Setup. Previously tour / option specific documentation setup could be found in the individual tour / option setup sections.
* Quantity pricing - for tour departures / freesale - you can now configure per person pricing without having to setup complex option price tables. Makes it easy to do 2 x 100 GBP, 3 x 90 GBP style pricing

Booking engine
* New CSS configuration box - so rather than having to put CSS in the HTML you can now put CSS in the style sheet in the booking engine header. Was fine before, but now its better :)
* Wide, panorama, image - if you are using the booking engine full screen (rather than in an iframe) you now have a choice where you put your header image. You can now configure a really nice panorama image (ideal for wide, outdoor, photos). Give that a go, some people may like it.
* AJAX API has been removed. No one was using it. We now suggest that if you really want to build your own booking engine in AJAX that you do your own development and send the booking through the new XML API, rather than using the AJAX API.

Booking & Customer management
* Made it easier to delete a customer record (in that you don't have to wait so long for a cusotmer not on any bookings, not with any enquiries, to be deleted). Remember to go super user to delete a customer record (super user is in top left corner)
* Now force a subject line in booking emails (advanced note entry). Too many people were sending emails to customers without subject lines! This could make it a little more tricky for those who use the functionality as a means to put formatted notes into a booking - but the trade off we think is worth it.
* On homepage, only unassigned / assigned to you enquiries are now shown. We have extended the quick view to those created in the last 96 horus (from 48). Its only meant to be a quick, sub conscious, means to see enquiries / bookings BTW !
* Board basis code no longer added to booking for hotel room / hotel rate bookings. That code was just confusing and didn't add to much. The board basis description continues to be added though, of course. The board basis description is now editable within a booking.
* Able to move hotel room bookings between room from the booking edit screen - from a nice simple change room function. Only available alternatives (that permit bookings for the same occupancy as the current room) will be shown.
* New hotel room booking calendar (gantt chart style) - so you can see availability and bookings at a glance

Thats all folks!

20th December 2009 - New release - few booking engine tweaks and 3 new languages

TourCMS team — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 12:49:14 PST

In the latest release

Langauges
* Now support Turkish, Swedish and Romanian taking us to 12 or so languages pre-translated in the booking engine

Reports
* Booking name now shown on customer / option summary in advanced report templates
* Fixed booking detail report so doesn't print out a blank sheet of paper before the first booking :)
* Added customer summary to booking detail (as a configuration option)

Booking engine
* Can now add an agent reference to the booking process - ideal if you need to ask the agent for their name or perhaps their own booking system identifier. You can also configure this question to come up only if the booking is being made by an agent (not if a direct booking). Go to step 4 configuration in website manager to turn on.
* Tweaked the IFRAME system - so we now suggest you remove the ScrollTo in the IFRAME script (on your website). Our examples have been updated.
* Can show the option table in online booking engine for each person (rather than each type of tour / hotel). Handy if you want to ask the same question to each person in very very very specific circumstances. Alternatives (which are better for most situations) are to add extra customer field questions for each customer - or to repeat the option in a single table for the number of customers on the booking.
* Radio buttons on option table - can now make it so that you choose one option OR another option. Ideal if you have a couple of mutually exclusive alternatives.

Bug fixes
* Copy hotel room details to multiple rooms - wasn't copying the base rate (for zero occupancy). Is now.
* Image uploading to marketplace wasn't working very well in Internet Explorer. Now works for PNGs and JPEGs like it should.
* Fixed a problem with freesale bookings on booking engine in IE.
* Staff booking engine - hotel bookings - fixed an issue that came up when selling zero priced rooms

VAT sales tax increase (EU)
Lastly, if you are being charged UK sales tax VAT please note that this will go back up to 17.5% from January 2010. If anyone who is unregistered for VAT (so can't claim it back) and wants to pay a whole year in advance then we can take your money in December if you wish! Can't see anyone jumping for that as most customers are either outside EU (not paying VAT) or are registered for VAT (hence can claim it back).

Thanks!

8th December 2009 - New release - more reports and a few other tweaks

TourCMS team — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 02:21:10 PST

Lots of small tweaks now in the latest version of TourCMS

Bookings
* Tour/hotel internal note is now visable on the first step of the staff booking engine. Some customers use the internal note to store details about special offers etc hence it is handy having it shown on this step of the booking engine
* Individual users can configure a default website / channel for staff entered bookings. Handy if you have multiple companies in the same TourCMS account

Web booking engine
* Step 2 is changed, visually, to better work with combinations that people have devised. Any feedback etc appreciated

Travel products
* The block value (for tour departures held back or not available on a specific date) can now be imported via the CSV mass departure import mechanism
* Hotel product types can now have a base price - e.g. 5 GBP then plus a per person / per night charge
* On hotel product type rate entry you can now see which years you have nothing on sale (helps when configuring so you know what remains to be loaded). Green background means something for on sale.
* Can now delete options (and remove from all tours) in one click. Careful now!

Reports
* On money section (sales ledger) can now extract all sales ledger entries into excel
* On sales ledger, next to a payment, you can see the sale value and outstanding balance
* Booking extract - now has advanced search capabilities - this functionality was originally intended as a full data dump hence didn't need search capabilities but now people are exporting bookings to spreadsheets on a regular basis hence having the advanced search on the spreadsheet export is helpful
* Can put extra booking fields on the booking detail section type for advanced templated reports
* New report - arrivals by the week (similar to the existing arrivals by the day report)

And of course we launched the marketplace last week and we continue to work on that.

30th November - TourCMS marketplace open for business!

TourCMS team — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 00:56:35 PST

Thank you everyone for your patience while we built the new marketplace - but today we can announce that the marketplace is open for business

Load you standard content (descriptions, images) in the new marketplace fields (on each tour/hotel) and this can then be distributed out to 3rd party websites of your chosing. You do the commercial deal with the 3rd party how you wish - so if they are looking to do a pay per click basis or whether they are an agent - that is fine.

No longer is TourCMS just about organising your office and keeping on top of controlling dates, prices and availability. Now you can use TourCMS to generate new opportunities and easily distribute your product to various 3rd party websites.

Further information from here http://www.tourcms.com/mp/

10th November 2009 - Minor fix release

TourCMS team — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:09:01 PST

A few fixes gone live in the latest release

Tour / Hotel booking engine
* On a multiple room hotel booking the "Continue Booking" button would sometimes not work with a particular browser / PC firewall combination. That has now been replaced with a conventional web link - which can't fail.

* Able to override, on a website channel basis, the default title, first name, surname field labels

Admin section
* Changed the default inactivity timeout to be 60 minutes (rather than 15). This will only impact new accounts. If you wish to extend the inactivity timeout on your own account, go to Setup, Account settings.

* Customer export - added the dear and envelope text fields to the full customer export

For once, not a very long list!

26th October 2009 - New release - Multi lingual tour product fields and a few tweaks

TourCMS team — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 18:13:34 PDT

Just a few tweaks in the last couple of weeks as our time has been spent working on laying foundations for the new project that we emailed everyone about a few weeks back and will be announcing shortly.....

Travel product setup

* Able to store multiple language descriptions for each tour / option.

e.g. imagine you have a French and an English website. Setup one website channel to be in French, another to be in English. You can now load against the French website tour descriptions in French. The English website channel can just show the English.

Or use this functionality to describe your products differently for different sites

* Fixed a problem where the tour date filter (on tour departures) was sometimes unnecessarily short meaning you didn't see all your trips unless you noticed that you could widen the date filter

* Option / tour internal notes are now editable from the option / tour setup - not from the content section

Bookings management

* Able to adjust dates on a hotel room booking within an existing booking (as long as it doesn't overlap with another booking in the same room)

* Able to enter a payment date when entering a new manual sales ledger entry

Bookings engine

* The book word (on the first screen) is now not automatically in upper case. Hence if you want that word to appear in upper case you will need to set it in upper case in the booking engine setup. Our previous method for converting your text into upper case didn't work in a very small number of non-latin characters.

Other

* Fixed a problem with full website rebuilding where it was just rebuilding the first tour (not all tours)

* Change the user interface for deposit rule setup

* Can now setup an HTML email signature (rather than just a text one)

8th Oct 2009 - New release - Website rebuilding and a lot of small booking management tweaks

TourCMS team — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:42:29 PDT

Pretty large release went live yesterday

Booking management
* Able to set a default component order for an itinerary - so if you are a tour company that sells hotels, or a hotel company that sells tours, you can get the correct component to show at the top of the list regardless of the dates of the individual products

* Can now add a note for further information on travel agent commission (e.g. payment date etc). Also a tick box whether commission paid (and in the sales ledger section you can see a list of unpaid agent commissions)

* If you go from no travel agent set, to setting an agent, and the agent owes the balance (rather than being a direct booking), TourCMS will now update who owes the balance automatically

* Agent commission paid tick will automatically update to ticked if you remove commission from a booking

* Can now delete multiple flags (to do items) on the flags list at once

* Now just require super user permission (and full bookings permission) to unarchive a booking (Rather than account owner as previously)

* New alert if you are editing an old, historical, booking!

* Can now fix the balance due date to a certain date

* Hotel booking upto 100 days duration now possible

Customer management
* Made it so on the advanced customer search you can filter by customer records with recent / future bookings

Travel products
* An option can take the default quantity from the total customers (rather than the tour quantity that it is associated with). Handy if you have a single supplement that should only be listed when 1 person on the booking (in some situations)

* Exclude a tour / option from a % based deposit calculation

PayPal
* Fixed US Virtual termainal paypal payments sales ledger reconcilliation

Online booking
* Fixed a bug where the minimum numbers of the first screen were in some multi rate situations not letting you have very low people numbers (where a booking straddled multiple rates)

Reports
* New booking conversion report - see reasons why bookings are not converting to confirmed (e.g. individual staff performance, whether online vs staff entered etc)

* New unpaid commission report in the money section - so you can see who you haven't paid commission to

* New unpaid agent balance report in the money section - so you can see which agents still owe you money

* Booking summary report has the agent commission note / paid status (another way of finding where you have paid commission)

* Split the currency value into a separate column on the sales ledger report (so easier to get into excel), can list the sales ledger payments list by type

* Customer extract - now have date customer profile created in export

Website manager
* Can configure more than 6 web pages per tour now (and give the templates names)

* Altered how FTPing works when FTPing a lot of files (currently this kicks in when FTPing over 50) - it now does them in groups of 50. This means that it is unlikely to timeout. (Previously has been timing out when sites of 750+ pages were regenerated)

Thats all folks!

[Incidentally this release note also contains a list of functionality that has been live for a while but not announced except to the customers who needed it]

Wish TourCMS luck with Travolution awards 2009

TourCMS team — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 02:30:00 PDT

A few months ago we were shortlisted in the Best technology provider category of the Travolution Awards 2009

On Tuesday evening (29th September) we will find out whether we have won! Wish us luck.

Our view is that we have always focussed on providing just the technology. We believe that as web based software you want to be able to evaluate the system, run your project and get trading using TourCMS with the minimum of input from us. In effect this means we ONLY provide the technology, not the associated professional services that other providers require.

We also pride ourselves in openness - you know our prices, you can engage with us in our forums etc etc. All aspects that other system providers don't do. Hopefully this unique perspective was understood by the judges!

We continue to grow at 300% (or more) year on year.... we conclude this means we have it about right!

Further information about the awards

28th July 2009 - A few new reports

TourCMS team — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:55:24 PDT

Just a few tweaks this week

Tour/Hotel

* Able to swap between counting days and counting nights for hotel product types (remember between today and tommorow is 2 days but 1 night). You can't swap on hotel product types that have bookings, but at least this will solve various setup issues when you are learning the difference between the two types

New reports

* Channel report - so you can see the % of your bookings that come via your web booking engine (vs the staff booking engine). Also shows what % come from agents as trade sales.

* Tweaked the villa/ ski chalet report - the lead customer now shows when you hover over booking - and also fixed a bug where villa bookings were not counting as overlapping when exactly the same dates

* Leadtime report - see how long people book ahead (between date booking made and their travel date)

* Agent dashboard - top performing travel agents by commission, clicks, bookings and revenue generated (a few more agent reports coming, incidentally)

Sunday 19th July - TourCMS maintenance window

TourCMS team — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 02:46:52 PDT

Please note that the system engineering team will be conducting maintenance on our hosting environment

0400 UTC to 0900 UTC, Sunday 19th July

Some intermittent downtime is expected during this time window.

12th July 2009 - Sale balance changes for agent made bookings and other tweaks

TourCMS team — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 09:39:46 PDT

IMPORTANT

Bookings that are made by agents (or assigned to agents) where they are owing the balance (vs the customer paying on a direct booking) will now have a reduced balance taking into account any commission that is owed to them.

i.e. for a 1000 GBP booking where you owe 200 GBP commission, the balance even when the booking is first made will just be 800 GBP.

This will impact all new bookings going forward - and any existing bookings that are edited after this time (an edit being anything that adjusts commission levels or the sale price). Old bookings will not be impacted.

Other changes

Duration rules are no longer applied to tour departures - just tour freesale and options. It wasn't clear that if you loaded a 7 day tour with a fixed price then multiplied by the per night price..... much better just to load the total price for a 7 night tour as the departure price. We have checked all data for all existing bookings and only a few test bookings used this combination anyway (due to it being illogical!) but now it is impossible to get into this muddle.

Agent tracking cookie tool - if you are using the TourCMS tracking system (to track visitors to your site and their ultimate booking conversion) you couldn't access the cookie data from your own website (due to how the Internet is engineered to stop cross domain cookie reading, a good thing!). However this was causing a problem for the XML API to generate customer records (or enquiries) as these customer records were not being tracked to the correct marketing partner. There is now a tool, available from Configuration & Setup, to have the cookie data sent back to your site. You need to have some web development skills to use it, but at least now it is possible.

Option filter - you can now make options only appear on certain departures or rate types. e.g. if you have a child option that should only appear on a child rate - this is now possible. Likewise you can have options that only appear on certain board bases (for hotel style bookings)

5th July 2009 - Big update to TourCMS - lots of changes all over the place!

TourCMS team — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 15:26:46 PDT

So much to cover in this release note.... so

REPORTS
* On the sales ledger report you can now search by booking dates (not just payment dates). Handy if you want a deferred income report (needed by some accountants!)
* Extra detail on the booking summary report - markup / commission - and able to report by agent
* Customer extra data fields can be added to customer summary reports
* Booking extra data fields can be added to booking summary reports
* In resort report - so you can see who is with you on any single date
* New villa / ski chalet report - including a rather fetching gantt chart

TEMPLATE SYSTEM & REBUILDING WEB SITES
* Can output, on tour level, what kind of tour product it is (t_type)
* Has been failing when creating sites over 700 pages or so.... we *believe* we have fixed this timeout issue now... very few companies have sites over 700 pages that need to be rebuilt all at once.... but we still want to solve this problem.
* Calculated tour from price now takes into account whether pricing by day / night
* Lead in price for individual tour seasons now calculate correctly if a duration rule is set (e.g. if a tour is minimum 3 days, and pricing is by the day, should multiply the base price by 3)

BOOKING MANAGEMENT
* Staff booking process - departures now has two dates and a slightly improved layout
* Staff booking process - freesale tours merged two screens to one - should be easier to use
* Able to edit all agent commission on a booking at the same time. Also, on the right hand side, you can see what the agent commission would be if you made the same booking today. This is handy when you change agent on an existing booking and need to recalculate commission due. There is a single button to click to move those values to the actual commission values. If you change agent you are automatically directed to this page so you can check commission is correct before going back to the booking.
* Extra day showing on the today / tomorow tab (on bookings page)
* Popups in bookings edit - easier to navigate between each one
* If a freesale tour, and set to no overlap, when you edit a date you can see the previous / next booking dates... to try to stop staff moving bookings around and overlapping with existing ones (i.e. for villa / ski chalet style companies)

PRODUCT SETUP
* Options during a tour (rather than checked against start or end date). Handy if you have a gala dinner half way through a tour and you want it to show up to be selected on a 2 week tour. If set to primary dates the option will be added using the option season dates - so if you have a specific event then set a 1 day long option season length.
* Usability improvement - if you are adding a tour departure and just add a start date, a 1 day tour will be added
* New price by duration table - so you can on freesale tours multiply the price by 2 for a 2 week stay vs a 1 week stay. Handy for the villa / ski chalet style customers.

BOOKING ENGINE
* Change the "continue" button text on the shopping basket page
* Days of the week now show on the step 1 of the booking process (for tour departures)
* Able to restriction options by ID in the URL parameter linking to the booking engine. This is handy when filtering options and building your own shopping basket on your own website. We will fully write this up next week when we rewrite the booking engine manual.
* Can now set on extra customer data fields whether just added to lead customer or all customers
* Can now add booking extra data fields to the booking engine
* First screen of booking engine - if configured for multiple tour departure rates - the departure table will show the breakdown by rate type
* For freesale tour product types, if less than 10 bookable dates, those bookable dates will show (in a table). Handy for villa / ski chalet style products

TourCMS PRICING
* Added a new price level - the Budget level - at just 10 GBP per month / 20 USD. We expect companies who just want to add a booking engine to their sites - but who don't need a full reservation system right now - to take this option (if doing less than 20 bookings a month)

ROADMAP
For the first time we will now add what is coming next to our release notes

* More credit cards (itransact, moneybookers and one more undisclosed for moment)
* Better agent functionality - more reports, selling at net rates and agent balance improvements
* More changes to options - including packages (using options to do asset control between tours)

Phew!
July is going to be a busy one for us.... but hopefully from these release notes you can see we are still making good progress!

29th June 2009 - Outage report and apology

TourCMS team — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:00:00 PDT

Please accept my apologies for the outage that occured on Monday 29th June 2009

This was due to a power issue in the data centre. We use the global leading hosting / server company and they, and us, try to minimise all such events.

You can read about what the technology blog Techcrunch made of the outage..... Techcrunch article

Incidentally, we do tend to tweet (on Twitter) issues with TourCMS. Please follow us @TourCMS if you are interested

Apologies again

Alex Bainbridge
Managing Director
TourCMS

13th June 2009 - New release - Two new languages - Slovenian / Croatian

TourCMS team — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 04:47:13 PDT

We have added two more booking engine languages

- Slovenian
- Croatian

We are also working on an integration with a Croatian payment gateway (for credit cards), to be announced shortly.