At a very top level, the following functionality areas are new and/or vastly improved

Hotel pickups

Now able, on a tour by tour basis, set hotel pickup points. A much better approach than the previous, ad hoc, approach of using questions & answers. (Questions & answers were fine, on a company by company basis, but didn't deliver the capability to have the same functionality over all TourCMS accounts)

Still more work required on this functionality - including auto-notification of the correct bus driver - enabling last minute bookings to be handled complete with the appropriate hotel pickup.

Promo codes

Now about to set a discount code for a % based discount (to be automatically applied).

Still more work required on this functionality - including tour specific promo codes - however this new functionality is an improvement on the manual promo code process that people were running previously.

Vouchers

We are currently beta testing a new voucher production and redemption process. Give us a shout if you use vouchers as part of your regular business processes.

Web API

Many many changes! We now have data fields for route maps, for uploading PDF documents (e.g. for hotel pickup maps or airport transfer zones)...... BUT probably the most important change is the new data quality settings.

We really need tours that meet a certain high quality criteria - this means big images (at least 1500x1000) and have great tour descriptions. Over the system, about 4000 of the 7000 tours meet the high quality criteria. We are working on new business opportunities that will only be available to companies with higher quality tour descriptions & images so if you go to TourCMS Marketplace and see it says your descriptions can be improved, probably a good idea if you do!

(This is and additional level to the fields than are mandatory for a tour to appear in the API))

Summary

Plenty happening. As always, good discussion on various elements of these projects in the TourCMS forums

Product configuration

* Hotel product types now hidden - although still possible to turn on hotel product types if you go to Configuration & Setup - tours general settings

* Freesale tour types (where customer selects a date) - now selectable on a tour by tour basis, but hidden by default. We still think freesale is very useful (especially for the basis of tailor-made tours) but tour departures should be used where they can be

* Now able to setup a single alternative tour (e.g. what you would suggest to a customer if their first choice wasn't available). Can continue to setup alternative tours using other methods, as before

Descriptions & Images

* Suitable for fields - e.g. suitable for families, suitable for student travel etc

* New image management capability - load large images. More about this soon

* Voucher redemption instructions field added - if you use vouchers

Automation

* Now able to setup automated supplier notification emails. This isn't the complete solution - they are currently sending in the language the customer initially booked in. We will support full supplier chosen language supplier notification emails shortly.

Thank you

The TourCMS team

Agents

* Agent login - on start of booking engine - now uses the TourCMS Marketplace agent login credentials not the previously configured agent usernames/passwords. This means that agents only have to remember one set of credentials for any TourCMS customer (of course you as a supplier have to have a commercial relationship with each agent, they can't just sell you regardless)

* Agent login on start of booking engine - removed the "select agent from a list" capability

* Invite existing agents to the TourCMS Marketplace. From within agent manager you can invite an agent - they will receive an email (sent from you) with a link. If they click the link (and accept the invitation) a TourCMS Marketplace agent account will be created for them - pre-connected with your products (so they can start selling you immediately). Now very easy to work with more and more agents!

* New filter in agent manager - top agents (by number of bookings). Find your best agents easily!

Tours

* New phrasing - Private, Public & Distributed - hopefully this differentiation is clear to everyone

* Tour names - big reorganisation of tour names. Firstly removed the capability to have website channel specific external (non distributed) tour names. Then we added the capability to have long tour names (upto 100 characters) on a website channel by channel basis. So previously was 4 tour names per tour - now we have 3 tour names per tour.

* Split the includes and excludes fields into 2 fields. Existing data is in the includes field

* Removed the alternative descriptions (by default)

* Start and end times now settable on a 5 minute increment (not 10 minutes as before)

* Descriptions content - removed h1, h2, h3, h4 heading capability from the content fields (really headings should be in your template designs, not in the data.... especially as we have now split the includes and excludes fields)

* Cut offs (on tour departures / freesale) - so you can now close much more accurately for on the day bookings

* Ask first settings (for departures) are now set as % of the trip capacity rather than actual numbers. Also they are off by default.

Bookings

* Removed the unlimited quantity switch on a tour - so all can now be edited fully

* Removed the itinerary tab by default (but you can turn it on again in bookings configuration & setup)

CMS

* Removed the f_notice element tag

* Removed the %website_address% booking token (and field)

* URLs should now support UTF8 characters (Greek, Japanese etc)

Users

* Split the user permissions from the system management section

* Only account owners now can see billing information, change credit cards etc

* Inactivity logout now 60 minutes for everyone (rather than some on 15 mins)

* Merged some of the user permissions to use the same permission settings - hopefully making it easier to setup new users and manage existing users

Other

* Removed the hotel word and tour word configuration capability

In October 2012 we will continue to make substantial improvements and changes to the system. We will endeavour to keep changes to a sustainable level. We appreciate your support in our aim of making TourCMS easier to configure and more powerful at the same time.

Thank you

This release note is a summary of changes made over the last few months:

Bookings

* Unconfirmed bookings tab - easy to see bookings (arriving shortly) - where not yet confirmed (normal process is that this is for bookings where payments are still due)

* Post trip email - can send upto 365 days after the trip, can set upto 2 post trip emails

* Pre trip email - can now send 3 pre-trip emails (e.g. at different times - or a different email to agents and customers)

* Flags - new flag notification for last minute bookings and last minute cancellations (ideal for day tour operators)

* See on booking edit screen the number of days before travel that the booking is (next to the cancel booking button) - handy if you have specific booking cancellation conditions.

* Can now edit custom booking fields on cancelled bookings

* Flags & notifications - can see other users's flags (on the main list)

* Add existing customer to an existing booking - you can now add by customer ID (not just surname) - helpful if you have hundreds of customers with the same name (that some tour operators do). Find the ID on the customer record.

Working with agents & partners

* TourCMS Marketplace agents - notified via email when a new (confirmed) booking made (Email notification can be turned off by the agent/partner - in their login)

* New column on tours page - green tick / red cross -showing if a tour is correctly setup in the TourCMS Marketplace. Really you want all green ticks!

Product configuration

* Harder to mass delete all tour departures (now requires super user). People were deleting all their dates by accident. Oops.

* Tour copy - now you can create a tour by copying another tour.... should make configuration of many products a little quicker. Additionally you can copy dates & prices from an existing tour to a new tour.

* Time based buffers - so can auto-close departures at, for example, 4 hours prior to tour start (ideal for day tours that are booked on the day)

Reports

* Supplier report - search by product type, now has all supplier types on the report (including just accounting record ones)

* Customer summary report - advanced report templates - can hide booking name, booking ID, whether a staff member, customer age - and alter which parts of the passport information to show

* Run a custom report for just a single booking (from Docs & Comms on the booking itself). Can be handy for some situations.

* Invoice extract - now has booking name, lead customer name, agent name and either the agent or the customer ID (depending upon who is paying the balance)

API

* Tour search order - next_bookable_date - particularly useful if you run irregular tours (e.g. each tour only once or twice per year) (or an event) - as you can then list tours in chronological order

* Tour search - search by availability on a specific date

* Tour search - min_priority - ideal if you only want to list high commercial priority tours (e.g. to have a subset on your TourCMS Facebook application, for example)

* Dates and deals API now has hotel product in

* Dates and deals API now has booking engine URLs in (for going straight into the "out of the box" TourCMS booking engine)

* Created date now on tour show and tour search API - so can list tours in created date order (ideal if you want to say "new events")

* Booking update - able to update travel insurance details (these are per customer, per booking)

* Tour show - can now have custom fields and categories.... if using internal API credentials. Tour search also now supports searching by categories (so you can create your own custom tour search rather than rely on the standard TourCMS fields, if you like)

* API handoff - miss the first step of the TourCMS booking engine - e.g. imagine you have your own availability calendar on your website - you can then jump straight into the middle of the booking engine.... this means you can have full control of how you present dates, prices, availability on your own website - but don't have to build your own booking engine using the API..... best of both worlds ;)

Payment gateways

* Paypal timeout now 180 seconds (previously 90). We still are getting some Paypal payment failures online - grrr - we will continue to look at this.

* Paypal - should be able to now have IPN data coming into TourCMS for non TourCMS Paypal transactions - without TourCMS creating an alert for it

* Fixed a problem with the Borgun payment gateway - payment data was coming in twice (but only added to the TourCMS sales ledger once - the 2nd was always rejected as a duplicate - but the 2nd time would create a failed payment flag notification - which wasn't good)

* Realex - able to set sub-accounts

* Ogone - now supported

* SecurePay - now supported

Other

* Staff user management - now search by email address / name - useful if you have hundreds of staff in your account (not many do!)

* Enquiry and agent sign up spam - we continue to see form spam on these 2 forms (adding an agent sign up or new enquiry to your site). We have taken some preventative measures - but will do more!

Thank you!

User Interface

- Website manager renamed as Channel Manager. Websites also renamed as Channels. (As a reminder, Channels enable you to manage multiple brands or websites within a single account)

- Portuguese booking engine / customer facing documentation (we now support 20 languages)

Agents & Suppliers

- Delete agent records

- Delete supplier records

- Supplier login - able to change the message about image caching - if you are only updating images on your website once every 24 hours (rather than if you are serving images from our infrastructure, when it will be updated after 30 minutes)

- Agent manger - now has agent group selection

- Booking report - now has agent group selection

Customers & Bookings

- SMS sending for flags & notifications

- Easy to delete blank customer records (go to super user in the customers section and you will see the link there)

- New automated emails in Channel Manager - mid-trip, booking anniversary, travel anniversary, payment acknowledgement

- Redesigned flags & notifications settings for all users

- Able to BCC users that the booking is assigned to - for all outbound automated email.

- New flags & notifications - successful/failed payment (when customer made via email request)

- Add multiple customers at once (to an existing booking)

- Uncancel a booking, deletes the cancel notifications & flags

- On a user you can set a corporate (or team) from name / email address for outbound email. Therefore you can keep their own email addresses on their user accounts (so they receive notifications etc) BUT can send via perhaps a shared generic email address for outbound email to customers

- Year on Year reports - now shows the last 3 years - if doing the report based on the year entered the system

- Balance due information now available on the booking summary report (Advanced reports)

Payment Gateways

- Authorize.net added

- As mentioned, there is a new payment acknowledgement email you can send (handy to send emails to customers when they have made a payment from an email request)

- As mentioned, you can now be set a flag & notification for a successful or failed credit card payment made from an email request.

API

- datesndeals API - can now call with distinct start dates - so only get one deal per date (ideal if you are creating an availability calendar and need to colour it correctly without doing much calculation yourself)

TourCMS Pricing

A couple of tweaks to our pricing. Nothing any paying customers should worry about!

- Free accounts have moved to 10 tours/hotels before you have to upgrade (rather than 20)

- Budget + has moved from 3 to 5 channels

- Standard has moved from 4 to 5 channels

- Premium has moved to unlimited bookings (was 1000 a month previously)

- Gold has moved to unlimited bookings (was 1000 a month previously)

Thank you!

We have also been involved in a large UK project (announcement coming shortly) and that did take quite a bit of development resource time..... but now that this project is almost complete we can revert back to full time improvements including shortly more CRM functionality, more payment gateways and additional financial reporting.

Tweaks

* New multi-supplier login - let suppliers login, add product, see bookings - full explanation -a major amount of work has gone on here and if you want to set up a service where different suppliers login to your single central account this is now easy

* Supports customers of indeterminate gender

* Live booking API now complete (95%) and fully documented. Design & build your own booking engine!

* Advanced reports - customer summary - can now split by title, first name, middle name, surname

* New alert (if you wish it) to tell you if anyone in your account has become locked out (as a result of too many failed login attempts)

* Able to remove the account name / login URL from the new user email - useful if the user is logging in from your website, rather than via the TourCMS main login.

* Tours now have start and end times (rather than the previous approach which was to put the time in the code)

* Google Analytics can be set on all steps of the booking engine. It also now should work so that when the user goes to a payment gateway and comes back to the booking engine this is no longer seen as a new visitor

* Mandatory booking fee - can be set to per person (rather than per booking)

* Nepalese timezone

* Options - you can select to hide the price in the booking engine

* Can block all automated emails on a booking

* 2 new automated emails - quotation booking chaser, provisional booking chaser - good to hassle customers if they haven't replied to you ;)

* Terms & Conditions now need to be configured in the Marketplace - so that if a booking is taking place on a 3rd party website - that website knows your T&Cs. Please do configure them if this is the kind of bookings you are doing

* Many new supplier fields on a supplier record. You don't have to use them..... but they are there if you wish to!

* Rounding rules - can now round up to the nearest 9

* New API method to update the tour URL (handy if you are using an alternative CMS for your website so your other CMS knows the tour URL..... )

Phew ;)

General small tweaks

* Can now brand the TourCMS back office in your colours and in your name

* Able to add staff users with permission to view bookings restricted by website channel (rather than previously by product filter)

* Easier to delete customers/enquiries - including a new SPAM delete mechanism for undesirable enquiries

* Able to move multiple enquiries from one user to another in one go (handy if a member of staff leaves)

* New simplified method to add enquiry forms to your website - see the documentation - now easy to convert your existing contact us forms to using the TourCMS system....... including behind the scenes correct travel agent tracking

* Customer username (for customer login) now defaults to their email address

* Search by supplier - on booking advanced search

* Fixed Payment Express integration so works with AMEX cards

* Improved uncancellation of hotel bookings where since the booking was cancelled a new hotel booking was received in the same room hence the former booking had to be moved rooms in order to uncancel

* Addressed a big issue with people being logged out in Firefox 5 (eek!)

API

This is where the main focus has been in the last few months

* Completely new API permissions setup - now we have 3 levels of permission - Seller, Affiliate and Agent. Much simpler than before.

* Many new API methods as detailed in the documentation. Developers can now access bookings, customer records, payments, update data etc etc.We will be announcing more about the API in due course.

Thanks!

Launch your own affiliate programme

One of the most powerful aspects of TourCMS is the distribution and marketing tools that are part of the TourCMS Marketplace. However upto this point it has been tricky to sign up your own agents quickly (for you and them).

Now you can add a sign up form to your own website. Agents / affiliates can sign up directly from your own website (without having to come to the TourCMS website).

When an agent / affiliate signs up a TourCMS Markeplace account will be created. This, following your acceptance of that agent / affiliate, will then automatically be connected to your supplier account - so they will see your product information etc...

This process is much easier than before..... add a page on your website about your affiliate programme (with the new sign up form) and you will find plenty of new companies willing to take your product and promote it.....

4 new payment gateways

* Borgun - Iceland

* E-xact Hosted Checkout - US / Canada

* Realex - Ireland / UK

* DIBS - Denmark / Scandinavia

User permissions & login

* Read only (Restricted) - no longer see email templates

* Supplier login - Previously was possible to setup a login so that a supplier (e.g. a ground handler) could only see tours / bookings within a specific product filter. That functionality remains but the new functionality is centred on the supplier record instead. Suppliers can create, delete tours / options, see bookings etc

* Filter bookings access by website

* Add a TourCMS login (either Agent or supplier side) to your own website - useful if you want to maintain the login experience for your own agents. Instructions

Reports

* Booking name shows on the "who is in which room" report

* Upto 10 custom fields on bookings / customer report (up from 5 previously)

Bookings management

* Advanced search - can now search by name, product code or any matching text

* Component name custom edit can now be 150 characters (was 50 before)

* Improved sales ledger payment search - filter by booking agent now possible

API & web

* Tour search - can order by price down, price up

* List channels, channel information - have number of tours/hotels in tour_count

* Joomla - progress continues on the Joomla extension

Thank you!

Booking engine

* 3 new languages - Chinese, Finnish, Danish

* 2 new payment gateways - Nets (Norway), Sparkassen-InternetKasse (Germany)

* Customer title now has a separate setting to name (yes, no, mandatory)

* Step 1 calendar can now be set to start on Sunday (rather than Monday). Ideal for US customers.

* Can change the text for adults, children and infants

Product configuration

* Tour / hotel / option codes can now be upto 50 characters

* Option - can inherit the deposit rule from the associated tour/hotel (and its deposit rule)

* Option - can set a negative tour / product filter code (previously was only possible to set positively)

* Hotel - able to set to permit free infants but hide the children dropdown

* New data quality email - if we think you haven't configured a product quite correctly we will send you an automated email giving you advice as to what you could change! Do tell us what you think of them if you get one.

* Can now manually set the lead in price for a tour / hotel (if you don't like how TourCMS automatically calculates the lead in price)

Bookings

* Able to make the lead customer a non-traveller (will impact the number of people on the booking)

* Can resend expired quotation / expired provisional booking email

* Upto 3 documents can now be sent at attachments on manually sent booking emails

* Made date, cancellation date now in the booking extract excel document

* Latest bookings list now shows 75, latest assigned shows 75, Quotes & provisionals list now shows 300

* Own all flags on a single booking in a single click

* Arrivals report now has component dates on (daily and weekly arrivals reports)

* Advanced reports - can order by cancellation date, can add cancellation date column

* Automated emails - can now email lead customer, cc agent (but only where agent is paying the balance). Ideal if you use affiliate style agents as they probably shouldn't be getting your customer booking emails

* Automated emails - can now email all customers on the booking. Ideal for post trip email so you can send an email requesting reviews from all customers in the group, not just the lead customer.

* Automated balance reminder emails - can now setup emails that remind the customer that their balance is over due. When combined with the email tokens to add a "pay now" link to your emails you can better automate your office by asking for actual payments automatically.

* Text search (the new label for booking name search) now searches against the booking name and all booking notes. Ideal if you are hunting for an elusive booking and only have partial information as to what it might be.

* Booking edit - the booking name edit box now accepts much longer booking name entries

Other

* Tour search API - restrict by tour duration. i.e. if you just want 7 day tours you can find them easily now.

* New tokens %b_base_cost_price_total_nett% - Cost value of the booking (excluding tax) and %b_base_cost_price_total_inc_tax% - Including tax

* API - new Ruby and Java libraries (alongside existing .NET and PHP libraries)

* Marketplace partners can now see affiliate TourCMS accounts that they have created (where they are referring suppliers to TourCMS). They no longer can see non upgraded TourCMS accounts.

Bug fixes

* Brought back that you can refresh a credit card from Payment Express back to TourCMS (that we have previously removed!)

* Product grade no longer shows on widgets if grade is set to not applicable

* Configuration of standard emails - lead customer now selectable again ;)

* HTML used in itinerary tokens now comes out OK again (meant to be used for pre-departure information packs for example)

* First night fixed price for hotel products - issue fixed

* Fixed bug where the switch for not selling when a single night not loaded (a product loading safety precaution) wasn't quite right

* Fixed bug on single occupancy hotel setting where cost price was loaded but no sale price

* Moved the advanced tour freesale settings onto the same page as the normal tour freesale settings - so everyone can hopefully see the rate tab, regardless of your screen size

* Fixed misleading user interface where you have a local payment in the non-sale currency of the booking

* Fixed Netherlands Antillies country issues. Now have two new countries - Curacao and Saint Maarten

* %website_contact%, %website_email% now return the website contact details not the agent ones

* Addressed a speed issue on step 1 of the booking engine (hotels)

* Fixed issue in tour search API when 3 keywords provided and when joined with an AND

Thanks!

API

* Search by grade and accommodation rating
* Change the keyword search to be an AND rather than the default OR

Tour configuration

* Copy the same description (tour/hotel) into multiple website channels quickly. Handy if you are featuring your tour/hotel on multiple channels and you want to share the same descriptions on all. Some customers though have different descriptions for the same product when featuring on different websites (e.g. in another language or promoting a different aspect of the product)

Booking tokens

* %address_schedule% - a list of postal addresses for all tour/hotel components on a booking

* %pickup_schedule% - a list of all pickup points (and pickup instructions) for all tour/hotel components on a booking

* %t_url%, %comp_url% - pull the web address of the tour/hotel into your emails / documents - so you can tell customers where they can go for further information

Bookings management

* Now shows 200 (rather than 50) quotes and provisional bookings on the quick overview screen.

* Deposit can be larger than the outstanding balance on a booking but now the sale value takes into account the net sale value (removing agent commission). Will keep an eye on this as we have changed this around a few times now. Pretty sure we have this right now but quite complex :)

* IP address used to make the booking now shows (and new token %b_ip% if you want to pull into emails / documents)

Booking engine

* Title will be mandatory if shown, except for non lead customers where it will take the mandatory/non mandatory setting from the name permission

* Rename the word agent on step 1 of the booking engine (where used next to agent selection dropdown)

* Agent selection dropdown - can restrict which agents show on that list by agent group

* Notes / special requests - can be turned off

* Can make telephone numbers digits only

Payment gateways

* Can refund (fully or partially) from within TourCMS (for gateways that support it)

* Credit card fees show which customer made that associated payment - so if you want to remove a credit card fee you know which one to remove

* Request payment via email (ideal for tailor-made tours) - new tokens to request deposit and balance payments. e.g. you can receive a quote request online, you then tweak the booking until it matches the customer requirements, you can then send an email saying "pay a deposit now" - they click on a link - make a card payment - the money goes into your accout, the sales ledger data is entered into TourCMS....

* Now completed the complete rewriting of our payment gateway system. We are ready to work with individual customers to integrate additional payment gateways as required. Contact us for details.

UI changes

* Advanced customer search - search by title

* Now easier to see Marketplace partners where you are connected with one website channel but not all your website channels

* Create new option - name can now be upto 150 characters

Bug fixes

* Fixed a problem with %itinerary_table_text%. Sorry about that.

* TourCMS now compatible with IPv6

* Addressed an issue that may have caused duplicate email sending when you are using your own SMTP email gateway and it is not responsive. Now leave your email server alone for 10 minutes after a sending failure.... as sometimes your SMTP servers were actually sending, but replying back to us as a failure, hence duplicates as we resend automatically if we get a sending failure.

Other

* Tweaked our pricing for our gold level accounts. Now has 500 staff users in the account. Ideal if you want multiple suppliers to login to your account and see their bookings. Previously a rarely used supplier login account would cost quite a bit of money - now it is much better

* Tweaked our included bookings for Standard +, Premium and Gold. Now makes more sense for large scale tour wholesalers.

* The TourCMS affiliate programme (where we pay 100 GBP per new sign up (and upgraded) referral) has now been moved to within the Marketplace partner login. Much easier for everyone to signup and promote TourCMS now :)

Thank you

Bookings

* Booking name - new switch (in configuration & setup, bookings) to make the booking name come from the first tour/hotel added (rather than the last one added). Generally the default is fine (especially if you are tailor making an itinerary) however now it is possible to change the default if you wish. Remember you can always change (on an individual booking) the booking name - e.g. if you want to personalise it.

* Subject lines for booking emails can now take tokens (if entered manually)

* Pin a note to the booking - now can be exported in a custom report (booking detail & booking summary). Also a new token %pinned_note%

* Sales ledger reports - 2 new outputs - Balances not yet due, Balances not yet due (confirmed bookings)

* When you make a credit card payment (with a credit card fee) the fee now shows who made that payment (handy if you have several credit card payments on the same booking and want to know which fee relates to which payment)

* Fixed a bug that was impacting % based deposit calculations (where set on a tour/hotel, not the marketing website channel) and where the sale currency wasn't the same as the account base currency.

Hotel setup & reports

* Children as adults rule - now only changes a child to be counted as an adult if there is 1 adult in the room. Seems the rule was almost perfect before but now it absolutely reflects how many hotels offer their occupancy contracts.

* Room / rate copy now copies the no arrivals field

* Report - who is in which room - if you report on a leaving date the report no longer contains those leaving that day (just those that are there during the day - or that night)

* Report - who is in which room - now has customer age shown (if known)

Booking engine

* Use H1, H2, H3, H4 in your HTML sections

* Quite a few changes to the Russian translation based on feedback from Russia...

CMS & API

* On a category page (CMS) (e.g. by collection / product filter) - you can now infer a collection ID into a list of options - so only options that are on tours/hotels within that collection will be listed

* On tour search (API) you can now order by alphabetical order

General

* Fixed a bug with IE and Excel documents - for a reason relating to browser user agents - only under HTTPS - users were being logged out when an Excel document was opened.

Status of credit card payment gateway project

This release saw one change to payment gateways (indication on credit card fees as to which payment the fee relates to). We have one more tweak to do (Able to issue refunds from within TourCMS for external payment gateways) and then we will be moving onto the main, overdue, payment gateway project that I know a few customers are waiting for.

Thanks!