IOS Reservation Feature Questions

[de-active]

Wait a second, you didn't get it.

We have:
Side A - (hotel or agent) Services, offering Online information & order

Side B - Customer, Online Customer seeking to buy / order a service

and "Side A" doesn't offer to take an online order, or to contact the customer via email ?

Sorry but if I were the customer and I had seen a service online (never mind who put it online, agent or hotel or advertising company) I would expect them to be able to communicate online. Otherwise I would choose another company.


All this is my point of view, as a customer & provider of services for many years.

No actually you didn't get it, I think I didn't make it explicit enough for you. I meant, from the travel agent sending a SMS to the hotel that there is a confirmation of a booking (B2B), not from the hotel to the guest (B2C). Off course people who are going to book online expect online communication, normally via email   

Ahhh but the same, lets say a hotel in some distance country, on some distant  mountain, on some distant peak, cut off from all civilisation and communication, except his trusty old Nokia and he happens to offer hotel to thrill seekers going on an adventure holiday gets a SMS message from the travel agent of a booking - that'd be brilliant for him 

[de-active]

Thanks for the reply Datahell, here's another to think about, most possibly in the next version of IOS: Reporting, extensive reporting tool and statistics. Lets say each hotel owner is able to get detailed statistics on booking, with graph etc   

[datahell]

IOS Reservations development started again. We might jump to version 3.0 instead of v2.5. Why? Because many new features will be added, here are some extra features that there were not to be added on v2.5: hotel/room type, SMS alert (sms message dispatch to the hotel owner mobile phone on reservation), FAX alert (FAX message to the hotel owner fax device on reservation), more payment gateways, more supported currencies, locations description inside the component, SSL mode ON/OFF. I listen to many people ideas and I will try to implement all the good ones on the component. I want to create the best booking software out there.

Note: Upgrade is always available and free for anyone uses my software.

Please don't ask me about release date and things like that. It will be announced on time. The more I delay component's release the better it will be.

[de-active]

Good to hear you listen to your customers  I can think of lots of features to put on, not all of them practical or great, but no harm in mentioning them.

Sorry do you mean these features, SMS/Fax alert ARE to be added? Or not to be added?

Do consider the reporting tools, I say this because numbers/statistics and data collection is very good for data mining and hence marketing and targeting.

If you could for example see how many bookings were made over a period of a month, three month, 6, 12 months, you can work out peak seasonal times. If you could work out from where these tourists come from (example, you may have a field upon registration where it asks for Nationality/country), then it will help better cater for those customers. If these could further be presented in the form of a graphs, pie charts etc

If you could see which hotels perform the best in any given month. These are some basic examples of data collection but data collection is very powerful.

Administrative control panel.

Just me two pence.

[datahell]

ARE to be added.
I removed the feature to bind a hotel with an autonomous page.
From version 3.0 and so on, locations have multilingual description, so you can add any description you wish (option to enable WYSIWYG editor is also an option). Off course v3.0 has sub-location support too (since v2.5). Something else regarding locations is that you can now have unlimited number of pictures for each location. So, a kind of gallery is available for each location.

The design is much more user friendly and more solid. From the same page you will be able to do more things, faster and easier. The same for the front-end area. The hotel page will be much more informational and the information will be split into tabs (hotel info, location info, comments, more?).

I will see what can be done with statistics.

[de-active]

>With the picture gallery idea, a slide show might be considered.

>Also a more comprehensive commenting system (See booking.com)

>Maybe user defined fields upon registration of guest, example in some countries, they require ID card/PP number to be recorded or the like

>Back-end Offline registration of guest: Imagine someone calls up the hotel/travel agency via phone, and so doesn't make the booking via online, if you could still register the guest in the system, that'd be good. This way, it would also allow reservation agents to take guests details over the phone, email, fax etc

Doh: It's good idea to remove the autonomous page for location, instead have fixed, static pages for locations as locations do not change like hotels.

[datahell]

Reservation notifications settings for a hotel (IOS Reservations 3.0)
http://wiki.elxis.org/wiki/IOS_Reservations/Edit_Hotel_notifications

Add/Edit location (IOS Reservations 3.0)
http://wiki.elxis.org/wiki/IOS_Reservations/Edit_location

[de-active]

WOW Amazing    IOS Reservation is getting there to become one of the best off the shelf, mass produced reservation system. Keep listening  .  I think these features are brilliant!

The web address I believe is: http://www.interfax.net/en/index.html and not http://www.interfax.com/ ?

With the locations, you can have one parent location (e.g city) and then many child (towns?). With each child (town) you can have many hotels? Right?

I'm so excited! (like you didn't know) 

[de-active]

Just a quick question: Is it possible to set the SMS/Fax on a time basis, an "out the office hour" scenario. What is meant by this is, can you set either SMS/Fax to be sent for booking confirmation let say between 12am - 7am? That would be good so lets say during the night any confirmation can be made automatically? 

[de-active]

Another idea for the purpose of user friendliness and keeping users assured is to have a "process/progress map" of reservation. What do I mean? When someone wants to book a hotel, they first search, then find a hotel, then a room, then enter their data and finally pay with a confirmation. If you could show this graphically or just a simple time line that would be reassuring to the guest. Wouldn't you agree. You can start from the beginning of the search or once someone has gone down to the rooms and rates level.

Process/Progress Map:   

Rooms & Rates > Your Selection > Guest Data > Review> Confirmation

This could be graphical or simple text based.

[aiden11]

Good idea, but i think we should all start to donate some money as ISO Reservation is a great component and if we want more futures we should support the developer.
The company is putting so much effort and implementing more futures on the software.
Such components for joomla do cost lots of money and don't have the futures that elxis and iso do offer.

I will donate my share shortly.

[de-active]

No, it's not free, Elxis is free. So donations shouldn't be given for a paid software, it should only be given for the free stuff like Elxis.

I was thinking the same actually. So what I concluded was IOS R should be sold for a higher price, when the and improved features come out, maybe upto 100 Euros? However to cover my back (& pocket) maybe it should only be the case for those purchasing a new version and not old customers (those who have already purchased it).

Truly, I think it should be more expensive.

As for Joomres, it's nothing compared to IOS R.

One of the reason why I decided to try out IOS R (which I am still testing out) is because of the attitude of the author, very humble and helpful, as for Jomres guy, well I won't say much else.

[aiden11]

You are wrong, why should the price go up for new customers, if you want to have these new futures you should pay.
I am prepared to pay for the new futures.
You just admitted that the software is much better then any other one out there.

So you better dig on your pocket and donate to keep this excellent software up.
If you don't want to donate or pay for the new futures then better keep quiet.

[datahell]

Guys relax. I develop this stuff because I like it, not just for the money. If I wanted to earn more money I would n't spare 95% of my time developing free software. I have developed in the past much more complex applications but no one knows them because they were for private customers. I don't like to work like that any more. I want to develop mass usage software. Elxis is something I develop because I want, no one forces me. So, I don't want donations and I feel uncomfortable when someone makes a donation at elxis.org.

I 've decided to develop IOS Reservations in a level far above from the competition and its price. If the component price change it wont be more than 90 euro. So, it will stay cheap.

Now, the bad news: Because of the mass changes on IOS Reservations 3.0 there might not be an automatic way to upgrade from v2.0 to 3.0. These versions become even more incompatible day-by-day. Off course old customers will get for free the new version but I can not guarantee that will be able to update easily from v2.0 to v3.0. The biggest incompatibility is that the season rates system is being abolished. A new, more flexible system, takes it's place. So, the whole availability calculation method changes.

I write in a daily basis IOS Reservations help pages at Elxis wiki. You can visit these pages any time you wish to see the status of IOS Reservations 3.0 development.

Latest addition: Hotel's add-on services

If you have features requests continue writing them. I read all posts.

[de-active]

You are wrong, why should the price go up for new customers, if you want to have these new futures you should pay.
I am prepared to pay for the new futures.
You just admitted that the software is much better then any other one out there.

So you better dig on your pocket and donate to keep this excellent software up.
If you don't want to donate or pay for the new futures then better keep quiet.

Chill out dude! The reason why those who have already purchased it shouldn't pay any extra is because, already purchased clients don't pay for upgrade, so this is an upgrade, but new clients will have no choice but to pay the new price- unless of course Datahell decides otherwise (i.e to charge an "upgrade" fee for existing clients, which he said he won't. Anyway I won't say anymore cos Datahell has responded and that is sufficient to put an end to this.

I would highly urge already paying clients who have used the software to join this thread and give their real-life problems or feedback when using this. I haven't used the software or implemented it (but hope to) so not in the same position as those already using so may not have come across some and if any awkwardness. Every business does work on a different model, like the example I have of a strange hotel on the top of the mountains, so if we can generalize these business needs they may be turned into features. A classic example was my case, where not all hotels are very well connected via internet ect so a SMS or fax would be useful for reservation confirmation.

Season system being abolished! Great, I was afraid of this!  It seemed so horrible. I'll get back to you on this.

How about, a "specials engine". Last minute discounts etc? Lets say a certain hotel/room hasn't been booked within a time frame (1 week), you can set up special rate for the last ten days of the month or something? Or a certain % discount if more than a certain number of guest or the like?