New Website for Hotel Reservations

[escapeur]

The effort started one year and half ago and finally we have touched the end.
The new website will be ready in less than a week, offering great prices for Hotel Reservations in some of the best Holiday Destinations.
We offer 2, 3, 4, and 5 star Hotels in Greece, Turkey, Spain, Egypt, Italy, USA, Portugal, Tunisia, Marroco etc...
We have more than 3,000 Hotels at the moment.

The Website has been built with Elxis CMS and we are using IOS Reservations as our Reservation Software at the back.
Few more changes and corrections we need in order to be 100% operational.

You can Visit the new website at www.escapeurope.com.
All Comments about your thoughts, mistakes, things we should do are more than welcome.

[datahell]

You have added a "youid" in IOSR urls and some of them do not work. Also you have destroy the SEO PRO URLs, you use not sef urls for the inner pages which is bad. Also you have made some urls not working at all.

Example:
http://www.escapeurope.com/index.php?option=com_reservations&task=hotel&lid=75&hid=youid:955&Itemid=121
The show all rooms link is:
http://www.escapeurope.com/reservations/skiathos-hotel/.html?allrooms=1
which is wrong

Your site is full of bad urls. I think you have to fix them before going live. IOSR has excellent URLs, I dont understand why you spoil them. If you wanted to add extra information on them (the youid for example) you could simple add this information in the query string.

Example:
http://www.escapeurope.com/reservations/crete/belmondo-historic-hotel.html?youid=XXX

Also by converting the hotel id from an integer to a string (youid:123 is a string) some javascript function do not work any more and the inner code needs different validation.

Example:
resavailcheck(youid:124808, 'http://www.escapeurope.com');
The above is wrong.
You have to make it and also change the validation code (validate a string instead of an integer):
resavailcheck('youid:124808', 'http://www.escapeurope.com');

But I strongly advice you not to include the "youid" it is useless repeating it.

[nikos]

You can Visit the new website at www.escapeurope.com.
All Comments about your thoughts, mistakes, things we should do are more than welcome.

1. W3C CSS Validator results for http://www.escapeurope.com/ Sorry! We found the following errors (2)

2. W3C Markup Validation Service 3 Errors, 5 warning(s) found while checking this document as XHTML 1.0 Transitional!

Also looking various pages of your site my eye stopped here  and here where I noticed that images have not any space from text and this does not look nice. See parameters of bot mosimage to fix it. (apart if you did it on purpose and you like as it is). At this last page at the bottom the link for hotel zante plaza is wrong (look: http://www.escapeurope.com/el/reservations/laganas/zante-plaza-hotel.html)

Also looking for sitemap i dd not find any link for it and by my opinion it is useful to exist.

Also is missing Home from top menu. At the bottom where exists, is difficult for the visitor to see it (as it was for me). Or at least make you logo to work as home if you don't like to set home on top menu.

Check your site again and again. If you spent 1,5 year to build it, is not problem to spend 1 week more to fix all problems.

[escapeur]

Dear All,

I would like to thank you for all comments even if all of them are negative.

As this website is operating from a small team of Travel Professionals and not technicians i have to talk to them -the technicians-  for all the mistakes you have noticed and hopefully will be fixed.

Dear Nikos, the 1.5 years of effort had nothing to do with the website design - which was a matter of a month) but with the effort of adding the Hotels & Connect to Different Bed Banks. This connection is probably the first one for a website using Elxis and IOS, so, some mistakes might have been done as you say. (Data Hell i hope you will be able to give us your useful advises at this point in the near future)

At this point i would like to tell you, that the concept of escapeurope.com is probably unique in the Greek Travel Industry. And what i mean is the prices you can find for Hotels & Apartments in our Data.  We might have less Hotels than other Greek travel websites such as pamediakopes or hotels4u.gr but our prices are, in the most of the cases ,10 to 50% less than them. We have better prices even from the European giant booking.com.

I know the problems with the url's and this is something we have to check again and again.
I will email Data Hell and hopefully he will tell us an easy way to fix all these issues.

More comments about mistakes and things we should do are more than welcome.




 

[escapeur]

Dear Nikos,

Concerning the issue with the Home Page, i would like to inform you that the "Hotels" item at the top menu and next to "all inclusive hotels" works as "Home".
You might be right, though. Maybe we should change the title from Hotels to Home. We will check it.

[nikos]

I am not a hotelier or a tourist proffessional to estimate quality of services or prices e.t.c. you mention about. I just saw your site by the eye of a simple visitor and as an elxis advanced user and I wrote my personal opinion - comments about, because you asked it. It is up to your needs what you will do, or change, or fix, finally and I wish you all the best with your site.

[escapeur]

I am not a hotelier or a tourist proffessional to estimate quality of services or prices e.t.c. you mention about. I just saw your site by the eye of a simple visitor and as an elxis advanced user and I wrote my personal opinion - comments about, because you asked it. It is up to your needs what you will do, or change, or fix, finally and I wish you all the best with your site.

Dear Nikos,

As i said earlier all comments are more than welcome.
I would like to personal thank you for taking the time to check our website and tell your thoughts.
This is something important for us as it helps to achieve our goals and targets.

Kind Regards

[webgift]

Welcome bobbygreen to Elxis Community ,
You can see the features of IOS Reservation Component. We can also see the live demonstration area and login as administrator here  in order to test that and implement of how it works.

Finally here is the list of IOSR affiliates that can help - advice you.

[rentasite]

I have seen this site long long time ago. and to be honest i didn't realize that it was an Elxis site with IOSR.

_{What i don't like... at a glance? In the contact area there is a mobile phone instead of a fixed phone.}

It really escapes from the standards! Keep up the good work. 

[babis1]

ops i see sitemap.xml in root http://www.escapeurope.com/sitemap.xml thats good, is the default elxis sitemap that ?

[escapeur]

Thanks for the good comments guys.

The fact was just a mobile there is because we were mooving to a new office. Now we have propert telephone numbers.

Thanks again

[escapeur]

* all the bad urls have been fixed.
**Filters like price, stars, board type have been added.
*** The xml connection between IOS and the 3rd Bed Bank has been completed.

I think this is the 1st time we have such a connection between IOS and a 3rd party.
Congratulations to Webgift Services.

[nikos]

After long time...

I still personally believe that a home page link on top menu, or a logo on header with link on home page, will make site for visitors more functional regarding the navigation.

[webgift]

- Thanks a lot escapeur for all these kind words and support.!!!
- I think that you have used the linkable logos (Niko) redirecting to the homepage. However you are right that's why i have almost included this feature.!

[nikos]

Now yes, exists. Some minutes ago when i saw it there was not.

Set and a title and will be fine.