IOS Reservations 4.x feature requests

[AJRA]

Hi,
I use IOS Reservations and one shortcoming I have found from the beginning is due to the following fact: Hotel reservations are either made by the client himself or by a Travel Agent (Tour Operator?). In any event, there has to be a way to enter the hotel guest's names, titles (Mr., Mrs., Inf., etc.) and ages. Same thing will apply for "Car Rentals" where name and age of driver are a must.

[datahell]

The name of the person that made the booking is enough, it is not ferry or air-plane tickets. Even for car rentals you only need the driver's data, not the rest passengers. So, I don't think such information are required.

[datahell]

A new screenshot from IOSR 4.x.

In the picture you can see the move reservation feature (change check-in/check-out dates on an existing booking).

Brief explanation
- Navigation through months from the top arrows.
- Old check-in/check-out dates are marked with a striped background.
- Click on a date to set new check-in date (checkout date is auto-calculated from the reservation's stay duration).
- If all the reservation's rooms are available on the new date cells marked with green background and you see accumulative prices for each date.
- If not, cells are marked with red background colour.
- You can accept move and update prices or accept move without updating prices.

Similar interface exist in frontend section where guests can try different checkin dates for hotel rooms. (e.g. a room is not available on the desired date and pick near dates).

[kyomar]

That's awesome. Will it be possible to change stay duration as well?

Sorry has been mentioned before, but it would be really great if one could change room as well (only admin/hotelier). The more flexible the better. The problem with deleting and redoing a reservation is the res.-no. changes or how is this solved? I use res.-no. on the invoice (accounting) and I am worried that I have to delete/redo invoices as well. Just my thoughts.

[datahell]

I have thought about it when I re-designed the system and till now I haven't add this functionality. The main reason is because the admin might do bad things which may lead to serious conflicts with the customer.

Sample scenario
Customer A books a double bedded room with cuisinette and see view for 100 EUR. The admin decides to put him somewhere else and he changes his room to a double bedded without cuisinette and view to the mountain. He also keeps the same price (100EUR) although the new room is cheaper. The customer arrives at the hotel and sees that the room they are going to put him is not the one he booked... This is why I think it would be better not to be able to modify the booked items, but just the prices.

[kyomar]

I have a different approach when designing workflows. First priority is efficiency and then how can I prevent mistakes along this path. Like your example, I can do the same by deleting and recreating a reservation with mistakes. If one tries to eliminate all possible mistakes the system becomes very inefficient and complicated. Different user levels could be a solution to prevent unauthorized changes.

In my view it should be possible to change everything within a reservation. I checked demo IOS Res3 and I felt like my hands are cuffed behind the back.

Anyway, there should always be communication between guest and hotel. Any change in the reservation should trigger a message to the guest with the new details.

I am really looking forward to IOS Res 4.

[datahell]

If you were in my position you would see that most people unfortunately make tragic mistakes in very simple tasks because they are bored to pay attention to warnings and read the documentation. They want to have a site like booking.com without doing nothing, without configurating anything and without even insert data! IOSR 4.x lets you do much more things on the reservation (except changing the booked items), like changing prices on the booked items and of fcourse moving the reservation in an other date (with a much better interface).

As for the communication both IOSR 3.x and 4.x send reports to the customers with this difference:

IOSR 3.x: automatic report send to customer on reservation confirm, reject, move. No manual reports.
IOSR 4.x: automatic report send to the customer on reservation reject only. The admin/hotelier can manually send a full report (reservation status as a PDF attachment) to the customer by clicking on an icon. So on IOSR 4.x the hotelier/admin can controll better when he will inform the customer. Also IOSR 4.x has direct contact forms for all customers, hoteliers and tour administrators. You click on an icon and contact directly the person you want. I will attach a screenshot later.

[juanon]

oopss!!

still no way to autonfirm bookings??

when could we test the first beta?

thanks

[datahell]

- Bookings are auto-confirmed in both IOSR 3 and 4 after a successful online payment.

- I don't know yet.

[juanon]

Pitty,

I need to autoconfirm with in-hotel payment, every customer asks it to me...

Thanks

[datahell]

Confirmation is something controlled by the chosen payment method, even offline ones. You can edit any payment method and change to confirmed=1, that's all!

[juanon]

Great!!

Really looking forward to IOSR 4.

Keep the good work!!

[juanon]

Great!!

It seems IOSR4 is almost here!!

Ionnis, we are really excited, can you please tell us the new features?

Thanks a lot

[datahell]

I just finished the hotelier's control panel. I post a screenshot from the last page I completed, the reservations report. You can see some new things like the commission fee (money the hotelier pays to the admin as a fee), export report as Excel spreadsheet file, and more filtering options like the guests country and the reservation source. The hotelier's control panel is fully mobile/tablet compatible. Finally the hotelier's control panel does not displays IOS copyright messages, but only your own. IOS copyright and references to IOS Reservations and Is Open Source are only visible in the administration area. This because some people asked it in the past months.

The development will stop for a while, to get some rest and continue at the end of August (Don't expect IOSR sooner than September 30).

[kyomar]

looks great, very clean and organized. Enjoy your well deserved time off.