IOS Reservations 4.x online demo

[datahell]

IOS Reservations 4.x demo site is available online!
Version 4.x introduces a brand new generation of the booking platform IOS Reservations built on the superior Elxis 4.x CMS.
On the demo site you can test online IOSR 4.x Hotels extension and also see in action template Aurora by Webgift.

Try IOS Reservations 4.x online
Comments are welcome.

Notes

• You can not yet buy IOS Reservations 4.x. It will become available for purchase in about a week.
• Template Aurora can be purchased from Webgift.dev website.

[juanon]

Hi Datahell,

Congratulations, testing right now.

aren´t exists ratings and comments for hotels?

Thanks

[datahell]

Yes, they are but not used in the demo.

[mgrc]

Great job.
Speechless after checking the demo.

Just wondering where/how currency conversion data is obtained.

Amazing set of features.

Wow!

[datahell]

Thanks!
My goal was to create a simple and easy to use interface for users, hoteliers and admins and run the hard tasks silently in the backend. See as example how easily the room prices are entered, how search works, how the different blocks -even the external modules- co-work as a whole, see the smart human friendly messages and tips, and more. IOSR 4.x is not just a booking script, it is a whole platform with ready to use libraries that developers will love. I have developed some VERY useful tourism related libraries for IOSR. Exchange rates are 100% correct and they are updated in silent automatically once per day.

I wouldn't be able to develop IOSR 4.x if we hadn't the power of Elxis 4.x in the backend.

There are 1-2 minor important things I need to fix on the demo site in the afternoon. Don't forget to also check the mobile version with your mobile phone!

[CREATIVE Options]

Excellent work John !

When you are in low resolution the left bar doesn't re-arrange (Left bar doesn't seems to have break point).
If you have select the mobile version to be enable, it is ok.

[nikos]

Excellent professional job!

Congratulations!

It has many new features and i enjoyed the surfing specially with aurora template which is a very nice template.

I saw it with PC on a 22" monitor, Tablet 7" and smart web TV 47". On TV monitor of 47" looks magnificent!

[how]

Well done Datahell, congratulations

I would like to use IOSR 4.X for offering hotels just in kefalonia island of greece.
So I would desire main location kefalonia and sub locations places and villages of kefalonia.

So in the search form I would like predefine main location the kefalonia island and option for a customer to search in a sub-location he likes.
Is it possible to adjust the search form like this?

I read in the demo site:
''Pick the destination of your choice, set your desired check-in and check-out dates and your rooms preferences to get the available hotels. If you don't get any results set more generic criteria or click to one of the recommended destinations.''

How can you pick a destination of your choise? I dont see any list with offered destinations that can be displayed. Customer should try to type a destination he wants and if there is such destination to select to continue his searching.

So in my case what should I do? Choose country greece, add new location ''kefalonia'' and continue with adding sub-locations?
How can customer sees (without has to know his exact destination in the island) a list of the offered destinations in the island? I dont know if what I say makes sense to you.
I have the impression that customer has to already know his exact destination, but from the search form cannot see the offered destinations.

I tried through the demo to create a new location. I saw that choosing a real existing  country is mandatory .. I cannot set as main location ''kefalonia'' should be Greece-- Kefalonia. (I think IOSR 3.x works different yes? with main locations and sublocations.. main location wasnt necessary to be a country)  I tried to add new location kefalonia to country greece but I couldnt continue further as demo returns that error message ''Error details Task demoNotAllowed was not found in class adminIOSRC in file admin.php ''
I guess is not allowed in the demo site?

Any comments that could help me are welcome.

thank you

[juanon]

Congratulations!! Congratulations!! Congratulations!!

After testing for some hours I´m really amazed, very very good work. Very solid, very good thought...

I love the new one-page payment process, the new interface for price rates and the API features.

That said I have to ask you some questions:

- Can we see how ratings and reviews work?
- Is it possible to change the size of photo thumnails?
- Can photos be limited in size for avoiding big uploads?
- Is it easy to change the holidays days? Spanish ones are wrong...
- I need autoconfirmation of bookings and auto cancelations, is it possible?
- I don´t understand the order of results for DATE... Can´t the hotels be ordered for rating?
- Isn´t it possible the offline payment with credit card now?
- how does "Nearby" works? for kilometres? I don´t understand.
- how can a hotel stop bookings beyond a date? is there a default price for hotel rooms?
- Would it be hard to change facilities words for icons? and adding some graphic stats?
- I can´t make pdf invoice to work in firefox.

In the demo we can´t check some features, perhaps you can explain them a bit:

- Different types of maps, images and styles in pages.
- Different types of urls.
- Integration, custom data fields.

Besides I think there are some few features easy to implement and very useful for sure, perhaps I´m in still in time:

- Closing dates for hotels where no room is available
- Customization of reservation form (for example for repeating email and make the telephone number to adapt to a regular expresion)
- Some way to make a room Not refoundable (although other rooms in hotel do), it is something very common nowadays in hotel marketing.
- Comments like "only 1 room left" or "only 2 rooms left"

Finally I would like to know more about integration with booking (and other big ones), price of the software and if there is any discount for old buyers.

Thanks a million for this great piece of software and your effort.

Regards.

[webgift]

Very promising the functionality of the new IOS Reservation component compatible with Elxis 4.1 (or newer).
I am really sure that it will help professionals to do their e-jobs.
My congrats and my gratitude of choosing Aurora template for IOSR demo area!

[datahell]

Too many questions, I can't reply them all and I can't get into much details on IOSR 4 features right now.
I fix now 1-2 minor importance issues on the demo site and I will come back later to answer some of your questions.

[datahell]

@how
You can setup your locations as you wish. Unlimited levels and sub-levels are supported for locations. If all of your locations are on the same country you can disable country pages (see IOSR Hotels settings). In this case the country segment will be removed from the URLs. If you have a "kefalonia" only site then you should not add kefallonia as location but only kefallonia areas and then their sub-locations. Example:

- North kefalonia (1st level)
    - city A  (2nd level)
    - city B  (2nd level)
          - city C  (3rd level)
- South kefalonia (1st level)
    - city D  (2nd level)
    - city E  (2nd level)

I advice not puting hotels in locations that have sub-locations. These locations should be treated as "place holders". On the demo site such place holders are Peloponnese, Cyclades, Lazio and Tuscany. In these locations I display on the left column a special module showing additional information for them in order to enrich these pages' text with good Human/SEO information.

Also, if you notice in the administration section, locations are not part of IOSR Hotels but of IOSR core. This is because locations are global elements in IOSR and can be used by other IOSR extensions too (like a car rental extension for example). IOSR 4.x is not just a hotels booking system it can be used for many-many things.

Search is fully automatic and accepts all of your locations. The default search module uses an AJAX auto-complete method for location (most people asked this way), it can be switched with a drop down menu of locations instead.

@juanon
For hotel ratings IOSR uses Tripadvisor, for comments it uses Disqus.
Yes, thumbnails can be changed. Images are automatically get resized during their upload.
Holidays in Spain? Yes please, send me the correct list! (at least up to 2020)
Bookings gets auto-confirmed after a successful online payment. Else it is a very bad idea to auto-confirm bookings. Auto-cancellation of bookings is a very bad idea.
Ordering options supported are: hotel title, hotel added date, price (default) and stars.
I will develop the offline payment gateway soon. It is easy to develop payment methods for IOSR 4.x.
Regarding "nearby hotels and locations": IOSR checks the locations tree in the database to find out sub-locations or other locations of the same level but not the root level. Then it calculates automatically travel data (distance and travel time) between these spots. IOSR also add geo data info in pages. See the HTML source code on locations/hotels pages...
There are no default prices (I don't see any good in this), you enter the price you want for any period you want. The same for the number of available rooms.
Facilities text to icons can be changed but you have to modify IOSR source code for that. I believe for SEO and readability reasons text is better than images.
PDF now works, I had forgotten to upload the related IOSR library on the demo site.

Some IOSR features will become clear after the official release of IOSR 4 as currently I haven't yet published any information article and documentation for it.

[andreatravel]

Good job!
Still photographs are inserted one at a time  , it would be a good multi-upload to the gallery.
We look only to buy.

[datahell]

Images get uploaded 3 per time and there is a really good reason for this. First of all it would take me no more than 5 seconds to rise this limit from 3 to 100 or more. So it is not an IOSR limitation.

People not having serious programming skills can't see the reason why. Most users are amateurs knowing nothing about how the web works, and its OK, it is not their job. They are careless and do bad things on their sites like using huge images not web friendly. Ask any professional building web sites for third parties and will tell you stories that you will laugh so much... IOSR is a responsible system that tries to fix bad actions by the users. Let's consider the following scenario to understand how a problem can arise from bad usage and then users will blame the software instead of themselves.

A user wants to upload 10 images for his hotel. Each image is 3mb in size taken by a low definition camera (some will try even HD images). So a total size of 10 x 3 = 30mb.
Now, most web servers are configured to accept a maximum 10mb upload size. So what the script will do? Die in a very bad way. Even worst, the action will be semi-completed and so some of the POST data will be saved while some others not, leading to entries with issues. The user will not understand why php terminates and will contact the software developer telling him that his software doesn't work!* Started getting an answer? Of course not all servers are configured to have a maximum upload size to 10mb, yours might have 1000mb, but IOSR is built for general usage and it must be 100% sure that it will work correct under all circumstances. 99.9% is not good, it must be 100% (although in this particular issue it can't be 100% because someone might try to upload a single image of 1GB in size). An other reason why the script might die is because of a slow upload rate by the user (have you ever talked to a web user from India?). If your images haven't been uploaded in 30 seconds (common setting in most servers) the script will also die. By setting the maximum images upload limit to 3 we decrease the possibility of such issues and make such issues very rare.

When I develop applications I take under consideration things most people will never think of. This is my job, this is my expertise. IOSR works in a specific way because the is a reason for this. I can't explain everything to you, some are "job secrets", but you have to trust me.

* Most of the problems I solve for my customers are not related to my software (although they initially think that) but to their servers. Many people have very bad hosting services and most of them have zero support by their web hosting companies...

[andreatravel]

you could not be more clear than that. thanks