IOS Reservations Hotels - Features requests

[datahell]

I attach a screenshot from the hotel reviews/rating page (still under development). In this picture you can see how reviews are displayed in IOSR Hotels 2.x public area.

Note: You have to login to see attached images.

[nikos65]

Can the hoteliers reply to the customer comments ?
I thing is very important for hoteliers to add a reply for every  customer comment but not to begin a dialog ! One comment from customer one reply from the hotelier.

[datahell]

Hoteliers and administrators can freely post rating/reviews even with fake names and they can -off course- reply to an other review. They can also publish/delete reviews. Guests can post a review only after their stay to the hotel is complete. They receive an email notification containing a secret link they can follow to post a review, once per reservation. This review is published after hotelier/admin approval (they also get notified via email).

[nikos65]

Hoteliers will love it !! 

[SarDira]

Great system with great people behind it. I can't be more happy using it.

I vote for adding a Voucher. Especially under multiple hotels mode:
We sell a lot of rooms in different hotels. So if our customer printed the confirmation email and present it at the hotel this will cause us problem because the hotel can see the price we sold the room. Then they may persuade the customer that their prices are cheaper and that next time they should book directly using their portal.

So instead the customer will receive both receipt & voucher. Receipt is just for book keeping but the Voucher is the document that should be presented at the hotel. Customer can resend/print either voucher or receipt right from the control panel

Example voucher (note how there is no price)



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In addition to meals another feature we need is Extra beds. The problem with "Add-on Services" is that it is very general and hotel wide. While both meals and extra beds can vary in prices depending on room and season.

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Maybe for the future "Add-on Services" can be set for specific dates?

[webgift]

This review is published after hotelier/admin approval (they also get notified via email).

I don't think that it's fair anyway!

[datahell]

@Webgift: Approval before publish is absolutely required. Very negative comments, or comments containing bad words, or ratings that are not realist (eg I visit an excellent hotel and just for fun I rate it very bad) will ruin hotel reputation. This is why approval is required. And this is valid for any business. Even news sites use publish after approval on comments.

@SarDira: Meals have already been implemented. Read my previous posts.

[juanon]

Hi,

In Booking.com comments and ratings are automatically aproved after a minimum number has been left (this way a single bad comment can´t ruin the hotel reputation).

No hotelier will accept bad comments so they will never be shown and then the rating system will be useless...

I think comments should be automatically aproved after for example 3 or 5 (or better a number the admin can choose). If the hotelier think some comments is really unfare he can always contact the administrator for him to unpublish it.

Just my two cents.

Thanks

[timalsina]

No hotelier will accept bad comments so they will never be shown and then the rating system will be useless…

That's right. Hoteliers will not publish bad comments. Only allow admins to moderate comments and allow hoteliers to comment on guest comments.

[datahell]

I understand which is fair and which is not. I can build an 100% automated hotels rating system but people using IOSR Hotels want to be able to post fake reviews and also be able to control reviews by guests (delete/approve them)*.  This is what they have requested me as a feature request and this is what I built. If you, in your site don't want to post reviews by your selves, then don't do it. It's that simple. As for the auto-publishing of reviews I will add a Yes/No setting in IOSR Hotels configuration. So, all of you will be happy

@juanon: Don't compare the number of reviews booking.com has with a hotel listed in IOSR . A hotel in booking.com might have 300 reviews. IOSR users sites don't have so many visits/traffic and the reviews will be only a few per hotel. So a single bad review might ruin hotel reputation.

* Note that no-one is allowed to edit the review and change guest rating. The hotelier can only delete it. So whatever you see submitted by customers is 100% real.

[timalsina]

That looks excellent. I like the way it is now! Is there a way to have a css rule applied on hoteliers replies to differentiate them from customer review entries.

[datahell]

As you can see in my last screenshot the last row with the action links is only visible to the hotelier/admin and in this row the real User ID (I will change it with username) of the person that posted the review is shown. So if the hotelier/admin post a fake review with a fake name/country/etc, he will be able to distinguish it from the others. There is also one more important information that it is not visible in the screenshot. Below real guests reviews it is displayed the reservation code for which is the review (remember that they can post 1 review per reservation). So you can track the reservation that lead to that review by the hotel guest. Note that this page is not yet 100% complete. I believe tomorrow I will have the reviews system 100% complete.

Note
For those want to keep using the Tripadvisor widget or the user comments via Disqus these systems will remain in v2.x but I recommend the usage of the new internal reviews system because it is much better than Tripadvisor and Disqus services.

[how]

hello all,
a feature that might be useful in some owners occasions is one more payment option.
I think it as follows:
''Pay to the hotel'' with the notice: "The hotel, depending especially of the terms and conditions of your booking, keeps the right at any time to ask you for your credit card info or request you to make a deposit before arrival "

I let it upon other users opinion and your judgement if you believe that might could be useful.

p.s. datahell great work as always, keep walking!!!

thank youuu

[juanon]

I know developing a Channel manager should be a huge task but what about an easy way to integrate with a third party company like myallocator?

Thanks a lot

[datahell]

The reviews/rating system is now complete. I added a configuration option -as juanon asked- to auto-publish reviews after a number of existing reviews. You can set this to 0 (auto-publish from 1st review), 2, 3, ... up to 1000.

Regarding myallocator
I had contacts with them in the past. At the end the integration did not get implemented. One of the problems of such an integration is that IOSR is not a single hotel management system, it is not even a single channel manager. IOSR is complex to their standards and there is not a single customer to deal with. I believe myallocator is the best option from those I have found in the past. It is not in my plans for v2.0 to develop a built-in integration of IOSR with a third party channel manager. What I plan to do is to extend the IOSR Hotels API in order to provide more ready-to-use tools to a third party developer wishes to build such an integration.