Thursday, May 15, 2014

Drag Across Dates to Select Multiple Days

We added an enhancement to make it easier to select dates on the internal calendar. Now, instead of clicking each day one by one, we have the option to click the first date, hold down your mouse, and then release on the last date of the reservation. This will select all dates in between, as seen here:



It is also possible to select two units at a time this way. The unit where you start the click will be selected, as well as the unit where the mouse is released, such as seen here:

Monday, May 12, 2014

Innrewards.com - new directory site created by ReservationKey users

Several of our long time users have been working hard to create a new directory website for independent lodging facilities, innrewards.com. The idea with this is to provide a central place for guests to find properties and avoid paying commissions to the big Online Travel Agent sites. ReservationKey has worked with innrewards.com to provide a way for availability in our system to update their website. This means that their website pulls availability directly from ReservationKey for their users that also use ReservationKey.

It is free to list on innrewards.com, so why not take advantage of this extra advertising opportunity? To get started just register for an account on innrewards. Then, to make the connection between ReservationKey and Innrewards, just go to the Settings Tab, External Connections. To start with we are using the same connection as we build for TripAdvisor, so add the connection for TripAdvisor. In the future we likely will build a dedicated Innrewards setup area, but for now this was the quicker way of being able to roll this out.

Once this is completed you should be able to start seeing your property's real time availability start showing up on innrewards.com .

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Review of Forum Updates

We've been working hard to make the forum more functional, especially to help with organizing and prioritizing requests that we receive. We now are sorting all messages into one of three categories - Technical Support, Feature Request, and Bug Reports. And from there we are connecting the post with the area of ReservationKey it is related to. Already this has been extremely helpful in allowing us to have a better idea of which parts of the program are the source of the most questions, which in turn helps us to determines where we can best spend our resources improving the system.

This also should help our users since now it is much easier to find prior forum posts related to the section of the system one may have a question about. In fact, as part of the process of posting a new post we show a list of prior related posts. We hope that if the issue was previously discussed, the person that currently has a similar question may find immediate assistance, without having to post a new question and wait for a response.



Also, it is easy to find posts related to a section by using the new "By Section" search option:



Or, simply click any tag to retrieve a list of all matching posts. The status is also clickable, which makes it easy to review completed projects, in progress, etc.



A completely new section of the forum is the Statistics area. This is useful for seeing which parts of the system have the most number of posts, and how many posts are made per day, per month, etc. Here we can quickly spot trends in the use of the forum (such as Thursdays seem to be the busiest day), and which section of the system generates the most posts (for Technical Support, Reservation pages in the most recent 30 days). We can see overall statistics or broken down by type of post.



This new organization is already helping us to be much more efficient in answer questions, and to be better organized in keeping track of feature requests and bug reports. We hope you find these features as useful as we do.