5/28/2009

Platform Additions

1. Turn Day Support - We now have turn day support available. This gives you the ability to only allow guests to check in on certain days. This can be an effective tool in normalizing and streamlining your internal processes and also to break up seasons and holiday into rental periods.
2. Custom Statements - as of Monday, you now have the ability to create customized statements in the control panel. This gives you "wiggle room" when closing a rental deal via phone or in person. You can now credit an amount against the final rental cost to lower the end price to the guest. To use this, create a booking in the control panel and click save. A new tab will appear called "Statements". Click here and you will find a button, Add Credit/Fee. There you have the ability to add a cost to the booking, or to credit a discount, symbolized by adding a "-" before the numeric value.

Platform Improvements

1. Availability Calendar - On the property details page, the availability calendar has gone through several upgrades and improvements in the last 2 months. You may have noticed however, that when you >> to a new month, the entire page would refresh. That issue has now been resolved.
2. Site Speed - Over the last several weeks, we have been making radical changes to our data flow processes to increase the average page load time on your websites and in Control Panel. We are pleased to announce that we have improved the average page load time by 50% in the last week. We have also ordered additional hardware to further improve this important performance driver.

*For any questions please contact your success manager.

5/21/09 Link Building Inquiries and Strategies

Recently, and particularly this week, there has been a lot of talk and inquiries about link building. Link building is a valuable initiative that is an important part of your overall SEO and internet marketing strategy. Link Building can improve your web presence, increase your traffic, and optimize your site for utilized keywords. A few of you have received request to exchange reciprocal links from real estate sites. Its important to be able to identify what is a good opportunity and whats not. Any generic email you receive with predefined link adding parameters is probably not a good opportunity. You want to work with local merchants and business listings, and barter for a link that will work in your favor. To address this popular topic, we have published a 3 part series of link building blogs for your reference.

Series 1: Drink Milk, Build Links
Series 2: All Juiced Up
Series 3: The Natural Rule of Link Building

*contact your success manager with any questions

5/20/09

Fixes and Updates as of 5/20/09

Creat New Lead Support - You can now create new leads directly from your control panel. This feature is useful to further grow your Bookt CRM and contact database. When you receive a call from a prospecting guest, you can add their information directly to your leads screen. In your control panel, go to Leads>>Lead Requests. Then click on the New button above the aggregate list.

Additional POP3 Support - For importing external leads into your control panel, we have now developed new POP3 support. This technology will grow in the weeks to come, and we have more flexibile features scheduled on our roadmap. In order to take advantage of this, you need to create a new email address, that is dedicated to only external and internal leads. We will then interface with that email account and import all the leads into your control panel where they can be processed.

Lead Processing Adjustments - We noticed a few complications with the lead processing over the last week. They would be visible to you with an "Oops" message. All lead processing issues have been resolved.

Quick Lead Processing Tips:
1. We always recommend calling back guests as a primary lead response, especially on booking and property inquiries.
2. When responding to a lead, try to have coorespondence with the prospect within 30 mins of when the lead was generated.
3. Its generally not a good practice to delete any leads... even complete spam. We are tracking your lead processing time on all leads and actions. This will allow us to determine the correlation of conversion rate/response time on a large scale.
4. For spam or garbage leads, select one or multiple ones (check boxes on the aggregate list) and update status to Canceled.
5. Defer - "I dont want to work on this yet, but I will come back to it"
6. Discard - "This doesn't look like its worth following up on"

5/11/09 - Exciting Update on the Bookt Platform

Last week was another great week of development on the Bookt platform. Here is your weekly update.

Site and Control Panel SPEED – Over the last couple of months, site speed (webpage loading time) has become a top priority. We understand that a slow site can result in a higher bounce rate, higher abandonment, and ultimately fewer conversions on your website. We monitor the load time of every single page platform wide and capture a mountain of data that helps us more effectively optimize the speed of your site. Late last week, we put in place a series of tweaks that have already resulted in a vast improvement. By the end of this week we expect to see average page loading time reduced to almost half of what it was early last week. To quantify that, we expect to see the average page load time to drop to less than 0.6 seconds, with a overall goal over 0.3 seconds or less.

Property Comparison – Last week we announced the new property comparison feature as a new release available for your website. This feature has now been activated for your website and should be visible for you and your site visitors later today.

Instant Software Partial Sync – For those of you who use an application of Instant Software, we have now enhanced out connection and provided a partial sync solution. This means that instead of having to drive all of your content/data through your Instant Software application, you can now manage that content directly from your Bookt Control Panel. For instance, you can upload new, higher resolution photos to your website, and also setup limitless amenities. Please contact your success manager to understand all of the capabilities and limitations before working through.

For any questions regarding this new release, please contact your Bookt Success Manager.

New Feature Releases & Updates

As most of you have now come to expect and realize, each Monday we publish new website features to make the management and marketing of your website as efficient as possible. Each Monday we will publish a new posting that you can read right here on your Control Panel Homepage that will give you an update of new releases, capabilities, controls, and in some cases adjustments to your lodging website. If you have any questions regarding details please contact your Success Manager.

Monday 5/4/09

New Features

• Compare Property feature - the compare property feature allows you to select multiple properties from the search results page and compare them side to side. In the coming weeks we will be advancing the display of information to show at a more granular level. To have this feature turned on, please email your success manager.

Adjustments

• The "You May Also Like" control which is common on your property details page is now pulling with more accurate information. We are associating price, category, amenities and location with this feature. Applicable properties are show that carry a high relevance to provide other similar options for your site visitors.

• Smarter Calendar - The drop down calendar we are using now only shows dates that are current or in the future. A subtle change but one that will help the flow of consumers from the search panels to your property pages.