Friday 6/5/09 - New Exciting Build Released

TGIF, But before you break for the weekend... review this update of the recent development build released!

As of 1am this morning (6/5/09) a new development build was released with upgrades and adjustments to the Bookt platform.

NEW FEATURES AND UPGRADES!
1.) Perhaps the most exciting announcement this week, is again, a platform performance improvement. On the Tuesday night, we installed a significant amount of new hardware to our load balanced servers in our data center. The upgrade was successful and once again we were able to radically improve the speed of your site, and your Bookt Control Panel. After the server updates, we have tracked the average page load time to be 100% faster... thats a change from an average of 1 second loading time last week, to currently .5 seconds. Again, this will always remain a high priority for us and we are commiteed to increasing site speed indefinately.

2.) Property Details, location & mapping is now live! We have now released the Location & Mapping tab. When viewing a property, you will see this tab as one of 4 or 5 now available on your page, next to Rates. This page will map your individual properties in relation to nearby attractions. We are also currently working with a algorithm to to optimize the zoom levels of the maps to a more granular level.

3.) Minimum Stay Date Ranges - Do you have certain periods during the year that you want to require a minimum stay? You now have the ability to apply a minimum night stay to a specific property for a specific date range. As mentioned last week, the same rule also applies for property turn days. See Customize>>Booking Rules to setup.

4.) Optional Fees - Optional fees give you the ability to provide an opt out fee during the booking process. This is common for upsale items such as a Pool Heater, or Travel Insurance. The fee can be calculated on a flat or percentage basis. To setup an optional fee field, create a fee in Customize>>Property Fee, and select the "Bool Field" checkbox.

Other Adjustments
Search Results, Revised Search - Your revised search panel on your search results pages has now been moved to the right column, aligned vertically. This moves more of your search results above the fold... bringing more actionable items into the range of sight of your guests.

Search Results Mapping- Now, only the properties shown in your search results will show on the interactive mapping on the search result pages. Prior to, your entire inventory would show. The new adjustment will show only applicable results on the map, and make it much easier on the guests eye.

For any questions regarding the new features and/or adjustments, please contact your success manager.