You'll find it under a new menu option "Reports":
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Tuesday, 23 February 2010
New in KeepMeBooked: Full year overview
We've just deployed a new addition to KeepMeBooked: Year View. This opens a new tab with an overview of all bookings and rooms for the entire year, like this:
You'll find it under a new menu option "Reports":
where we will soon by adding more reports (revenue, occupancy etc.)
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
You'll find it under a new menu option "Reports":
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Friday, 19 February 2010
Remote user testing with UserTesting.com
Just used UserTesting.com for the first time. UserTesting.com is a service where you can ask a user to complete a specific task and watch how they get on. They are instructed to think aloud, just like in a face-to-face usability test, so you can get an understanding of why they did something. But it is much easier to organise than face-to-face testing as you don't have the hassle of recruiting testers to come to the office, making sure they turn up, giving them cups of tea and so on.
It worked very well. User didn't have much difficulty with the tasks, which is both good and bad. Obviously we want people to find KeepMeBooked easy to use, but the point of testing is to reveal the bad/difficult areas, just happened that this user pretty much flew through the tasks. There were a couple of small things we can improve on though:
- The login fields are too short, user had to scroll to check he hadn't mistyped his email
- When adding seasonal pricing to an existing room, the room rate for the newly-created season has the wrong default.
- User didn't always notice status updates confirming that a change had been saved.
And reminded me how slow the calendar refresh is in IE8. It is about 2-3x faster in Chrome or Firefox. Not easy to fix, that one.
Here's the screencast of the test if you'd like to see it:
******
Want reservation software that takes usability seriously?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
It worked very well. User didn't have much difficulty with the tasks, which is both good and bad. Obviously we want people to find KeepMeBooked easy to use, but the point of testing is to reveal the bad/difficult areas, just happened that this user pretty much flew through the tasks. There were a couple of small things we can improve on though:
- The login fields are too short, user had to scroll to check he hadn't mistyped his email
- When adding seasonal pricing to an existing room, the room rate for the newly-created season has the wrong default.
- User didn't always notice status updates confirming that a change had been saved.
And reminded me how slow the calendar refresh is in IE8. It is about 2-3x faster in Chrome or Firefox. Not easy to fix, that one.
Here's the screencast of the test if you'd like to see it:
******
Want reservation software that takes usability seriously?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
More detailed tour pages
We are working on a number of ways to show you more about KeepMeBooked before you sign up. Even though it only takes a few moments, and is free, signing up is still an extra hurdle you might not want to cross until you have learnt a little more about KeepMeBooked.
As part of this effort, we have just launched four new pages of tour information.
And we will shortly have some more demo videos to watch, plus we are looking at providing a way to try KeepMeBooked for real without even signing up for an account.
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
As part of this effort, we have just launched four new pages of tour information.
And we will shortly have some more demo videos to watch, plus we are looking at providing a way to try KeepMeBooked for real without even signing up for an account.
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Thursday, 18 February 2010
New in KeepMeBooked: close off rooms for maintenance
You can now mark a room as unavailable on the calendar. This will change the background grid to grey, and won't display the room in your online booking widget.
Process is similar to creating a booking. Just click and drag across the dates you want the room to be unavailable for, and select "Mark as unavailable":
This will open a further screen where you can add a note (which only you see) or edit the dates of the maintenance period (useful if you need a period longer than two weeks, i.e. longer than you can drag on the calendar)
Once created, the calendar grid shows grey where a room is unavailable, and you see your note when you hover over it:
Just click anywhere on the marker to reopen and edit it.
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Process is similar to creating a booking. Just click and drag across the dates you want the room to be unavailable for, and select "Mark as unavailable":
This will open a further screen where you can add a note (which only you see) or edit the dates of the maintenance period (useful if you need a period longer than two weeks, i.e. longer than you can drag on the calendar)
Once created, the calendar grid shows grey where a room is unavailable, and you see your note when you hover over it:
Just click anywhere on the marker to reopen and edit it.
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Would KeepMeBooked have helped MG Siegler avoid his Valentine's disaster?
A rant about a disastrous Valentine's weekend has appeared on TechCrunch, a widely read technology blog. It seems that a TechCrunch writer (MG Siegler) booked a fancy hotel on Expedia only to turn up and find that the hotel has no record of this booking.
Siegler is astonished that Expedia apparently relied on faxing the hotel to confirm his reservation (and the hotel claims never to have received the fax). He is amazed that Expedia doesn't have any more sophisticated method of communicating with the hotel.
Expedia does have a range of more sophisticated methods of communicating with the hotel (Expedia Connect and Expedia QuickConnect), it is just that this hotel chose not to use any of them. They are probably offering Expedia an allocation of rooms, and manually booking them off when they receive the faxes. Looks like here someone at the hotel forgot to update the allocation and booked out all the rooms from other sources, leaving Expedia taking bookings on rooms which were already sold elsewhere.
Why do hotels do this? Why doesn't it work as MG Siegler imagined it did - with seamless electronic two-way communication between online travel agent and hotel?
Mainly, I think, because the process behind the scenes is so complex that the software offered to manage this process is really complex, so many hotels choose not to use it and rely on semi-manual processes instead.
This is the kind of screen you'd typically see if you used an automated tool to manage your rates and room allocations on a bunch of different online travel agents:
Note the numerous separate tabs for different travel agents (Expedia, Lastminute, LateRooms, etc.) each with a massive matrix to enter prices and numbers of allocated rooms day-by-day.
And that's just getting the information to the online travel agent, you have another layer of complexity to get details of a booking fed straight into your booking software from whichever of the sites has sold your room.
Hotel industry traditionalists will say it has to be this complex, it just has to. Each online travel agent has slightly different requirements, the hotel might want to tailor their rates to different agents, the whole thing just does get complex. Deal with it. And if that means it needs a human to manually manage everything, and a fax machine to retain a physical audit trail, so be it.
Nonsense, I say. It doesn't have to be that complex. Just like data exchange between healthcare providers doesn't have to be that complex.
You could have a simple XML standard that all third party sites accept, which lets them see what rooms you have available at what rates, and to transmit reservation details back to you.
The software you use to manage this could be as simple or complex as you choose: letting anyone sell any available rooms (as long as they have a commission agreement with you to do so), or using rules to tweak your rates and deals for different channels.
We at KeepMeBooked can't single-handedly bring about that state of affairs, but we can start the ball rolling by showing that reservation software can be pleasant and simple to use, it doesn't have to be complex.
******
Looking for reservation software which is easy on the eye and a joy to use?
Try KeepMeBooked: simpler web-based reservation management
Siegler is astonished that Expedia apparently relied on faxing the hotel to confirm his reservation (and the hotel claims never to have received the fax). He is amazed that Expedia doesn't have any more sophisticated method of communicating with the hotel.
Expedia does have a range of more sophisticated methods of communicating with the hotel (Expedia Connect and Expedia QuickConnect), it is just that this hotel chose not to use any of them. They are probably offering Expedia an allocation of rooms, and manually booking them off when they receive the faxes. Looks like here someone at the hotel forgot to update the allocation and booked out all the rooms from other sources, leaving Expedia taking bookings on rooms which were already sold elsewhere.
Why do hotels do this? Why doesn't it work as MG Siegler imagined it did - with seamless electronic two-way communication between online travel agent and hotel?
Mainly, I think, because the process behind the scenes is so complex that the software offered to manage this process is really complex, so many hotels choose not to use it and rely on semi-manual processes instead.
This is the kind of screen you'd typically see if you used an automated tool to manage your rates and room allocations on a bunch of different online travel agents:
Note the numerous separate tabs for different travel agents (Expedia, Lastminute, LateRooms, etc.) each with a massive matrix to enter prices and numbers of allocated rooms day-by-day.
And that's just getting the information to the online travel agent, you have another layer of complexity to get details of a booking fed straight into your booking software from whichever of the sites has sold your room.
Hotel industry traditionalists will say it has to be this complex, it just has to. Each online travel agent has slightly different requirements, the hotel might want to tailor their rates to different agents, the whole thing just does get complex. Deal with it. And if that means it needs a human to manually manage everything, and a fax machine to retain a physical audit trail, so be it.
Nonsense, I say. It doesn't have to be that complex. Just like data exchange between healthcare providers doesn't have to be that complex.
You could have a simple XML standard that all third party sites accept, which lets them see what rooms you have available at what rates, and to transmit reservation details back to you.
The software you use to manage this could be as simple or complex as you choose: letting anyone sell any available rooms (as long as they have a commission agreement with you to do so), or using rules to tweak your rates and deals for different channels.
We at KeepMeBooked can't single-handedly bring about that state of affairs, but we can start the ball rolling by showing that reservation software can be pleasant and simple to use, it doesn't have to be complex.
******
Looking for reservation software which is easy on the eye and a joy to use?
Try KeepMeBooked: simpler web-based reservation management
New features: improved PDF summary; delete payments / adjustments
Couple of changes released this morning:
Improved PDF summary
We've tidied up the PDF booking summary a little, splitting each element of the booking onto a separate line, and including space for you to include any boilerplate text you need at the foot of the page.
You can set up this boilerplate text under Settings -> Your details.
Delete payments and adjustments
You could previously only remove a payment or other adjustment by setting the amount to zero. Now you can just delete it by hitting the trash icon which appears next to each payment or adjustment line.
******
KeepMeBooked: simple web-based software to manage your reservations and guests.
Improved PDF summary
We've tidied up the PDF booking summary a little, splitting each element of the booking onto a separate line, and including space for you to include any boilerplate text you need at the foot of the page.
You can set up this boilerplate text under Settings -> Your details.
Delete payments and adjustments
You could previously only remove a payment or other adjustment by setting the amount to zero. Now you can just delete it by hitting the trash icon which appears next to each payment or adjustment line.
******
KeepMeBooked: simple web-based software to manage your reservations and guests.
Wednesday, 10 February 2010
Blog about KeepMeBooked and get 3 months free
Enjoying KeepMeBooked?
Spread the word with a review of KeepMeBooked on your blog and we'll reward you with 3 months' free service. Just email bloggers@keepmebooked.com with a link to your post and we'll extend your current subscription by three months. Only requirement is that your blog is current, actively updated and not a spammy not-really-a-blog blog.
Stuck for what to say? Here are some ideas:
Remember: once your review is live, just email a link to bloggers@keepmebooked.com and we'll add three months free of charge to your existing subscription.
******
Looking for beautifully simple software to manage your reservations and guests?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based software for B&Bs, guesthouses and small hotels.
Spread the word with a review of KeepMeBooked on your blog and we'll reward you with 3 months' free service. Just email bloggers@keepmebooked.com with a link to your post and we'll extend your current subscription by three months. Only requirement is that your blog is current, actively updated and not a spammy not-really-a-blog blog.
Stuck for what to say? Here are some ideas:
- Perhaps talk about how KeepMeBooked compares to whatever you used before (pen and paper, or other software)
- Be honest (obviously): you don't have to like everything, if there are weaknesses in KeepMeBooked that you want to mention, then of course you should (we want to hear about them too)
- Let your blog readers see what you are talking about by using screenshots
- Perhaps mention the one key feature which you really love ... and the one thing you'd like to see improved
Remember: once your review is live, just email a link to bloggers@keepmebooked.com and we'll add three months free of charge to your existing subscription.
******
Looking for beautifully simple software to manage your reservations and guests?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based software for B&Bs, guesthouses and small hotels.
Tuesday, 9 February 2010
New feature: export data to a spreadsheet
Also released this morning: export data. Go to Settings -> Export data and you'll see two .CSV files you can generate:
You can then open these in a spreadsheet to analyse them, run a mailmerge or (heaven forbid) import into a different reservation program if you decided you wanted to move from KeepMeBooked to a different product.
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
- Guests
- Bookings and Guests
You can then open these in a spreadsheet to analyse them, run a mailmerge or (heaven forbid) import into a different reservation program if you decided you wanted to move from KeepMeBooked to a different product.
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
New feature: see booking details by hovering
Small new feature released this morning: hover details. Now if you hover over a booking in the calendar you'll see more details about that booking, like this:
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Monday, 8 February 2010
Usability: booking multiple rooms online (again)
Back in December I blogged about how complex booking interfaces become if you want to allow groups of guests to book multiple rooms online. Suffice to say, it generally gets pretty messy, with many sites producing quite complex matrices of numbers-of-rooms and guests-per-room and so on. At its very simplest, this kind of interface ends up looking something like this:
For each room type, the guest needs to say how many rooms they need. And then for each room, how many guests in the room. Necessary, but the guest is definitely going to have to stop and think in order to complete this form, and we really want to avoid making the user think.
For me, a simpler interface would be something like this:
You can still select two doubles (one with two guests and the other with one guest) and a single (with your fourth guest). What's changed?
No room types. Just rooms.
This doesn't work if you have, say, 100 available rooms, but works just fine for up to, say, 20 available rooms (which is the kind of size our customers are). By abandoning room types you can just list all the rooms, and let the guest pick the combination they need. This means you can use a checkbox to select a room, not a number. And you don't have this fiddly "Guests in 1st room", "Guests in 2nd room" business. Numbers need to be read, checkboxes can be glanced at, so this should be quicker and easier for the user to absorb and act on.
There is another big usability advantage to listing rooms, not room types: you don't need the guest to specify occupancy room-by-room in their original search. I mean this kind of thing:
which gets fiddly and messy, especially as the user doesn't yet know what rooms are available. Maybe they'll take 2 doubles if they are available, otherwise a four person family room would be fine. The user might have to conduct multiple searches to see what combinations are available, and that's a right pain.
If your results screen just shows a list of rooms, you can just show all the rooms that are available and let the guest pick the combination they'd like.
Now you might think that picking a combination from a long list of rooms requires more thinking, not less. When Steve Krug and other usability gurus talk about not making the user think, they aren't suggesting the user is stupid and is unable to think. The user just has better things to think about than how to work a website.
Like deciding which combination of fabulous rooms they'd like their family to stay in. That kind of thinking is fine. The kind of thinking our interface is trying to avoid is 'Which of these darn buttons do I need to click to select the right combination of fabulous rooms?'. And if there are too many buttons, and too many numbers, that's what the user will be thinking about, not about how fabulous your hotel is.
At the moment, our online widget still sticks with booking just one room at a time. We'll do some more thinking and testing on this before we release anything more complex. But I think the mocked-up screen above could work very well.
******
Want to take online bookings and leave the geeky stuff to us?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based software for B&Bs and guesthouses
For each room type, the guest needs to say how many rooms they need. And then for each room, how many guests in the room. Necessary, but the guest is definitely going to have to stop and think in order to complete this form, and we really want to avoid making the user think.
For me, a simpler interface would be something like this:
You can still select two doubles (one with two guests and the other with one guest) and a single (with your fourth guest). What's changed?
No room types. Just rooms.
This doesn't work if you have, say, 100 available rooms, but works just fine for up to, say, 20 available rooms (which is the kind of size our customers are). By abandoning room types you can just list all the rooms, and let the guest pick the combination they need. This means you can use a checkbox to select a room, not a number. And you don't have this fiddly "Guests in 1st room", "Guests in 2nd room" business. Numbers need to be read, checkboxes can be glanced at, so this should be quicker and easier for the user to absorb and act on.
There is another big usability advantage to listing rooms, not room types: you don't need the guest to specify occupancy room-by-room in their original search. I mean this kind of thing:
which gets fiddly and messy, especially as the user doesn't yet know what rooms are available. Maybe they'll take 2 doubles if they are available, otherwise a four person family room would be fine. The user might have to conduct multiple searches to see what combinations are available, and that's a right pain.
If your results screen just shows a list of rooms, you can just show all the rooms that are available and let the guest pick the combination they'd like.
Now you might think that picking a combination from a long list of rooms requires more thinking, not less. When Steve Krug and other usability gurus talk about not making the user think, they aren't suggesting the user is stupid and is unable to think. The user just has better things to think about than how to work a website.
Like deciding which combination of fabulous rooms they'd like their family to stay in. That kind of thinking is fine. The kind of thinking our interface is trying to avoid is 'Which of these darn buttons do I need to click to select the right combination of fabulous rooms?'. And if there are too many buttons, and too many numbers, that's what the user will be thinking about, not about how fabulous your hotel is.
At the moment, our online widget still sticks with booking just one room at a time. We'll do some more thinking and testing on this before we release anything more complex. But I think the mocked-up screen above could work very well.
******
Want to take online bookings and leave the geeky stuff to us?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based software for B&Bs and guesthouses
Friday, 5 February 2010
New feature: accept deposits online and minimum stay rules
We are on a bit of a roll this week, and have just released two further improvements to the online booking widget:
Minimum stay required
Minimum stay required
You can specify the minimum number of nights you'd like guests to be able to book online
Accept deposits online
You can specify a deposit level that you'd like the guest to pay when they book online (previously the only options were full payment or no payment, now you can specify a percentage)
Try KeepMeBooked for yourself - your first month is completely free, the trial version is fully-functional, and you don't need a credit card to sign up.
******
Looking for reservation software that just keeps getting better?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Try KeepMeBooked for yourself - your first month is completely free, the trial version is fully-functional, and you don't need a credit card to sign up.
******
Looking for reservation software that just keeps getting better?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Thursday, 4 February 2010
New feature: colour-coded bookings
We've just released another new feature in KeepMeBooked, colour-coded bookings:
The colours will help you distinguish quickly who has paid, who hasn't, how they booked and so on.
There are two main colours:
Green
Bookings you enter yourself.
Dark green means paid in full. Light green means not yet paid in full.
Blue
Bookings that have come from the online booking widget.
Again, dark blue means paid in full, light blue means not yet paid in full.
And there are two other colours you'll see occasionally:
Red
A booking which overlaps with another is shown in red. This can only occur if you move or create a double-booking yourself. A new online booking cannot (obviously) overlap an existing booking.
Grey
An online booking enquiry (i.e. if you aren't taking payments online, and are just using the widget to allow guests to make a booking enquiry which you then confirm offline). Once you record a payment (either part or full payment), the enquiry becomes a booking and turns a lovely blue.
Grey is also used for online bookings where guest appears to have abandoned the online payment process before completing it. If a guest initiates a booking, a grey label appears while they complete payment. Once we receive confirmation from your payment gateway that they have completed the payment, the label turns blue. (If we don't received confirmation after two hours, the label expires freeing up that room again for another guest to book).
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
The colours will help you distinguish quickly who has paid, who hasn't, how they booked and so on.
There are two main colours:
Green
Bookings you enter yourself.
Dark green means paid in full. Light green means not yet paid in full.
Blue
Bookings that have come from the online booking widget.
Again, dark blue means paid in full, light blue means not yet paid in full.
And there are two other colours you'll see occasionally:
Red
A booking which overlaps with another is shown in red. This can only occur if you move or create a double-booking yourself. A new online booking cannot (obviously) overlap an existing booking.
Grey
An online booking enquiry (i.e. if you aren't taking payments online, and are just using the widget to allow guests to make a booking enquiry which you then confirm offline). Once you record a payment (either part or full payment), the enquiry becomes a booking and turns a lovely blue.
Grey is also used for online bookings where guest appears to have abandoned the online payment process before completing it. If a guest initiates a booking, a grey label appears while they complete payment. Once we receive confirmation from your payment gateway that they have completed the payment, the label turns blue. (If we don't received confirmation after two hours, the label expires freeing up that room again for another guest to book).
******
Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Tuesday, 2 February 2010
New feature: automated emails to your guests
We've just released a new feature in KeepMeBooked called "Automated Emails". You'll find it under Settings -> Automate Emails
This allows you to customise and send five types of email:
1. Acknowledge online enquiry (enquiry = no payment yet made)
2. Acknowledge online booking (booking = payment made online)
3. Acknowledge a payment you record (e.g. you have received their deposit in the post)
4. Request payment of balance (sent on a trigger date you set, e.g. 30 days prior to arrival)
5. Thank guest for their stay
The text of all these emails can be customised, and you can include details about the booking or the guest using simple tags like:
[arrival_date]
(You can display the full list of tags by clicking the 'show usable variables' link near the top of the screen)
******
Still using pen and paper to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
This allows you to customise and send five types of email:
1. Acknowledge online enquiry (enquiry = no payment yet made)
2. Acknowledge online booking (booking = payment made online)
3. Acknowledge a payment you record (e.g. you have received their deposit in the post)
4. Request payment of balance (sent on a trigger date you set, e.g. 30 days prior to arrival)
5. Thank guest for their stay
The text of all these emails can be customised, and you can include details about the booking or the guest using simple tags like:
[arrival_date]
(You can display the full list of tags by clicking the 'show usable variables' link near the top of the screen)
******
Still using pen and paper to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
