Sneak preview: checking guests in and out

We don't currently let you check in or check out guests, and we've been toying with the best way to implement this, and how to show you at a glance who has checked in and who has checked out.

We figured that, actually, it isn't so much about seeing who has checked in or not, but really about who is arriving today and hasn't checked in; and who is leaving today and hasn't checked out.

So we might do something like this:

Where a red border is people arriving today (27th July in the mockup) who haven't yet checked in. And yellow border is people who should be leaving today but haven't yet checked out. So if you have a yellow-bordered booking for a guest who should have left a couple of days ago, you know you need to go look for them under the bed...

Almost the opposite of how this information might normally be displayed, but we think this does a better job of giving you the information you really need than simply showing a "checked in" icon on the booking.

What do you think?

New feature: provisional bookings

For bookings with no payment yet, you'll see a new setting of provisional or confirmed:

(We've always differentiated between provisional (grey) and confirmed (blue or green) bookings, but you haven't been able to set this yourself, we've just used it provisional status to indicate an unpaid online booking.)

Now you can manually set the status of a booking to either provisional (grey) or confirmed (blue or green). Note that you can only mark a booking as provisional if it doesn't have any payment associated with it. Once a booking has a payment associated with it, it has to stay as 'confirmed' (on the assumption that if a guest has paid you already, they must be coming).



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New feature: include extras in online bookings

Guests booking a room online can now also book and pay for extras (baby cot, champagne on arrival, parking, etc.) online.

Under Accommodation -> Extras, you'll see a new checkbox "Bookable online" next to each extra:

If you mark an extra as Bookable online, your guests will have the option of booking that extra once they have selected their room in the booking widget:

This is a great opportunity to encourage your guests to buy any additional services that you offer!

(And if you don't want to sell extras online, just leave the 'Bookable online' checkbox unchecked and then the guest will go directly from selecting a room to entering their contact details, as before.)


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KeepMeBooked: simple web-based software for B&B and guesthouse owners

New feature: allow extras prices to vary by season

You can now set prices for extras which vary by season. Previously, room prices could vary by season, but extras prices couldn't. Now they can:

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Choice of terminology (room, villa, cottage, planet, etc.)

Lots of our users don't sell rooms, but rent entire properties (villas, cottages, etc.) So we've changed the menu item which was called 'Rooms' to be called 'Accommodation':

And you can specify a word to describe your accommodation units. If you are running a B&B, you'll probably call them 'rooms'. If you are running self-catered holiday rentals, you'll call them cottages, or villas, or gites, or cabins, or whatever:

You can put whatever you like in this field, and whatever you use there is used in place of 'room' elsewhere in the application, including in the online booking widget. And having some rooms and some villas, is fine too, it looks like this:

Selling space trips? Not a problem, either:

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New feature: charge for extras per item (not just per room or per person)

Quite a few users have asked for this: billing for any number of extras, not just one per person or one per room.

New option under Extras, to allow you to set an extra to be billed 'per item':

In a booking, you can set a quantity for extras which are set to 'per item' (rather than just checking a box, as with other billing types):

For extra flexibility, you can still combine 'per night' and 'per week' and 'per booking' alongside 'per item'.

Normally you'd just use 'per item per booking', so if you set quantity to 3, that'd be 3 breakfasts for that booking, total of 3.

But you might want to bill an extra 'per item per night', like a baby cot for example (have to have it every night, but you might want more than one of them). So at €5 per item per night, and you have 2 of them over a 5 night booking, that would be €5 x 2 x 5 = total of  €50.


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New feature: refer your friends and earn free service

We've just released a new feature to allow you to earn free service by referring your friends.

You'll earn two months free service for each friend who signs up for paid plan.

There's a new "Refer A Friend" item under settings:

This takes you to a screen like this:

Use the form on that page to have us send your friend an email with a special link in it, or just contact them yourself and ask them to enter your unique promo code when they sign up.

Your friend gets a two month free trial (instead of the usual one month) and you get two free months once they sign up and pay for a paid plan.

Start spreading the word about KeepMeBooked!

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Still using a desk diary to manage your guesthouse reservations?
Try KeepMeBooked: simple web-based reservation management