New demo video showing online booking widget

We've got a new demo video up on YouTube, which will appear on the tour page soon, but I'll pop it up here for now. It focusses much more on online bookings, and less on just demonstrating features. Here it is:

Mobile device version of KeepMeBooked now available (in Beta)

We've just released a version of KeepMeBooked optimised for mobile devices. If you login to KeepMeBooked from a mobile device, you'll see this login screen:

You can login with your normal KeepMeBooked username and password, and you'll then see a summary of your availability:

("6 free" means 6 rooms free on that day)

Click on a date to see bookings for that particular date:

Click on a booking to view the booking details:

Or Click 'Add Booking' to add a new booking:

You can also at any time click the search icon to search for a guest, and view their booking history:

It is not as pretty as the full KeepMeBooked application, but it's hard to make things look great on a tiny screen. Hopefully it provides you with the basic functions you might need while being out and about. It is still in development, so you will probably find some bugs -- if you do, please let us know on our customer forum.

An iPhone app will be released later this summer, but for now of course you can use this mobile web app from your iPhone web browser.

New feature: length-of-stay discounts

We've just released a new feature to allow you to automatically apply a discount based on length-of-stay. Until now you've been able to set room prices per night or per week, but not have both at the same time. This meant that if you charge, say $100 for one night, but only $595 for 7 nights, you couldn't represent that pricing in KeepMeBooked.

Now you can, by using the new 'Discounts' feature under Settings > Discounts. You can apply a discount which kicks in after a certain number of nights. So to use the example above, you'd have your room pricing as $100 per night, then create a rule to deduct 15% off any bookings of more than 6 nights:

7 nights would then be 7 x $100 = $700, less 15% = $595

Anyone booking for more than 6 nights (in this example) will automatically receive the 15% discount. Discounts only affect new bookings, not existing bookings which you had before creating the rule. (Although if you extend an old booking to meet the new rule, it will then get the discount.)

We have big plans for this feature, and in future we'll be allowing you to set all sorts of criteria (not just length-of-stay) to give you more flexibility over pricing. For example, in future, you will be able to have a rule which looks something like this:

We aren't quite there yet with all those other criteria, so for now just enjoy the extra flexibility that length-of-stay discounts gives you, while we continue working away to make this feature even better.

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KeepMeBooked: web-based software for B&Bs and guesthouses

A review of KeepMeBooked by Scott Thomas of About The Inn

Scott Thomas, who blogs about innkeeping at About The Inn, has kindly included KeepMeBooked in a very thorough review of three different guest management/online booking systems. Do click through to read the full review, where you'll read some lovely words about KeepMeBooked:

"KeepMeBooked, the newest of the three, comes to the table with a very slick and usable product."

"By far the easiest to use is KeepMeBooked, which allows for [room pricing setup] with a few clicks in a very intuitive screen."

"If a slick, user-friendly experience is the most important consideration, KeepMeBooked would be the winner."

Scott does point out that our reporting could be better (which we know and have improvements in the pipeline) and that you can't automatically send a cancellation email to a guest (which we'll add to the 'to do' list). And that 'Create PDF' maybe isn't the most inspiring label for a button which generates a booking confirmation / invoice. But hey, nobody is perfect!

(And there is one point of detail we should clarify for those of you that read the review in full. Scott says that 'the booking widget creates a request for a reservation, not a confirmed reservation.' This is only true if you have chosen not to take payments with online bookings. As Scott was just testing, he wouldn't have configured real payments, so would only have seen reservation requests. Once you configure payments, then online bookings are confirmed reservations, as you would expect. We should probably make that clearer in the settings screen.)

We think Scott's review is very thorough and even-handed, thank you Scott for including us.