New feature: Free text "additional comments" field for online bookings

You can now provide a space for guests to add additional comments when the book online (e.g. about food allergies, or a late arrival time).

Under Settings > Online Bookings > Customize size and basic options, you'll find a new checkbox labelled 'Include Booking Notes field':

If you check that box, then the guest will see an extra field on the widget where they can type in any notes they'd like you to see:

Their comments will appear in the Note box on the Booking Details screen:

New feature: segment reports by room, and by day / week / month

You can now segment your revenue and occupancy report by room, and by day, week or month:

More reports coming soon!

New feature: multi-lingual booking widget and guest emails

Multi-lingual support released this morning for booking widget and guest emails. You can now take online bookings, and correspond with guests, in their local language.

We've slapped a "Beta" label on this feature. That means you'll probably find niggly errors still: mistranslations, or snippets of English appearing in hidden-away corners of the booking process. If you find such errors, just let us know and we'll fix them quickly.

Here's how it works. If you want to enable a different language for your booking widget, go to Settings > Online Bookings Settings > Your Details and Enable multi-lingual:

Select the language(s) you need and save. We've translated already the static text that appears in the widget (like "Please select your arrival date"), but you'll need to provide translations for things like your room names, and the text of the email that goes out to guests.

Once you've enabled multi-lingual, you'll see a new option to manage translations for each room and extra:

If you leave anything blank, we'll just use the English instead.

(The 'Describe as' field, by the way, is used to populate the pricing description. So instead of saying "€75/room/night" we'd display "€75/chambre/nuit". "Nuit" is translated by us. "Chambre" comes from your translation of the 'describe as' field. So if you are renting rooms or villas or campervans or tropical islands, you can have the correct terminology in all languages.)

You'll also need to provide translations of your guest emails (booking confirmations and so on). You'll find you can now do that under Settings > Emails:

Finally, you can use a custom widget (Settings > Online Bookings > Customise size and basic options) to display a particular language by default:

 The language of the widget that the guest used to book is recorded, so they'll then get all their emails in their local language:

You can also manually assign a guest to a particular language, so that telephone bookers can also have emails sent in their local language:

OK, I think that covers it.

Thank you to all those users who contributed to the translation effort. If you find anything that you think is mistranslated, then please let us know and we'll fix it right away.

New feature: print batch of invoices / statements

You can now print off a batch of invoices all at once, rather than having to open each booking one at a time. You'll find a new 'Invoices' option under Reports:

Then you can select a particular date range (based on either arrival date or departure date), and limit the report to just some rooms (if required):

Clicking 'Show' will open a PDF in a new tab, with one page for each invoice.

Promo codes for online bookings

We've added the ability to allow guests to get a discount if they use a particular promo code.

Under Settings > Discounts, when you create or edit a discount rule, you'll see a new option to set a promo code as the trigger for a discount:

You can build up rules with several conditions, for example you might require a certain duration, and a promo code, to earn the discount:

To display a promo code field in your widget, go to Settings > Online Bookings > Customise size and basic appearance, and check the "Promotion code" box:

Click 'Generate widget code' to get the custom code for a widget with promo code field (or, if you prefer, just manually add "promo_code=yes" as a parameter to the widget URL). Your widget will then display a promo code field:

Guests will automatically see the discounted rate if they enter the promo code that you have configured in your discount rule.

A note on multiple rules and multiple conditions: You can set up several different rules. And each rule can have more than one condition. For a discount to be triggered, ALL conditions on a particular rule must be met. If multiple rules are satisfied, then the guest will earn multiple discounts. So, for example, you might offer 15% discount for bookings of over a week in duration. And, with a different rule, offer 5% off for promo code "promo5". If a guest books for a week, and uses the promo code, they'll get both discounts (which will be combined). So a $100 rate would be discounted to $80.75 (15% off is $85, then 5% off that is $80.75).

Right now, you'll just see that the guest has got a discounted rate when you open the booking. We'll shortly include the actual promo code used as a tag on the booking, so you can analyse bookings by promo code. (Update 13 June: you now see the promo code used in the tag section of the booking details screen:

And promo codes now also appear in a separate column in your .csv export file (Reports > Export Data > Download bookings and guests), so you can analyse bookings by promo code in a spreadsheet) 

We've also changed any existing (duration-based) discount rules to display as "between x and y" nights, rather than "more than x" nights. Previously, if you had one rule that said "more than 6" nights, and another that said "more than 14" nights, the system took your first rule to mean "more than 6 but less than 15". We have just chosen to make that date range explicit, to make more complex rules easier to construct.