Keping on top of new features

As many of you may have noticed, we moved to continuous feature deployment in June 2011. This means that your GuestCentric service is continually being improved. In order to keep you informed of all the relevant changes we introduced a new area in the Setup section of your extranet that highlights the new features, and allows for upgrade requests.

Better alerts for fully booked and overbooking

As occupation rates improve, it is critical for hotel managers to understand how their occupation looks like.
We improved the revenue calendar (both month and 2 months view) to highlight “Fully booked” and “Overbooking” dates.

In addition, as 2012 approaches it is critical to load 2012 rates. The calendar has been improved with a “Not set” highlight for dates where prices are not set.

Guests area improved for performance

The CRM area (Guests) has been improved for better response times.
1- Pagination allows better scalability for customers with 1000s of guests in the system already
2- Encoding issues in export to Excel resolved
3- Much faster responding filter
4- Reading pane loads faster

Better conversions from even better booking engine

Our award-winning booking engine is in continuous fine-tuning. We regularly run usability tests to maximize conversion. This latest update has the following changes:
1- Action-oriented color palette with blue selections and highlights
2- Cleaner rates+availability calendar provides better readability and selection
3- Larger titles for Room Types and Promotions
4- Seamless tablet integration in terms of selection, scrolling and zooming, namely with iPad which now represents almost 5% of total web traffic.
5- Credit card numbers can be entered in a format with blank spaces

Mobile SEO

All GuestCentric mobile websites have been optimized to be crawled and indexed by Google Mobile. A combination of tags and site maps has been used to ensure top ranking when using Google from a mobile device like a smartphone.

Media manager more scalable

In the last 12 months we have seen a dramatic increase in the number of photos stored by our customers on our servers. The average number of pictures per customer is now well over 30, which led us to redo the media manager to make it more user-friendly in terms of photo management:
1- Pagination and filtering allows for easy access to the specific pictures you may be looking for.
2- Image size auto-selection based on the defined criteria for banners, sidebars, etc.
3- Autocrop features for faster set up of properties.
4- Multi-selection allows bulk handling of photos.
5- Drag-and-drop upload mechanisms that make uploading pictures much easier.

Enjoy the new media manager and as always feel free to feedback by clicking the “Make a wish” button in the application.

Improved reservations area

With the introduction of channel management, reservations can now arrive at the GuestCentric extranet from a multitude of channels and with different conditions (e.g. with warnings because credit card information is missing, or with errors because the channel has booked a reservation for a date that may not be available anymore).

Hence, we upgraded the reservations management area to make it even more similar to email.

Reservations that previously appeared with UNREAD status are now displayed with NEW status and highlighted in bold until opened by the user. When a NEW reservation is opened, the system automatically moves the specific reservation from the UNREAD folder to the ALL reservations folder, available on the left navigation panel. In case you wish, you can mark a reservation as unread, so it goes back to the UNREAD filter.

By providing this extra level of control, you should be able to manage channel management and website reservations in a breeze.