Roadmap

Now, you can choose to display the accommodation type in your Booking Engine (private, shared). In case a shared room has the option to be booked as private (with a single room supplement), it will be marked as shared or private with additional information explaining that this is a shared accommodation, but it can also be reserved privately for a supplement fee.

This option can be enabled under Sales Module > Booking Engine > Accommodation settings by enabling “Show type“ in the presentation tab.

When configuring your payment methods, you can now choose to include or exclude a certain method for last-minute bookings. Go to Settings > Payments and choose a desired payment method. Click on the three dots > Configure. In the configuration sidebar, under the Filters tab, choose whether you'd like to enable this method for last-minute bookings.

List presets is a new feature that lets you generate predefined templates for your lists.

Right now, you can create presets in your bookings list, and soon, this feature will be available for other lists in the Backoffice as well. Learn more about List Presets: What they are and how to use them.

With bookings list presets, you can create different list views with customized filters and booking information. This lets you access your lists quickly when you open the bookings page. Read the article How to Create Bookings List Presets to learn more about setting up and using bookings list presets.

In the case of partner bookings,every user can now view the total booking price with a breakdown before and after commission. This can be seen by hovering the mouse over the total amount. Learn more about Partner bookings & commissions.

The email booking itinerary has a new, fancy look. It will now follow the style of the itinerary from the Customer Portal and Booking Engine and the setup you decide in Settings > General > Itinerary (whether to show/hide prices, dates, items, etc.) 

Read more about itinerary settings in the article Itinerary setting - explained.

Pending bookings in the Customer Portal now display the expiry time in days and hours. At the same time, the notification tab has a counter and occasional action-required alerts to ensure your guests don't miss a thing, especially the steps required to confirm a booking.

Now, you can see the booker's notes in the booking list and filter the bookings based on a booker's note. If you hover over the notes icon, you will see the note.

On the accommodation product page, room quantity is now displayed in a separate tab right under accommodation configuration.

On the top of every product page, you will now find a button "Jump to", which allows you to switch to any type of product page.

In Settings > Customer Portal you will now find a tab Navigation and Pages (renamed from Custom Pages). Here, you will see listed all the pages of the Customer Portal, including build-in and custom pages. Now, you're able to move them around and change the order as preferred.

After introducing transfer variants, we've enabled product variants for other products in the inventory, including accommodation, activities, items, and services.

Product variants might include bus stops in transfer services, different pillow sizes or bed types (separate or joined beds) in accommodations, various bike types for a cycling tour in activities, or meal preferences (e.g., vegan or gluten-free) in services. You can assign a unique price to each product variant, depending on its value.

To learn more about product variants, including how to set them up and maximize this feature, check out our latest article: What are product variants and how to use them.

We are introducing a new guest sidebar. When you click on a guest name, a new sidebar with updated information and tabs will open on the right-hand side. You will find useful information such as arrival and departure information, booking history, signed agreements or waivers, and email marketing consent.

With the accommodation filtering option turned on in the Booking Engine, your customers can filter accommodation based on location, accommodation type and amenities.

1. Go to Sales > Booking Engine > Accommodation
2. Scroll down to the filtering tab and switch on the toggle button > Save

Once turned on, the filtering tab will appear above accommodation options in your Booking Engine:

Read more in the article Accommodation filtering in the Booking Engine

The new "Create booking" button is now located on the top bar of every Backoffice page, next to the search bar. You can effortlessly create bookings from anywhere in the Backoffice.

Once you start a booking process, you can navigate across various pages in the Backoffice while keeping the existing booking active, with all changes saved.

At any point, you can return to the booking to add additional items.

To learn more, read the article on How to create a new booking from the Backoffice.

In Settings > Customer Portal > General under Invoices visibility, you can now choose how to display invoices in the Customer Portal (under Payments and invoices tab). 

To enable room transfers for packages with accommodation while creating a manual Backoffice booking, we allow booking a package with accommodation with an incomplete accommodation assignment.

Learn more about how to Create Backoffice package booking with incomplete accommodation assignment.

Accommodation entries in Itinerary (Booking Engine and Customer Portal) now have an additional line that mentions other guests allocated to the same accommodation. Guests will be listed just by first names, unless two persons have the same name (in which case, last name will be added).

Go to Settings > General > Custom translations to change the phrase with to any other preferred name.

The new calendar option allows you to include or exclude blocks in the occupancy rates calculation, depending on your preference. 

Mark a certain booking in bookings list as not viewed or viewed by clicking on 3 dots on the right hand side of the booking row.

In addition to location and product type, now you can filter the calendar grid by accommodation type, amenities, package, and tags.

The "Create booking" button has been moved to the top bar for consistency with an upcoming update: the ability to create a booking from any page in the Backoffice.

Choose how to display currencies in the Booking Engine and Customer Portal: in manual format, where the format remains consistent for every booker, or in automatic format, which adapts to the booker's system and browser settings.

The automatic format allows you to choose between currency symbol and ISO code, while the manual format also allows you to edit the thousands and decimal separator, currency symbol position, and decimal visibility.

To adjust your currency format, go to Settings > General > Currencies

Add external links to your Customer Portal's menu, and add links to the bottom of your Customer Portal page (footer). Learn more about How to customize the new Customer Portal.

New Settings > General > Itinerary view. Decide how and what you want to display in your itinerary in Customer Portal and Booking Engine. For more, read the article Itinerary setting - explained. 

Go to bookings > Refunds and check out new columns and filters for the refunds list.

Transfer Service Stops are now managed as Variants within the Inventory > Transfers product configuration. Learn How to set up transfers and its variants.

The Source column combines information about Channel, Partner, Connect and Backoffice user. All of those have their columns and can be displayed individually. 

New functionality in the Package Builder > Accommodation options > Delete all option from package at once

Filter by type, user, and creation date. Implemented in 2 places:

1. Activity > Activity Log 

2. Booking > Activity Log tab

Customers now have the option to unschedule activities via Customer Portal.

For more information, read the article on How to capture credit card details via Channex, directly within the Bookinglayer Backoffice.

Bookinglayer is now officially a certified partner of Lightspeed, the leading POS solution.

By connecting Bookinglayer to Lightspeed POS, any restaurant bill can be directly added to your guest's reservation in Bookinglayer. Your staff can search for guests by name or room in the Lightspeed app. With this integration, guests can conveniently pay their restaurant bills upon check-out. Read here on How to integrate Bookinglayer with Lightspeed Restaurant (K-series).

Customize your Accounting documents. Read here on How to set up custom translations for invoices

Define if a Rule is triggered or not when a booking is last-minute. Check the following article to learn more about last-minute bookings https://support.bookinglayer.c...

The Availability mode will display the number of spots available per activity/service and the percentage of availability of accommodations.

The Occupancy mode will display the current number of bookings per activity/service and the percentage of occupancy of accommodations.

The agreements section has been updated and reallocated. You can now set agreements for booking, payment and web check-in from one place and in multiple languages. Check the following article to discover more https://support.bookinglayer.c...

When sending an email manually from a booking you can use the search bar to find the desired email template.

Update, cancel or delete numerous booking lines in one go

Learn more https://support.bookinglayer.c...

A receipt is a document which summarizes the items included in the booking and registered payments. This document may be simpler to provide to your bookers instead of an invoice. In case of a group booking, you will be able to split the receipts per guest.

Learn more https://support.bookinglayer.c...

When one or several guests within a group booking cancel their stay, you may not want to completely remove them from the booking, especially if the invoice has been closed or any payments have been registered. It is possible to simply cancel a guest in a booking and still have them appear in the booking.

Learn more https://support.bookinglayer.c...

Allows you to add a cancellation fee amount or percentage when cancelling a booking. The cancellation fee is the amount that you will keep and not refund the booker.

Learn more https://support.bookinglayer.c...

Add or remove several photos in one go from Inventory > Photos.

You can request access to the different OTAs and, once approved, share your packages.

New payment gateway for South African businesses.

https://www.yoco.com/za/

Status filter for arrivals, departures, on site guests and transfer services (advanced feature).

Date (in guest form)

Radio (in customer form)

Decide how long (in months) after their check-out customers can access their booking via the Customer Portal.

You will find this setting under Customer Portal Settings > General.

You can now attach PDF files to your outgoing emails.

Check this article to know more.

https://support.bookinglayer.com/en/articles/5774954-how-to-attach-a-pdf-file-to-an-email-template

Expired and Cancelled bookings can be Confirmed via payment when the products are still available. Check this article for more details -> https://support.bookinglayer.c...

Yes, that's our CTO :-)

You will find this setting under Settings > Payment options > Gift Cards.

Each row in the report will hold an invoice. All fields exposed in the usual invoice PDF are available as column fields (booking, booker and invoice based).

You will find the option under Reports > Custom Reports.

Enables the possibility of forcing several payment methods for specific products.

New "Payment tags" section in the template editor. "Paid amount" will expose the amount of the last registered payment and "Payment gateway title" will expose the method of the last payment.

On Kounta's integration page, the "behavior" setting will decide if the imported items are added to the booking or a new bill. 

*When the "booking" option is selected and items are imported from Kounta in a different currency a new bill will be created.

The Maximum person(s) condition will define the maximum number of guests for a discount or coupon to apply. This is specially useful for solo traveller and couple discounts.

When deactivating a payment option that is forced in certain products, you will be notified of it and have the option to remove the payment method filtering from the products' settings.

To help with the common case of not collecting guest's emails and not being able to email participants correctly from the session planer, we have added a new setting to email the booker as well.

Several updates:

1. Room mapping moved to product settings.

2. Room quantities and 1 to 1 mapping. We strongly suggest you have a room type in MyAllocator and channels (Booking.com, Expedia, etc) for every physical room in your property. Now, in Bookinglayer you can have a single room for each room type with a certain quantity of rooms and map the child rooms (those generated by setting a quantity) 1 to 1 with MyAllocator.

3. Private room in MyAllocator. Mark this option when the room is shared in Bookinglayer but sold as private through channels. The room type needs to be set as private in MyAllocator.

4. Mapping status table in MyAllocator's integration page.

Close an invoice just for the amount that has been paid as deposit

To know more check https://support.bookinglayer.c...

When you try to delete Guest Groups that are currently assigned to rates, you will be notified and have the option to also delete the rates.

**Make sure there are no missing rates in the products since that could cause them to be unavailable or priced 0.

You can now filter your product reports for booking lines that have an assigned time slot in the booking or for those that don't.

When adding an activity with time slots to a bundle you can preset the time slot that will be booked.

For example, for a Daily Yoga bundle you can add 1x Yoga Class for the morning time slot and 1x Yoga class for the afternoon one.

Given the frequent issues in the past months with rules not being triggered for certain emails when rules had been edited, it is now possible to see which existing bookings will have the rule triggered when editing a rule.

This means Rules will no longer be activated/deactivated with the buttons in the rules list. The rule must be updated and the Status switched to ON or OFF.

When additional images are set on a package, an image carousel will be displayed in the package's booking engine page.

Additional images can be added and sorted from the product's settings page.

Additional images set on non-package items (accommodations, activities and services) will be displayed on the extended description of the product, in the base items & upgrades section.

You can now display on the accommodation selection section the room's and property's amenities with simple icons.

You can add amenities to each accommodation from the product's settings page in the inventory.

This improvement in UI allows easier management of toggled/untoggled options for accounts with large inventories.

When an existing booker adds an activity, service or item to their booking via their customer portal, you can now receive a notification with the details. You can enable this notification under General Settings > Notifications > New purchase via Customer Portal notification, and toggle the user roles you would like to receive the notification. 

The notification will include a direct link to the booking and a list with the recently added items and their time-slot (if set).

- After selecting dates, jump to accommodation options
- After confirming accommodation, jump to package upgrades
- After confirming package upgrades, jump to guest details

Get a weekly overview of how many guests are booked into each accommodation, activity, service and item.

Improvements in booking engine summary and customer portal itinerary

New itinerary settings for visibility of items, dates, descriptions and prices. Found under General Settings > Itinerary

To solve recent issues with calendar loading speed in accounts with large inventories and high occupancy, it is now possible to shorten the range of the calendar and increase its loading speed. You can find this setting under General Settings > Calendar.

You will find it under Sales > Booking Engine > Tracking

You can decide if the items in a bundle are scheduled for the bundle's date or on consecutive days.

Multi-select and remove several items from the booking's page itinerary in one go.

Request bookings can now see their itinerary and itemised breakdown when accessing the customer portal page.

Under Booking Engine > Accommodation, you will find a setting to enable or disable "room transfers". Room transfers is a feature that will offer your customers their selected stay split in two accommodation options when it is not possible in just one. This is intended to optimize your availability and maximize the number of bookings.

The list under Bookings > Bookings will contain all existing bookings with pagination (removing the previous limitation of the last 200 bookings). The totals at the bottom of the page will only be visible for users with Account Owner roles.

You can now set a limit to the number of activities a customer can book via the activity calendar.

As there is no guest allocation in the activity calendar, it would calculate pricing as if it was all added to one single guest, for example when selecting x5 (for 5 participants) in one single activity time-slot. This would pick the degressive pricing for 1 guest/qty 5, rather than the price for qty 1 for each of the 5 participants.

Now, the activity calendar predicts that when selecting the same activity time-slot several times there are several participants and applies pricing accordingly.

In the example below ,one participant received a unit price of 40€ because they selected a quantity of 3 and one participant a unit price of 50€ because they selected a quantity of 1.