Latest Feature Releases

Online Activity Module Feature Releases

 

Responsive Online Booking Views

You now have 2 new views available for your Online Activity Module – Grid view and Scroll view. Both of these views are tablet and smart-phone ready, even if your website isn’t. On touch enabled devices, Grid view allows a customer to scroll vertically (up and down) through available booking dates/times returned by the search results. Scroll view displays your activities with dates/times and allows a customer to scroll horizontally (right to left). The setting for this is on your Options menu screen.
 

Group Id for Online Search

You may have an activity that occurs several times a day, meaning the only difference in the activity offered is the time of day. To make the availability search process easier for customers you can tell Triptiva to group all associated activities together using a Group Id and allow customers to search all activities that share the Group Id. Then instead of having customers search for the 10:00 AM and then search for the 12:00 PM activity, etc. you can create and assign them the same Group Id, and let customer’s search all at one time. To do this, you create your groups in the Admin section, then in the Activity Set-up, you associate the Group Id with the appropriate activities and then create a button on your website using a url like the one below to search the group.
Then, instead of a series of buttons that display Book the 10:00 AM Zip Line, Book the 12:00 PM Zip Line, etc., you can show a button that displays “Book Zip Line.” Then the customer click the button, enters the desired search dates and # of participants and Triptiva will search all activities for the shared Group Id.

Example link: https://reservations.yourcompany.com/TripScheduler.aspx?groupID=XX
 

Specific Date Online Search

There are times when you want to offer a customer an activity that occurs only on a specific date. For instance, you might offer a charity trip and want to have customers book the event from your website. To do this you can simply create an appropriately named button on your website that uses a link that includes the required date. Here is an example link:

Example link: https://reservations.yourcompany.com/TripScheduler.aspx?tripID=55&d=1/16/16

Each customer who books the activity using the button, will be asked to enter the # of participants (not search dates). Once done, Triptiva searches for availability for the date provided in the link.
 

Track Vendors Booking Activities

Many of you have vendors book customers for you by calling your company. Using a Vendor Id in an online url which you provide the vendor, you can associate a customer’s reservation with the vendor and have Triptiva assign a commission owed. This allows you to know the vendor created the reservation along with the amount of commission you owe the vendor. In our experience some vendors make available a computer that their customer’s can user to book the activity directly. Other vendors have their front desk agents book the activity for the customer. In either case, you provide the vendor with the special url they are to use when booking for you. If you create an icon on their desktops and associate the special link, the vendor can click the icon each time and Triptiva will know how to track the reservation. This method provides a convenience to your vendor and encourages them to use your company instead of a competitor. At the end of the month or whenever appropriate, you run your commission report for the vendor to retrieve a list of bookings by activity and customer and show the commissionable amount due.

Example link: https://reservations.yourcompany.com/TripScheduler.aspx?tripID=55&ccid=9
 

Number of Days to Search

You can also set the number of days you want your Online Activity Module to search. The options are 7 days (the default), 14 days or 30 days. If you offer many activities a week, you want to continue to use the 7 day option. If you offer only a few activities per month, the 14 day or 30 day option might be best.
 

Custom Online Display Messages

There are a number of new fields in which you can add custom messages for display on your Online Activity pages. For instance, we have traditionally used Adult and Child as the pricing type labels online and in email confirmations, etc. You can now change these labels globally and per activity so the names are unique. If you fish you might want Angler and Companion, or, if snowmobiling, you might want Driver and Passenger. Adult and Child will continue to appropriate for many of your activities.

Additionally, you can add custom online header and footer messages to display globally for all activities and/or you can create unique ones for each activity. You might have one set of messages for your half day activity and another for your full day.

Here is a list of other messages you can customize for display online:

• The Activity Search message that appears when customer’s begin their search.
• The message to display to customer’s when no activities are available.
• The message to display when no activities are available and you want to offer the option to join a Wait List.
• The message for encouraging customers to Invite Friends to join the activity.
• A Child Age Requirements message.
• An Adults Only message.
• The Reservation Summary message customers see when completing a reservation.
• The Add-Ons title to display.
• A message displayed below the Add-ons title to provide special directions or other information.

 

Add-ons Online

Triptiva allows you to sell add-ons to an activity. In the desktop module you can select which add-ons are associated with which activity type or activity and whether you want to show pricing. If you offer wetsuits for free, you might want to hide the pricing rather than show $0.00. If you charge for your add-ons you will want to display the pricing for each add-on. Add-ons are offered just after the customer selects to reserve an activity. In conjunction with this, you can offer add-ons as an up-sell later in the booking experience. This is helpful when selling items like photos and other package options. You would present these to the customer just before begin the payment process.
 

Online Purchase Tracking in Google Analytics

With this feature, your Triptiva Options screen you will display a tab that includes a field for you to enter your Google eCommerce tracking code (different than the Google Analytics code). This code will allow you to track specifics for Online Module purchases. Using this feature, you can send each customer’s transaction information to your Goggle Analytics account for later viewing and analysis. This will provide data that let’s you know the specific referral source that led to the purchase, what was purchased, the amount spent, etc. You can also see the time of purchase, your conversion rate, and time the customer spent on the online site.
   

Desktop Module Feature Releases

  

Security Groups

Triptiva has refined security access rights and created a few new security groups to allow you to better specify who can do what. We have renamed the Reservations security group to be Reservations Plus. There is a new group called Reservations. This group can perform most reservation duties but cannot issue refunds, move activities to other dates or delete customers. The idea is for many of you with new seasonal employees answering your phones, you can initially assign the employee as a Reservationists and as they learn your system you can promote them to a Reservations Plus user. This will prevent refunds to customers that cancel but whom should not get a refund, etc. Also, new is the Supervisor Plus. This group can do everything a Supervisor can but the Plus user can enter payroll time and alter entries for an employee’s time tracking. A Supervisor Plus cannot see hourly or other wage information, only an Admin has wage and hour access privileges. The new Marketing security group can access and export customer activity information for email marketing and customer activity analysis purposes.
 

Gift Certificates

For selling and redeeming Gift Certificates, check out these new additions.

Automatic Gift Certificate Id generation. This helps create unique certificate numbers to prevent guessing a certificate number for use as a payment. Some of you were using serially numbered certificates which made the numbers more guessable.

Automatic Pin Number generation. Pin numbers provide an added layer of security in that users have to have the certificate number and the pin number to redeem a certificate. Pins are really useful when you allow online customers to pay by gift certificate.

Triptiva has created additional ##tags## you can use when designing gift certificate email templates. If you remember, you can use ##tags## in your templates to tell Triptiva to pull the associated data. For instance, ##GiftCertReceiver## will show, you guessed it, the name of the person receiving the certificate. ##GiftCertAmount## displays the amount of the certificate. For a template that you would send to the person who purchased the certificate, you might include payment information that you might not want to provide to the person for whom the certificate was purchased. ##tags## are a good way to control this in your templates.

Remember you can create various certificate templates and manually choose which to send a customer who receives a gift certificate. You can do the same for sending receipt certificates to the purchaser. For a person receiving a certificate, the purchaser can customize Personal Messages (e.g., Happy Birthday, etc.) and From Messages (e.g., Uncle Fred, Your Mom, etc.) which your template can include when sending the certificate. Some users have created unique templates for birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, etc. Certificates can be used as payment in the Rental, Lodging, Activity, and POS modules. You can accept a Triptiva Certificate as payment for online bookings if you have the Online Gift Certificate Module.

Two new reports are available – Gift Certificates Outstanding and Gift Certificates Sold.
 

How Heard Ad Tracking

In your Triptiva Admin section, the How Heard tracking has been enhanced. You can now make a How Heard Active or Inactive and assign it to modules (i.e., Activities, Lodging, Rentals, POS). Further, if you are running an ad campaign and want to know how well the ad has performed, you can create a How Heard item for the ad, make it active, assign to the a module(s), enter the begin and end dates of the ad and the amount spent on the ad. Later you can analyze the ad to determine its effectiveness.
 

Friends Enhancements

Some of you require that each reservation include the names of all participants (i.e., Fiends). Triptiva now allows you to indicate which are adults and which are children.
 

Customer Export

Customer Export allows you to search for customers who meet specific criteria. You can search for customers using the criteria for the Activity, Lodging and Rental Modules. You an search and drill down to find customers in a date range, for certain Activity Types, for certain Activity Resources, for certain Activities. You can further specify the search to give results for customers that spent over X amount or under X amount. Further, you can search for customers that made reservations with greater than X participants or less than X participants. Once you have your list, you can include only with email address and from X country. For the USA you can filter your list by state. Once done, you can export the list to use for a variety of purposes such as email marketing campaigns, direct mail, etc.
 

Order Activity/Rental/Lodging Display

On a tab in your Options screen, you can sort the order your items display on your reservation screens. This allows you to choose any order you wish. For those of you that want to show your summer activities at the top during summer time and then move them so you can show your winter activities at the top during winter time, you can do this on Order screen.
 

Activity Packages

Triptiva allows you to associate activities in a package. Thus, you can combine a raft trip and a hike into a package so when you book the package from your desktop you are reserving the raft trip and hike at the same time for the customer. If activities are part of a package, you can still book each activity separately for those customers that don’t want the package offering. Triptiva still monitors your quotas to help you prevent overbooking.