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Newsletter July 2014 
              

 Phone: 303-292-5522

[email protected] 

www.AdventureOffice.com 


 

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Adventure Office Support

In-Season Hours

Monday 9:00 - 6:00 MT

Tuesday thru Friday 7:00 - 6:00 MT

Saturday 7:00 - 4:00 MT

An Overlooked Source of New Customers

 

Dear Greetings! ,

An age old business question - how and where can a company effectively market and successfully attract new customers? 

There are as many opinions as there are advertising channels: social media, a company's website, email marketing, print marketing, brochures, concierges and other third parties, wholesalers, consolidators, "deal of the day" like Living Social, online travel agencies, etc.

One channel overlooked by most companies which currently has very little buzz is collaborating with local vacation rental companies.

The demographic of an adventure traveler is almost identical to the vacation renter, in many cases being the same person. Both industries provide excellent customer experience and have the same marketing challenges.  

The key to leveraging this mutual opportunity is to enable the traveler to be able to search and book both local adventure activities and vacation rentals. The provider of the largest vacation rental market place has released a tool to its rental providers to help move in this direction, see article.

Tim, Dave and Ted come from the vacation rental industry, with Ted having been a partner in the largest and most successful vacation rental software company in North America, prior to its sale in 2010.

Adventure Office will be assisting clients in taking advantage of this opportunity, with expertise in both markets and Adventure Office technology. If you have any questions or would like to discuss potential strategies for your company, please contact Ted at 303-292-5522 Ext 1003 or [email protected].

 

Stay tuned....   


Warm regards,
 
The Adventure Office Team    
July's Software Release  

  

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In the July release there were many enhancements and fixes as requested by our customers.
 

In this release, there was a major upgrade in session variables and how cookies are utilized in conjunction with i-frames and the online Web Cart.  There are different kinds of cookies, such as third party, which are typically not desirable and most browsers are set to not accept third party cookies without a user permission. The Web Cart had used a different version of cookies when it was within an i-frame to help the user.


 
Apple released a new version of their Safari web browser that defaulted to blocking all cookies without asking the user their preference.  The other major browsers are following suit. Not allowing cookies is causing issues with many web sites including the Web Cart within i-frames. It certainly is not realistic to require travelers to make changes to their browsers.  This upgrade has eliminated the use of cookies in the Web Cart.

 

July 2014 Production Releases:

 

Shopping and Web Cart:

  • Upgrade to no longer require cookies, fixing an empty cart issue as reported by clients using i-frames
  • Added EZ Waiver link to Confirmations for easier access to EZ Waiver signing process
  • Fixed Rate Seasons on Web Cart and Mobile Cart
  • Fixes to prevent overbooking in the Web Cart
  • Added user flag color to lodging availability on Daily View
  • A fix to prevent inaccurate overbooking warnings on Web Cart
  • Fixes to tax/discount calculations relating to fixed per day taxes and tax effective dates
Inventory:
  • Created separate Sales Cutoff for Quotes
  • Fixes to per reservation per day taxes
Operations: 
  • Created EZ Waiver Management screen for AO users
  • Showing rentals on Operations views based on their length, not a full day
  • A fix to prevent duplicate trips to show on Operations screens 
Email:
  • Created fields in Adventure Web Look & Feel to upload an email header and footer for use on outgoing emails
  • Added attachment section to Customer Send Email and also to Agent Send Email (email icon on Agent list page).  Attachments are saved as inactive eCollaterals for later use if desired
  • Fixes to Automated Email schedule updating when changing reservation date
Other:
  • Added rentals to Bookings by Division report
  • Several fixes to customer item calculations, discount quantity calculations, system speed/performance

 

Tech Tips - Deleting Discounts
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Adventure Office has added new functionality for our clients to be able to delete discounts they have created or imported.  We have had clients ask for this functionality to be able to clean up unwanted or unused discounts on a large scale.   This large scale deletion can assist clients in lessening the drop down list of discounts when searching in the back office.


 

To locate this function, go to Settings > Discounts and follow these steps:


 

1.  Select the Bulk Delete Discounts button.


 


 
 

2.  Search for your desired discounts by key words.


 

 


 

3.  Once a list has been identified, select the discounts you would like to delete.  You can

     accomplish this by using the checkbox in the header to select all discounts listed, or by

     selecting individual checkboxes next to each discount you would like to delete.

 

     
 

 


 

4.  Delete the desired discounts by selecting the Delete Selected button.

 

 

 
IMPORTANT NOTE:  There are very few things in Adventure Office that can be deleted - this is one of these rare items.  Once you delete these discounts, they are gone from your database and cannot be recovered.
  
Please email your suggestions for articles or updates for the Knowledge Base to [email protected]. 
 
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