Yesterday we upgraded VELUMrent to a new version. Here is a rundown of a few new features that came with this version…

Custom reservation statuses

VELUMrent now supports up any number of custom reservation statuses. Every status has a changeable name, color and type. By default you’ll only see two statuses. You can edit them or add additional statuses in the Settings menu.

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One of the main reasons most accommodation owners are using/are interested in using VELUMrent is because of its mobility. Unlike other booking software out there which ties you to one or several computers, VELUMrent is a web application and can be accessed from any web enabled device, anytime and anywhere. Today such devices are widely available  (desktop computers, laptops and all the way to your smart phones).

I will share a little hint for all users who access VELUMrent from devices running iPhone OS (like iPod touch, iPhone or iPad).

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Public View is a very special feature in VELUMrent and it is unlike anything we have seen in other booking applications for private property owners.

Here are some common daily problems property owners stumble upon when dealing with guest and reservations:

• Guests are having a hard time visualizing accommodation availability if it is not immediately free for the requested time period. In such situations owners usually bombard the guest with raw reservation data and hope that guest will understand it and choose another accommodation or date for their holiday.
• Working with one and more booking agency requires owners to frequently maintain accommodation availability data on their sites. And doing it separately for every agency is extremely challenging.
• If maintaining accommodation availability isn’t offered by agencies they usually make pre-reservation calls to make sure they can offer requested property to a guest. This back and fort calling also generates big communication expenses on both sides.
• If reservations are handled by more than one person, and on more than one location, or evan away from reception desk, double bookings may occur if your booking system isn’t always in sync with the central database. Or evan worse – there is no way to check property availability on the go.

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One of the main parts/features of every booking software is its reservations calendar. It shows you all properties and associated reservations for a specific period in time.

Every booking solution has its own opinion on how reservations calendar should look, work and be used. Depending on your needs some solutions will work better for you than the others.

Here is how we at Constructive Code think reservations calendar should work and how we implemented those ideas into VELUMrent.

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VELUMrent, our booking solution for small and medium businesses, had couple of upgrades in the last few months. Most of those upgrades were minor upgrades like bug fixes reported by active VELUMrent users. To see what exactly has been fixed and added check VELUMrent’s change log here.

Currently we are putting all feature suggestions that we received from our customers but didn’t not have time to implement before on top of our pending features list. And in the next two weeks we’ll filter, combine and sort them all down until we create a list of features that will be available  in next upgrade. And as you can see this upgrade is going to be a major VELUMrent upgrade.

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Some of our users already know that the best and the fastest way to receive VELUMrent news and updates is by following us on Twitter.

But as not everyone is a fan of Twitter we also created a Facebook Fan page for VELUMrent. We hope you will use our new Fan page not only to follow VLEUMrent news and updates but also to contact us, share information, ask questions and suggest features.

To celebrate our presence on this social media site we are giving away 10% discount coupons that can be used with all our subscription plans. To claim your discount you need to become our Fan on Facebook and then contact us to retrieve the 10% discount coupon code.

Until next time.

Today we released a big VELUMrent upgrade which includes a feature that will allow your customers and agencies to make reservations on their own through Public View. And as requested, they’ll still have to wait for you to review and confirm all pending reservation requests.

The procedure is fast and simple:

- In order for a public user to create a new reservation request he needs to click on any empty space on the Reservations calendar, enter his/hers contact details (which will be automatically stored in your Customers Address Book) and click the Create button.

- E-mail notifications are then sent to him/her and you.

- You now have to log into VELUMrent and navigate to a third tab called Notifications on your home page. There you will see all current request that have to be dealt with (there is also a red notification number in that tab if there are new notifications waiting for you).

- From here you can see all relevant reservation details and accept or deny any reservation with only one click. But if needed you can also open and edit any reservation as any other reservation in VELUMrent and then save the changes.

- There are no notifications to customers at this point once you accept or deny their reservation so don’t forget to notify them personally about your decision.

We would also like to thank everyone for their feature and other suggestions that helped shape VELUMrent in what it is today. And we would also like encourage all other VELUMrent users to comment on what they like, dislike and want to see in future upgrades so we can make VELUMrent better for you and possibly the only solution you’ll need for you business.

Today we upgraded VELUMrent to a new version and the biggest news is the implementation of  a completely free account (so no more 30 days trials and unavailable accounts if you downgrade your plan).

The Free VELUMrent plan has all the features as the paying plans and the only limitation it has is the number of properties it can show. This number is limited to three.

We also added some new features, some we already planned to include and other were Yours feature suggestions. To check them out please view our change log here.

This way we’d like to thank everyone for they feedback and encourage you evan more to let us know what you think and need so we can improve our product and help your businesses through VELUMrent.

Best regards.

Today we are going to transfer VELUMrent to a new server which should increase its the overall performance. During that time you may experience down time with our service. The whole procedure should be over in 24 hours.

All your work until now is backed up as always, so no data will be lost. And if you enter some new information during this 24 hours we can not guarantee that it won’t be lost so please backup the data on your end as well.

Thank you for understanding.

We had quite a few busy weeks this and past month developing new features for VELUMrent and preparing the site for redesign.

The site redesign should be done in one or two weeks. To be notified in time about those changes please follow us on Twitter (this is the fastest way to receive news about things that are happening with Constructive Code and VELUMrent).

So what’s new in VELUMrent version 1.1.0?

All together there are more than 10 new features and more than 11 bug fixes available in this release.

New added features will make working with new and existing reservations much faster and simpler. Now by clicking the date on every reservation will open this reservation for editing.

By clicking the empty space on the reservation grid you’ll automatically open a new reservation dialog with the dates and the unit predefined to the clicked space.
While editing or creating a new reservation we’ve also included a quick search field for customers so you can easily and quickly find the customer you’ve been looking for.

We’ve also added couple of new settings in the Settings menu so now you can choose between 10 new colors for confirmed and unconfirmed reservations or change the date format to suit your needs.

Public View has also been changed so it looks exactly the same as the the reservation grid you are using. Evan the fast switching languages are available there for customers to choose from.

To see which other features and bug fixes were included in this upgrade check our VELUMrent change log at http://www.constructivecode.com/velumrent-change-log/.

You can use this page to see all past and future changes to the application as we make them.

By now all VELUMrent user accounts should have been upgraded to this release. This and all feature upgrades are free.

Let us know how do you like the new features and what other features would you like to see in the future releases.

We’re looking forward hearing from you.