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.

Public View feature in VELUMrent easily solves all problems mentioned above. What makes this feature so special is the approach it has to your reservation data.

Public View is basically a feature-less Reservations Calendar. Everything what is great about Reservations Calendar (like reservations and properties grid, advance calendars, time filters, …) is also available in Public View for everyone else with access privileges to use.

However, we removed features for editing and managing current reservations and we also removed all guest information so it can’t be misused by non-company personnel.

By giving your Public View link to guests you give them all the details and tools they need to see and choose which accommodation and when they want to book. You will no more have to exchange several e-mails or telephone calls just to explain them which property and when is available. Guest will immediately see, the same way you see using Reservations Calendar, when he can squeeze his holiday and book it directly from there.

If you introduce Public View link to agencies the results will be evan better. They will always have a real time information about your property availability and will only need to contact you when they have a confirmed reservation. I’m sure they’ll be fond on lowering their communications cost and time as well with the option :).

As you can see Public View feature in VELUMrent will save you a great deal of time and money.

The main reason why Public View is possible and works so well lies in the fact that VELUMrent is a web application with an online database. This ensures that your booking and reservation information is always accessible to everyone you grant access 24/7.

If you have some questions regarding this feature please let us know in the comments below.

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.

The basics

Reservations calendar should be able to show you multiple properties and their reservations all at the same time. It shouldn’t take you more than a look at it to see where you have openings for new reservations and which properties are already booked.

Like other quality booking solutions we also use a grid compiled of rows and columns which represent dates and properties. This way you can easily spot “holes” on the grid and  see  which properties and when are available.

Time navigation is controlled by two calendars in the sidebar and with several time filters. Combining those two options with big resolution screens you can instantly see availability of all your properties for the whole season. That is more than two months of reservations data available at your fingertips with a glimps of an eye.

This really is the best way you could check and view your properties availability and see how your booking process progresses over time.

Reservations calendar – the center of every booking process

What we done differently with our reservations calendar is that we made it interactive (instead of just leaving it be a visual representation of all reservations) and made it the central place for all booking operations.

Other booking applications take you away from reservations calendar if you need to add, modify or delete reservation. Unlike them, VELUMrent understands that reservations are all that maters to your business and never takes you away from them.

Need to move reservation to a different property or change it’s starting date? Simple drag and drop it on a new location or to a new date on reservations calendar.
Need to make a quick reservation? Just click on the empty space on reservations calendar and VELUMrent will fill out the dates and select the property for you. No need to double your steps for a simple task like this one.

What ever you need to do and which ever information you need to access you can do it directly on reservations calendar. And because of this approach everything can be accomplished in fewer steps than usual and with bigger time savings on your side

This blog post covered just some basics behind the reservations calendar. We will go into more depth about its features and how they can save you time and money in one of our future blog posts.

If you have a specific feature you would like us to write about please let us know in the comments below or by contacting us via e-mail.

If you are reading this you are most likely a “connected” person and well aware of the benefits that can come by putting your business online, especially in businesses like ours (renting and booking businesses).

And one of the most important things on the web that will help you be successful is advertising and getting as many people possible familiar with your services and products. These days the problem are, more than ever, to get the desired search engine ranking, page hits and of course increase the number of leads. And all of that costs a great deal of money, especially getting new leads.

So wouldn’t it be great if someone gave you a chance to advertise for free and not pay for a single click on your ad? Yes it would and LongUrl.net will give you just that.

LongUrl.net in its core function works like any other URL shortening service out there. But there is a twist to this idea. Well with every URL you shorten using their service you’ll get a chance to put your own ad that will be show up at the top of the screen once users open this URL. Here is an example LongUrl link I’ve made so you can see it in action: http://longurl.net/ccode.

So if you are like me, and you daily post a lot of links (I do about 20 of them) why not use them as free ads for your service of choice instead of wasting them and giving free hits to linked websites.

As there are no restrictions where you can post those links places like Twitter, Facebook, blog comments, forums and other will become your free advertising places and people who read, follow and re-tweet them will help you redistribute the ad.
And who ever finds your ad interesting and clicks on it doesn’t cost you a dime but still counts as a potential customer :).

If you start enjoying this service there are also some paid models available. More information about those can be found here.

Hopefully this service will help you save some money during these hard times and bring some valuable customers.

If you have some great tip that can help others please let us know and will post it here, or let you write something about it.