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Vik Booking 1.13.5: your loyal business partner
The new Vik Booking 1.13.5 is now available for your Joomla website. This is a perfection of the previous major release 1.13, but it also introduces tens of new features!
Thanks to the suggestions and the feature requests collected from our clients, among web agencies and hotel managers, we are happy to deliver your loyal business partner!
July 2020: some countries of the world just ended their lock-down due to the Coronavirus pandemic. Some airports have just re-opened their runway landing, and travelers are timidly starting to book their holidays or trips, hoping to stay safe.
The accommodations industry, just like many other business fields, had to take and apply their own precautions to stop the virus from expanding, and to guarantee the necessary safety to the guests. This is probably what will bring back guests to traveling and staying at Hotels, B&Bs or any other kind of accommodation.
How can hoteliers be ready to face a slow yet fundamental re-birth of the tourism industry? For sure, offering the possibility of booking your property through your own website, as well as through the most popular OTAs (booking channels) of the world, will give your property a higher impression.
Creating competition is probably not the right choice right now, but if you can drive more direct bookings from your own website, you will save money on commissions that would be applied to bookings received through OTAs. For this reason, adopting a solid and reliable Booking Engine plugin like Vik Booking, is a MUST.
This is why Vik Booking 1.13.5 is your loyal business partner!
This new important update will install several new features to boost your business and online presence. Having a dedicated website for your accommodation/property ready to take bookings and payments will make a difference with your competitors!
What’s new in Vik Booking 1.13.5?
New features:
- New back-end and front-end framework. This is a major release that introduces hundreds of improvements and tens of new features
- Characteristics pre-set icons. You can now choose some pre-installed amenities as font icons
- Custom ordering for characteristics. All the characteristics/amenities of the rooms can be sorted in a custom ordering
- New Tableaux. Sticky headers for horizontal and vertical scrolling. Sorting of sub-units booked implemented
- Room-Day Notes. You can now create notes at room-level, or even at sub-unit-level for some dates of the year, to highlight certain events or notes
- Shared Calendars. It is now possible to link the availability calendars between multiple rooms to also sync them with the Channel Manager
- Upsell Extra Services. Guests will be able to upgrade their bookings (website and OTAs/Channels) by ordering some extra services through your site at any time
- National festivities and custom events. Highlight in your calendars the festivities or the local events that require more attention
- New Rate Plans Report. Obtain data, revenue and statistics of the most booked rate plans among your clients or on specific target dates
- New Children Pricing. Depending on the number of guests, you can allow some, but not all, children of a room-party to book for free even though their age interval would usually have a cost
- Options/Extra Services Guests Filtering. You can now define filters for the Options/Extra Services to be applied if there is a minimum and/or a maximum number of guests
- Promotions applied on the final price. The algorithm to apply the promotions can be set to be calculated on the room final cost, rather than progressively
- Actual Rooms Daily Costs. Rather than displaying a generic custom starting from price for the rooms, the system will now read the actual cost for today
- Filter bookings by coupon code. It is now possible to find all bookings saved with a specific coupon code by using the apposite search format 'coupon: CODE'
- Coupon codes on taxes/fees. You can choose to include or exclude taxes or mandatory fees (like tourist taxes) from the calculation of the coupon discount codes
- Report Guest Misconduct. If you have an incident with a guest, you can report to Booking.com the misconduct information with various details
- Damage Deposit. If you request to your guests a damage deposit to be pre-paid for then returning it at the end of their stay, you can now transmit to Booking.com this information with one click
- Key Collection. You can transmit to Booking.com the information of how the keys to enter your accommodation can be collected. This is an essential feature for those working on the Vacation Rentals business field
- Property Profile. Another essential feature for those working in the Vacation Rentals business field is the possibility of setting up their property profile for Booking.com, with the information about the renovating, establishment and building dates
Improvements:
- Raw customer data translated. Bookings coming from OTAs like Booking.com or Expedia will now attempt to translate their raw data-set of information into the current language
- Channel Manager Advances. Various improvements have been made to the Channel Manager connections
- Occupancy Ranking Channels. Filter your best seasons or target dates by channels to obtain a ranking of those who brought the highest number of bookings
- Availability calendars lazy navigation. It is now possible to navigate through the availability calendars of the Room Details pages via AJAX with a simple click, without needing to reload the page
- Category filters. You can now filters the results of several pages and reports by category, to quickly include multiple rooms that belong to a specific category or property account
- Assign to rooms. Rather than editing a room to assign an option, an extra service, or a characteristic, you can now do it directly from the respective elements
What to upgrade? Log in on e4j and get your updates.
Discover more on Vik Booking Try the Demo website
Got Errors During the Update?
If the update process gave you some errors, then it may be possible that your current installation or account are not allowed to install the update to the version 1.10 for free.
For example, if you received an error message like "Error connecting to the server: 403" or "403 Forbidden", then you are more likely to not have made any purchases within 6 months for this extension, for the Channel Manager, or for the paid version of the update. As explained above, if you have purchased the Channel Manager, then you are always allowed to download the updates for free without any other kind of extra charge.
If you are willing to purchase the Channel Manager or the paid version of the Update (available at this link), then you should make sure to make this purchase by using the same email address as for the first purchase of Vik Booking. This is fundamental, otherwise you will not allow your domain to be able to download and install the update.
If you are sure to meet the necessary requirements, and if you are still unable to download the free update, make sure that your domain is registered under your account on our website.
Other similar error messages that could mean the same thing are the followings:
"unregistered", "Failed to download package. Download it and install manually from....", "No purchases found for Vik Channel Manager...", "Error connecting to the server", "Forbidden", "403".
The easiest way to validate your order number is to try to download the Update Package from this link.
We hope you will enjoy your new Vik Booking!