Release Notes - 1.149 - Travel Agency Software

This update introduces bookings managements for Travel Activities/Tickets and includes overall improvements in the day-wise itinerary creation process in quotation, rates for bookings (along with selling rates), hotel's allowed extra-bed control for adults and children, tour operational calendar and bookings, supplier management for transportation and activities, along with many small bug fixes.

Let's dive into move details.

Improve Day Wise Itinerary in Quotation

The transportations and activities section in the Quote creation has been revamped from the group up to allow adding any variation of services for selected date(s). You can easily add multiple transportation(s) and activity/ticket(s) for a given day in any required order of itinerary.

This allows you to easily add services in the following ways:

Add Tickets before private transfer in any required day
Add multiple transfers and tickets on a given day
Simply select multiple day to provide a service of multiple days
Only add multiple transfers or activities for selected date(s)

Along with the ordering of the services, system will now automatically carry forward the last selected cab types for the newly added transport services, effectively removing the need of duplicate actions and reducing clicks. With this update, the old section of multi-day services has been removed as you can now achieve the same results by selecting multiple days for any of the desired services.

Booking rates for Hotels, Cabs and Activities

With this update, you can now upload the buying or booking rates for Hotels, Transportation and Travel Activities. This can be done alongside to your existing selling rate sheets, just by appending `(Ops)` in the name of the season.

Image showing format for booking rates uploading

Once uploaded, these rates will be used during auto-initializing the hotel/cabs/activities bookings after Trip Holding/Conversion. Earlier to this update, your quoted prices during sales were using for booking initialization. If booking rates are not available for some sevices, your quoted prices will be used instead.

Only used when using System Rates during Quotation

The booking rates of respective services (Hotels/Cabs/Activities) will be used in auto-initialization if and only if the selling rates from the system were used during quotation. Any modification to system rates or not availability of selling rates during quotation will results in invalidation of booking rates process.

Hotel's allowed extra beds for Adults and Children

You can now configure the number of allowed extra beds for adults and children individually. Earlier to this update, only total number of extra beds were configuration. To configure, you can either include these settings the room-types of hotel's price upload or by manually modifying the hotel details in the dashboard (ensuring these details are synced with rate sheets and vice-versa).

Image showing set extra beds configuration in hotel rates sheet

Similar to how you can configure the total allowed extra beds (EB), you can append following details in the room type in rate-sheets:

nAWEB: Configure the number of extra beds for adults. Here n is the number is the configured number.
nCWEB: Configure the number of extra beds for children. Here n is the number is the configured number.
nCNB: Configure the number of allowed children without extra bed. Here n is the number is the configured number.
nEB: Configure the number of total allowed extra beds. Here n is the number is the configured number. For example, if this is set to 1EB and you have configured 1AWEB and 1CWEB, then during quotation only one of extra bed Adult or Child can be added per-room. If this is not specified, the minimum of nAWEB and nCWEB is used for this configuration.

Introducing Activity-Ticket Bookings

We are really excited to introduce you to the activity/ticket bookings system which is integrated in your existing cab schedules and provides a one-stop trip operation process for all activity/ticket bookings of all trips. This is a ground breaking change of the existing tour operation process in the system, effectively replacing existing cab scheduling process with new day-wise tour operation process, involving both transportation and activity/ticket bookings.

Image of a Trip's detailed page with activity bookings

Improved Operational Calendar

The older cab scheduling calendar has been replaced with new Operational calendar. This calendar will now show all your cab schedules and activity bookings in a single combined view. The stats for booked and non-booked will now include all the booked and pending services for a quick glance.

The single day cell has been updated to only show first item off the day and additional items in the tooltip for quick viewing. Clicking on a single cell for a trip will now show all the services for the selected day and trip (earlier in cab calendar, it would show only the selected schedule).

This pop-up provides all the details necessary for smooth operation of a trip for the selected day with options to edit individual services and share bookings (individual/bulk) with guest and suppliers.

Single Day wise Tour Operations

When you click on a date in the Tour Operations calendar, you can now view all the cab schedules and activity/ticket bookings for that particular day. This provides a clean way for day-to-day tour operations and tracking of live tours and bookings.

Overview of Cabs and Tickets

The overview section for single day bookings been improved to include the overview of activity/tickets bookings as well. You can clearly view of all the pending bookings for a given activity or ticket type.

Clicking on any of these services will apply the filter for that particular service (cab/tickets) so that you can easily work on a particular type of services. The sharing option available on the top of the page can be used to share these filtered bookings with suppliers and guests.

Detailed list and Combined Download

Just below the overview section, you can view the detailed view of every trip's services for the selected date. Along with the services listing, you can also view the payments status as well as any mismatch between quoted and booked services. This improves the communication between sales and operations team to further enhance the your customers experience.

Image of list view of trips with highlighting the specific parts

Remarks and Confirmation Details

You can add any remarks/special notes and confirmation details (e.g. PNR, Ticket ID etc.) for cab schedules and activity/ticket bookings which will be included in the vouchers and WhatsApp message to be shared with customer.

Cab Schedule

You can associate remarks with a cab schedule during editing process or during the supplier assignment process. The confirmation details of drivers and cabs should be associated in the existing process by selecting a driver and a cab from the dropdown or by adding new data.

Activity Ticket Bookings

Similar to cab schedule, you can add remarks and confirmation details with activity ticket bookings during editing and supplier assignment process.

Activity Suppliers

The existing transport service providers has been enhanced to become the suppliers for Activity/Ticket bookings. So you can either edit existing Transport Suppliers which also provides activity/tickets or you can add new supplier for only provide tickets. As earlier, you can also add new supplier during the booking assignment process.

The supplier who have activity supplies enabled, will also a section to the ledger for Activity/Ticket bookings which have been supplied by the supplier.

Supplier Booking Assignment

To assign suppliers to cab schedules, you can existing process of assignment in bulk or individually. Similar to cab schedules, you can also assign the suppliers to activity/ticket booking, either individually or in bulk.

Image showing CTA for supplier assignment of activity tickets

Reordering of Day wise Services

You can easily re-order services for a day by simply clicking on a day of a trip and by clicking on the re-order button. The older method of automatic time-based reordering of services has been removed to ensure that the ordering are same in the vouchers as they are in the bookings. A recommended way for services ordering is to create the quote in the expected order of services for a given day so that the ordering is preserved in the bookings as well. If that is not possible, you can always re-order the services in the bookings.

The existing process of sharing cab schedules, via WhatsApp, Email, has been enhanced to handle the activity/ticket bookings. To share the bookings, simply click on share button. You can share individual bookings or in bookings in bulk with your suppliers and guest.

Instalments and Payments

Similar to cab bookings, the payments for the supplier will be automatically created during the activity/ticket booking process. You can log payments, and make ledger as you were doing with the transport suppliers.

Periodic Syncing of Meta Leads

With recent outage in Meta's marketing platform, the real-time web-hook notifications from Meta have become unreliable. This is resulting in sparingly missing leads. To overcome this issues, your Sembark Integration will now periodically check for new meta leads in your account. If a lead has already been received using real-time web-hook notification, it will be ignored, otherwise the system will process it as new lead.

If you want to manually sync leads, you can do so by visiting the Integration page and click on re-fetch action menu from Leads listing page. This can be useful if you have just integrated your meta account and want to load existing leads from past into dashboard.

Image showing sync button to fetch the fb leads

You can now include the link to the PDF file in the Quote Email when sharing email to your B2C queries (i.e. non-agent sources), similar to how you can include and exclude other section from email.

Add Image to Individual Ticket Type/Packages

You can now add images to individual ticket types in your Travel Activity/Tickets. The earlier image will now become a fallback incase when individual ticket's images are not available.

Image showing individual image of tickets for activities

Watermark in Quote and Hotel Voucher PDFs

PDFs generated for Package Quotes and Hotel Vouchers will now contain watermarks in the background.

For Quotation, the default watermark is your company's brand name (display name), followed by the Trip ID. You can customize this using the PDF template from your Organization's templates page. It is recommended to always use the TRIP_ID in the watermark to ensure tracking and reduce copycat.
Hotel vouchers will also have watermark which contains your brand name, followed by trip id, followed by a unique hotel booking ID.

Hotel's POC and Prices in Voucher

Once a hotel is marked as booked, you can now select a hotel's point of contact (confirmed by) during the voucher generation. The contact details of the respective person will be included in the generated voucher.

Image showing options to selected the hotel's poc and price inclusion in voucher generation

Along with selecting the hotel's POC, you now has option to include the booking prices in the generated voucher. Once selected, the bookings prices (with component bifurcation) will be shown the generated voucher PDF.

Download Trip Voucher and Combined Hotel Voucher as PDF

You can now download the trip voucher as PDF using the download PDF button, next to the copy button as shown in the image below.

Similarly you can also download the Hotel's combined voucher (under docs section) as PDF from the `Download PDF` button, located right next to the copy button in your dashboard.

More options for Fonts in Quote PDFs

The Quote PDF template has been improved to include more options for Fonts. These fonts have been carefully pickup to provide a visual appealing PDFs with great default settings. Following fonts have been included:

Image showing fonts settings customization in Quote PDF Template

Section Title and Page Border Customization in Quote PDFs

You can now customize the Quote PDF's page borders and appearance of section's titles. You can add borders to pages in Quote PDFs with 8 options of border styles. You can also control the size of border in every direction (top, right, bottom or left). If you don't want to have border on a particular side, simply set it's width to zero.

Customization of section's title (e.g. Accommodation, Transportations, TnC) allows controlling the background color of section title and borders around the section title.

Image showing page border and section title settings of Quote PDF

Here is a sample Quote PDF with above customizations

Image showing the quote pdf with page border and section title customizations

Header and Footer Brand Banner Images in PDFs

You can now upload your brand header and footer image which will be used in various PDFs generated by the software such as Quote PDFs, Hotel Voucher PDFs and Trip Voucher PDFs.

Below is a sample Trip Voucher PDF with a sample header banner image.

Other Enhances and Fixes

Fix the (sometimes) incorrect ordering of itineraries for a given day
Fix the incorrect amount display in the description of an Account Transaction (was showing in lowest currency value e.g. 10 INR was showing 10000 Paisa)
Fix the issues of incorrect number of dropped trips status in sales reports for team, destination and sources.
Fix the issue when clicking on a sales report of any type (team, destination, sources) was applying incorrect filters.
Improve the profit calculation reports by using the total amount from payments, instead of bookings. This allows us to also handled the dropped bookings with existing paid amount and cancellation charges.
Improve the Proforma-Invoice PDF generation to handle large number of particulars, without shifting the whole table to the next page which was leaving blank space in the bottom half of first page.
Fix the issue where the Hotel's URL was not updating when using the CSV file upload.
Improve the Hotel Bookings Ledger export to include two new columns to show the Total number of Rooms and Total number of Room-Nights for a given booking.
Hide the Kms from the Itineraries which are share in Quote WhatsApp message, based on settings from PDF template.
Use the 24 hrs timing format during sharing the start time of services.
Fix the issues in Activity Ticket services during Quote creation where the system was in-correctly auto-generating the configuration for all children.
Similar to Hotel/Activities rates, you can now upload the week day wise rates for cabs
Fix the issue of duplicate image in Quote PDF when including multiple same-site activity tickets.
Remove Hotel Booking's modifications permissions from Sales Head and Sales Person roles. Now, Team members must be assign the role of Reservation to grant the hotel booking modification permissions.
The Email CC issue in Hotel Booking enquiry email has been fixed on Windows devices.
The profit reports will now show the profits even when using multiple currencies during quotation. The exchange rates from the quotation will be used in the currency conversion.
Increase in the limit of multiple category package options from 4 to 6.
Customization of helpline text for Trip Vouchers from business profile