Business intelligence made easy with ResRequest charts

You may wonder what business intelligence is and what it involves. According to Forbes – business intelligence encompasses the analysis of a company’s raw data and analytics, to produce actionable takeaways. Data analysed might include current sales figures, customer shopping habits or operations costs. With more data on hand, business intelligence has become critical to making informed business decisions and can be utilised as a key component in forming predictive analyses.

Business intelligence involves the delivery and integration of relevant business information in an organization. Companies use BI to detect significant events and identify/monitor business trends in order to adapt quickly to their changing environment and a scenario. You can improve the decision-making processes at all levels of management and improve your tactical strategic management processes.

ResRequest’s reporting capabilities set us apart from most other systems, but it is an area that is under-utilised. Why not find out about what you may be missing out on? Contact a consultant and ask them to help build and save a report that you are looking for.


This graph shows how many bookings an agent made in a specific date range (week/month/year) and compares it to the previous period.

To easily analyse customer data we have enhanced our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) module to display charts. Using this nifty feature you can review trends at a glance. This process forms a key part of the sales and service cycle of your customer management strategy.


Agent booking trends over a period of time, ie: 1 year.

Agent booking bed night activity at different times
of the year across multiple properties.

If you have been diligent at entering your Agent’s details into ResRequest you will quickly accumulate a honey pot of data. Analyse your agents’ performance to quickly see which agents are bringing the most bookings, guests by nationality, agents activity and more!

Take advantage of these tools to gain a better understanding of your agents’ performance and your customers. If you would like to learn more about using the CRM module please reach out to our team who are standing by to assist you.

5 ways to improve your social media strategy

With 7.7 billion people in the world – 3.5 billion of us are online and with the digital and social media landscape continuously changing it can be a challenge managing your business whilst keeping your eye on social media. Some businesses in Tourism choose to opt-out of investing resources into social media, however, it should remain an integral part of an overall marketing strategy to see any return on investment and to see tons of guests walking through your doors. To be successful on social media you need to rely more on a clear strategy than just random postings and hashtags. In this post you will learn the 5 ways to turn your business from zero to hero on social media:

Step 1: Audit your current platforms

The mention of the word ‘audit’ can run chills down anyone’s spine, however, a social media audit can be a quick and painless process provided that you understand its purpose, to identify what’s working and what’s not. Create a spreadsheet to help with your research and findings. It just makes it easier whenever you need a quick reference.

Some detective work is required during the process, and so here are some guidelines to assist you:

Step 2: Identify your Goals

If you were to reach a target, set your sights, take aim, and fire. Having no goals and nothing to work towards to market your business reflects poorly on your brand.

As this phase/step will have a direct impact on your ROI, you should ask yourself:

Step 3: Create a persona

In this step, you create your most ideal persona based on information from your social media insights and your google analytics. Try and be as specific as possible, the more you define your persona the better. For example, if you have identified your target market as singles who travel – it would be okay. However, if you have taken it a step further and identified your target market as singles, who live in England, between 25 – 34 years of age, and earn over $60 000, primarily use Facebook, and have interests in outdoor activities you will have much more success.

Answer the following questions when creating your persona:

Step 4: Competition Analysis A horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace.”  – Ovid

Well said, Ovid! Sometimes a competitive analysis is never fun because your competition could be way ahead but at the same time, it helps put things in perspective and helps you finetune your strategy and see where you rank amongst your competitors. Important points to consider when conducting a competition analysis: This process should never be overlooked and requires continuous monitoring to make sure that you don’t lose sight of your competition.

Step 5: Using all your findings create a content calendar

A content calendar is usually in a spreadsheet format (although there are other platforms to schedule content like Hootsuite), it is used to schedule content across all your social media platforms. Why is a social media content calendar important? Because it provides an overview of your content over months, weeks, and days. It allows you to visualize how your content according to your overall strategy. The other benefit is to allow you to prepare content around specific days that are important to your brand, public holidays, etc.

This is just the beginning! To be relevant and on top of your competition, it does require you to continuously re-evaluate these steps to be a success. Having a rock-solid strategy now in place, imagine the impact your reach could have on your business!

Why we love automated testing

Automated-Testing-VS-Manual-testing

Why we love automated testing?

As a business that follows the Software as a Service model, ResRequest’s team is mainly made up of Developers and Customer Support consultants and we use many tools to help provide a great service for our customers.

Our Dev’s are in their element when nestled in front of multiple screens and have cool tools on hand to work with…

In this article our Dev team share what tools they use to test the product that they build and maintain.

Manual Testing vs Automated Testing

Manual testing is performed by a person carefully executing the test steps on computer software. Automation/automated testing means using an automation tool to execute your test case suite. This way, the actual outcomes of the tests can be compared with that of the predicted outcomes, to help identify issues, bugs, anomalies or limitations.

At ResRequest, we continually strive to improve our awesome suite of products. A lot goes into researching, developing, and delivering a great product. Automated testing is only one of a  myriad of ways that we strive to deliver the best product we can.

You might ask: “Surely manual testing is sufficient to deliver a product to the end-user?”. In many cases that’s true, but in today’s competitive world, filled with changing technologies and demanding user requirements, it is imperative to ensure stability. 

At ResRequest, we understand that developing quality takes time, and so, we recognise strategies need to be put in place to help keep us ahead of today’s break-neck pace. One of the many strategies we use to help us, in this regard, is automated testing.

Rationale

ResRequest values automated testing over manual testing, because:

  • Manual testing of every possible workflow, field, and scenario takes time and money.
  • It is difficult to manually test all different themes, layouts, setups, currencies, etc.
  • It does not require human intervention and can be run unattended.
  • Executing automated tests can be quicker than doing the same testing manually.
  • Automation helps cover bigger areas of an application, which prevents any unforeseen regression issues from occurring.
  • Even though we, at ResRequest, love testing and using our products, manual testing can sometimes be tedious and repetitive, and as a result, error-prone.

 

Benefits

 

Why spend time and money on automated testing? 

It brings the following to the table:

  • Can be a lot faster than manual testing.
  • Ensures consistency.
  • Improves accuracy.
  • Reusable test scripts.
  • Helps ensure stability of the final product.

What should be tested with automated tests?

Ideally, it should focus on:

  • High risk and/or business-critical areas.
  • Test cases that need to be repeatedly/regularly executed are also great candidates to be automated, as their scope should be well understood.
  • Testing that is very tedious or difficult to perform manually can also greatly benefit from being automated – computers don’t get bored.
  • Testing that is time-consuming should be automated, if it can be done reliably. This helps us focus manual testing on areas that would benefit more from having a little more human touch.

Disadvantages

Though automated testing has many advantages, it also has some disadvantages:

  • Proficiency in programming and some level of technical knowledge is required to write the automation test scripts.
  • Debugging automated test scripts is quite involved. Identifying limitations in the test script requires an in-depth understanding of the technologies used, as well as the application/software being tested.
  • Test maintenance is costly, as each update/improvement/feature may require an updated or new test case.
  • Automated tests cannot (and should not) entirely understand the end user’s use-case/requirements. The automated test case will simply execute a number of instructions and will not know if the end user’s experience can be improved, by changing the overall workflow of the software it is testing.
  • Automated tests can never beat a human tester’s expertise and knowledge of the application it is testing, and should, therefore, be used alongside manual testing and only where needed.

Selenium

There are many tools and applications that can help with automated testing of a system or software. At ResRequest, we have chosen Selenium for this task.

What is Selenium?

From the Selenium website: “Selenium automates browsers. That’s it! What you do with that power is entirely up to you. Primarily, it is for automating web applications for testing purposes, but is certainly not limited to just that. Boring web-based administration tasks can (and should!) be automated as well.

Selenium has the support of some of the largest browser vendors who have taken (or are taking) steps to make Selenium a native part of their browser. It is also the core technology in countless other browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks.

Selenium’s primary purpose is automating web applications for testing, web-based administration tasks can also be automated as well. Selenium has the backing of large browser vendors who have ensured that it is a crucial part of their browser. Browser automation tools, APIs and frameworks are just some of the platforms using selenium at its core.”

How does it work?

Selenium interfaces to a web browser’s driver, that driver then connects to the web browser to control it. The next step is to instruct Selenium on what to do, and it will take care of explaining it to the chosen web browser, in a way that would make sense to the relevant web browser.

What’s ahead?

Currently, we use Selenium and automated testing on some of our core products, but we plan to roll this out to as many ResRequest products as possible, in the future. All hail our robot overlords!

Keep it clean

In computer science, garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) describes the concept that flawed, or messy input data produces poor, unrecognisable output or “garbage”.

 

Essentially, a system is only as good as the data you put into it. This may seem like a basic principle, but if not followed, it can be a massive exercise to try and clean up the data in your system at a later stage.

 

From ResRequest’s perspective, “garbage data” can be found in areas such as duplicate contacts, reservations info and poor housekeeping of agent/guest CRM etc. The “garbage data” becomes very apparent when you want to start reporting on this information. If the data being inserted into the system is not “clean”, you will not be happy with the results when you try and use the data.

 

Here’s an example of data that was not maintained well, on a Standard Reservations Report, compared to managed clean data:

     VS

 

 

 

 

Why would you want to keep the data in the same format?

Not only will your reports look so much better, searching for reservations in your system will be so much easier if the information follows the same format.

 

Let’s compare how a well-maintained guest contact record compares to an incomplete one on a Guest CRM report:

If you decide to run a mail campaign, to target guests from the USA, the guests who don’t have this info attached to their contact would be left out of the campaign so you would lose potential business due to the information not reaching the right people.

 

Overall, the benefits of inputting and maintaining neat data in your system are so worthwhile and will save you a lot of time in future!

 

What tools are available in ResRequest to help keep your data clean?

Replace contact: Deleting contacts isn’t so simple once the contact has been used on a reservation so we’ve given you the functionality to replace a contact with another contact. This means that all the relevant links (for reservations and financial folios) of the replaced contact will transfer to the remaining contact.

Duplicate contact check: When adding a new contact to your system, ResRequest prompts you to check if the contact you’re adding is a duplicate of an existing contact. For example, when inserting the name “John” while adding a new contact, the ResRequest system will display all existing contacts’ named “John”, so the user can determine if it is an existing contact or not.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Although it would be great for the system to prompt you in all areas where data is inserted, at the end of the day, you are the owner of your data and it is up to you to keep the data in your system in good order.

Are you connected to your buyers?

Connecting to your key agents electronically will ensure you never miss out on valuable bookings. Tour operators use a host of software systems to stay on top of technology trends. Online bookings are one of the fastest growing trends.

ResRequest interfaces to a number of tour operating systems enabling, tour operators to book ResRequest properties when permission is granted. Recently we added to our channel partners and integrated to GranIT Safari.

GranIT Safari Software (GSS) is a specialist safari software product that manages tour operators’ business processes. The system has the ability to handle groups, F.I.T’s, packages, Fly-Drive packages and is currently being used by over 50 tour operators primarily in East Africa and Madagascar. It is available in English and French.

“With Safari Software we’ve reduced our response times to as little as 10 minutes.” Nilima Chandran – Naked Wilderness

Agents using GranIT Safari include Leopard Tours, Liberty Africa Safaris, African Horizons, Kobo Safaris, Utalii College and many more.

“It’s user-friendly, yet complex enough to deliver optimum options and endless possibilities.” Tomas Sorensen – African Horizons

GranIT Solutions’ partnership with ResRequest comprehensively links both the GSS and ResRequest software to be able to check room availability and book rooms in real time at the click of a button. Room availability can be checked at the quotation and tour levels. This ensures that the rooms booked on the itinerary are actually available.

“This software is the only one that does what we need without making us change our operating procedures to suit the software.” Richard Corcoran – Liberty Africa

Looking good with GuestRevu

GuestRevu helps thousands of hospitality professionals in over 35 countries spend less time stuck behind their desks by automatically collecting online reviews from dozens of sites like TripAdvisor and Booking.com, emailing questionnaires to guests so they can provide valuable direct feedback, and consolidating data to make analysing trends a piece of cake. Listen to your guests, learn from their experiences, and earn their custom and loyalty.

The best part of direct feedback is that you have a chance to resolve any potentially harmful situations before they become reviews on public platforms. By providing your guests with the opportunity to address concerns with you directly, they will often feel that their feedback is being taken to heart, and feel less inclined to vent on social platforms like Facebook and TripAdvisor. Another great benefit is that you can fix problems when you get direct feedback. As they say — prevention is better than cure.

GuestRevu’s partnership with ResRequest PMS makes this process even simpler by automating the feedback collection process, meaning that you’re able to automatically send custom-made surveys once a guest checks out, no manual effort required.

How does it work?
Save time and know what your guests are saying about you publicly by having all your online reviews collected and analysed in your GuestRevu dashboard.

Our integration to GuestRevu is automated so all you need to do is add your guests and their email addresses in ResRequest and GuestRevu will do the rest. For more info on this marketing tool, see our Guest Survey guide.

So what’s the deal?

Instead of adhering to the standard pricing structure, where you’re charged based on the size of your property, GuestRevu is offering an amazing flat rate of R350p/m for all ResRequest properties. That’s an average saving of around R200p/m! 

Not only that, but both GuestRevu and ResRequest will waive their setup and integration fees – that’s another saving of around R1,000!  

Managing your online reputation and gathering golden guest insights has never been easier, or more affordable. Sound good? 

Sign up with GuestRevu here and GuestRevu and ResRequest consultants will be in touch to get you set up.

Navigating ResRequest like a pro

 

Are you a wizard on ResRequest? How many tricks do you know?

Many users are not always aware of all our handy features and top tips so we’ve highlighted a few of our snazzy features from frequently asked questions and noted some helpful hints from our support consultants.

Here are some of our most popular features. Are you using them?

Tips

 

1. Ops Chart

Our Ops chart is by far the most customisable and useful report for lodges to help with all parts of your operations on the ground.

Examples where teams will benefit the most from using the Ops Chart report are:

  • Logistics and transfers

Display logistical arrangements such as arrival and departure times of flights and which guests require transfers each day. Run this report every Sunday for the week ahead to streamline your planning.

  • Housekeeping

View which rooms are occupied or available per day and reference the internal notes for guest preferences or special arrangements for the room and what times the guests will be arriving or departing.

  • Kitchen team and catering

Generate a report for the kitchen crew to calculate how many breakfasts, lunches and dinners are required that day/week and how many adults and children to cater for.

  • Front of house (view which guests have paid, along with pax, res notes etc.)

This is really useful for the meet & greet team to know exactly who they are expecting, what nationality the guests are and how many people are in the group. The report can be set up to include special memos, such as a guest’s birthday so that the team can create an extra special experience for them.

These are just a few examples and there are many more possibilities. Get in touch with our team to help customise the chart to your liking.

Working with the Ops Chart: Here’s a tip

If you’re not interested in viewing rooming and just want to know basic details about which guests are arriving, their names or what extras have been booked, then deselect your Accommodation Chart in the report filter section.


2. Rooming calendar

The Rooming calendar is your hub for Property Management as most of the lodge processes are governed from here.

Navigate to the Rooming calendar through Property > Rooming Calendar or even set the Rooming calendar as your landing page.

Unallocated bookings

The Rooming calendar lists ‘Unallocated Reservations’ in a table below the calendar. These are bookings that have not been allocated rooms. Bookings that have been allocated to rooms are displayed as coloured blocks in the calendar in the row of the allocated room. As soon as new bookings are made they will automatically appear in the ‘Unallocated’ list. Each booking has a ‘Res Details’ option where you are able to have a quick view of the Guests contact details and the Financial information of the booking.

Functions

To activate any of the functionality, the bookings (either allocated or unallocated) must be selected (highlighted in green), the buttons in the tab above the calendar then become active for use on the selected reservation.

Reports

Within the Rooming calendar there are multiple day reports you are able to pull to help with daily logistics and planning at the property.

  • Day Sheet – Here you can see the breakdown of the Pax Analysis, Reservation Summary, Rooming Plan, Request and Extras for a particular day. This report may be used to track transfers too.
  • PAX Report – Here you can see a breakdown of how many guests are arriving, departing or in-house on a specific day.
  • Extras Report – Here you can see all Extras booked for that day. This report may be used to track transfers.
  • Arrival Folios Report – This report lists all folios of guests arriving on the selected day.
  • Departure Folios Report – This report lists all folios of guests departing on the selected day.

But wait, there’s more…We have a new and improved rooming calendar coming soon, so watch this space!


3. ResNova on mobile

ResNova is our booking widget which enables you to embed your ResRequest availability and rates anywhere on your website. It offers two formats so you can show your information in a calendar matrix or a quick search…or both! You have the option of just showing availability, or enabling bookings, and even linking up to a payment gateway to enable payments during the booking process. All of this is seamlessly integrated to your ResRequest system.

Mobile compatibility for ResNova is also now here! Whether your customer uses a mobile or desktop, booking your hotel is now super easy. Your ResNova widget will automatically adjust to your user’s device! PayGate can be used as a payment gateway for ResNova bookings.


Tricks

 

Do you have your special ResRequest tricks that you use all the time or a few quick shortcuts that make you a master of ResRequest? We’ve asked our support consultants for their top handy hints. How many of them do you already use?

1. Filter for email addresses

Add *@* to your Guest History report email filter to “find all your guests with email addresses, great for mailing lists.


2. Hide the financials from a Reservation Summary document

You can do this by using the document show/hide options if you want to use the document as a voucher for guests/agents.

 

This is what your Res Summary will look like with the Financial set to hide:

3. Insert keywords

Add keywords such as “lodge”, “safari, “luxury accommodation” into the Keywords field, on the Internet Marketing tab of your system defaults (Admin > Setup > Defaults) to increase your footprint on online searches.

4. Save time when creating large group bookings

By using the “different config” option, in your itinerary creation popup. You can add multiple combinations to a single itinerary, all from a single popup screen.

5. Narrow your search for contacts by using an *.

Example: You want to search for an agent with “African” in the name. Go to Contacts > Find contact > in the organization field, type in: *African*. You will then see a list of all the results, showing “African” in the name.

If you can’t get enough of these helpful tips, we have some more in our quick tips and tricks blog. Remember if you are ever stuck or need a hand, head over to our Learn Online support site available and our functional support call centre crew are only a request away.

We hope that these tips will save you time and help you get the most out of your ResRequest system!

 

Top travel trends

 

The hospitality industry has changed rapidly over the past few years, largely due to the increasing digitisation of all aspects of life. Let’s look at some of the trends these changes are bringing to the industry.

 

Data-driven

Data is all the information you can collect about a person or activity. Data analytics uses all this information to show trends, forecasts and build reports. Hotels and lodges are starting to collect this data on their guests, potential guests and the preferences of both so they can offer a tailored service and more personalised approach. For example, you can use data analytics to personalise your summer sales campaigns to target guests who like to travel in summer. This more personalised campaign is more likely to get a positive response.

 

Tech

Technology is driving the trends in most industries, and the hospitality one is no different. From apps on your phone to unlock your room door to choosing your own entertainment, lighting, meals and pillows from your phone! Hotel management is also shifting to cloud-based services and reducing the number of IT experts needed. Customer service has also gone online and allowing real-time feedback is far more important to management than hearing about complaints weeks after the guest has left. Collecting all the customer service feedback into a single space accessible by all staff is also part of tech’s influence on the industry.

 

Millennial

The millennial market (people aged between 18-34) is a fast-growing travel market. They are tech savvy, like personalised services and flexibility. Hotels and lodges that offer a seamless check-in using a mobile, or offer gourmet ‘Instagram’ meals and a fast wifi will be top of the list for most millenials!

 

Wellness

Health and wellness is another trend that is impacting multiple industries. Guests are increasingly more health-conscious and want to maintain a healthy lifestyle while travelling. Thus the need for gyms, in-room equipment, healthy food options and spas are becoming a standard requirement for many hotels and lodges.

 

Environment

The green trend is growing globally and more and more guests are aware of the negative environmental impact that travelling has and want to offset some of that where they can by choosing environmentally friendly places to stay. Hotels and lodges that recycle water, grow their own produce, use solar energy and energy efficient lighting are some of the features that guests are looking for.

 

Quirkiness

Standard, chain-type of hotels and lodges will find themselves behind the trend if they offer the same experience whichever location one visits. Guests like hotels and lodges to have quirky/unique touches such as themed bathrooms or roomed names. This can extend into the personalization discussed under data, such as providing custom music lists.  

 

These are just some of the emerging trends changing the hospitality industry. If you have experienced something new or interesting on your travels, comment below and let us know! You could be on to a new trend!

 

References

Bizcommunity

Site-minder

Millennial travel

 

 

You’ve seen them. You’ve heard about them. You’ve read about them. A group of people, probably in their early twenties to mid thirties, all with a mobile phone in hand and busy trying to get the perfect photo or selfie. These people are probably what society would term millennials, people aged between 18 and 37, and they are becoming increasingly significant as the fastest growing travel market globally.

 

This new and expanding market is influencing the travel industry in many ways. Let’s explore some of these trends.

 

Apps

App downloads are on the rise and are a particularly popular choice for millennials when travelling to a new city. Apps such as Google Maps provide real-time guided navigation and is free to download.

 

Social media counts

Social media drives the millennial’s travel choices and is a large part of their experience while on holiday. Make sure your social media efforts reflect the strongest points of your destination, especially any special features of your property or your services, which will stand out to followers and their sphere of influence. Millennials like to express their identity through travel so unique experiences will draw their attention.

 

Specialised travel

Millennials also like travel experiences that cater to specific interests such as yoga or hiking. They want to be able to tailor their trips to their interests and create a personalised travel trip. Adventure travel is also growing in popularity for this reason. It offers a trip focused on a particular activity.

 

Online

Millennials are online for the majority of the day and the internet is their go-two option for researching, communication and purchasing. Millennials use the internet for booking flights and accommodation and the industry will need to move a lot of their services online.

 

Since Millennials are an ever-growing market it’s increasingly important for industries to cater for their preferences. Are you keeping up with the demands of the markets that you target? How do these trends affect your business and how you strategically market your product? We hope this article has helped provide some clarity on how you can do this.

Read more Forbes

 

Keeping your data safe

On the 25th of May, The General Data Protection Regulation commonly known as the GDPR, came into play. This new legislation is designed to set for companies on standard for consumer rights on data. Companies will need to be able to show the systems they have put in place to protect consumer data and their privacy.

The legislature is quite broad when defining personal identification information which makes compliance a challenge. Companies will need the same level of protection for things like an individual’s IP address or cookie data as they do for name, address and emails.

How does ResRequest comply with the GDPR regulations?

We are reviewing our processes and putting checks in place to ensure that we are adhering to the new standards.

Our subscriber policy is not to data mine and we request consent to sign anyone up on our mailing list. Your email address and personal data you consent to provide us with is used only for contacting you with ResRequest business related information. ResRequest system users’ email addresses are added to our mailing lists during implementation and at the direction of the system administrator. We use these contact details to send you notifications from us on our system functionality. This information is important to ensure you get the most out of your ResRequest system to add value to your business. We hope you enjoy reading our newsletters and learning about the product you lease. 

If we have met with you or you have shown interest in using ResRequest, we may use your contact details to send you information about ResRequest that we feel will be beneficial to you.

We do not share your details with data collectors. Should you wish to no longer receive our communications, remember that you can unsubscribe at any time.

Our dedicated SAAS team constantly monitor our online platforms to ensure our security is always upgraded and detect breaches. Our server hosts are recognised service providers.

ResRequest does have third party platforms which are part of our business service, such as Guest Survey interfaces, Financial Accounts interfaces, connections to Online Travel Agents, Booking Engines, Point of sales systems, Telephone Systems, Payment Gateways and Business Analytics. These systems are dependent on accessing data from our customer’s system to process our customer’s operational needs and an NDA between you and the service provider is recommended.

To learn more, please read our updated our Privacy policy and Terms of use which can be found on our website.