For users of the TourCMS tour operator ecommerce platform

TourCMS development roadmap - April / May 2010

Internally we keep a roadmap of functionality and improvements we are making to TourCMS.

Now it is time to share some of the detail with everyone so if you are waiting for specific functionality you know when it is coming.

These are our best estimates for dates. More likely to slip than be brought forward:

By 26 March

* Widgets - easy for you to put your tours on other people's websites

* Step 1 booking engine - new date calendar design more suited to villa / campsite bookings

* Itinerary token - improvements and tweaks

By 2nd April

* Net rates - able to sell in booking engine on net rates - or a 2nd currency in same booking engine

* Quantity pricing - enhance to take upto 30 rather than 10 price points

* Statistics in Marketplace Partner login (clicks, bookings, commission etc)

By 9th April

* Hotel - multiple room booking on a single screen (rather than looping) in online booking engine

* Hotel - availability information in the API and easy to put on your site

* Hotel - OTHER TO BE DISCUSSED (see below)

By 16th April

* New content editor - so works in Google Chrome

* Booking engine design settings in Marketplace Partner login

By 30th April

* TourCMS engineering developments (2 weeks)

By 7th May

* Vouchers / Coupons improvements

By 14th May

* Multi tour booking engine / itinerary builder

By 21st May

* Automate pre/post travel emails

* Customer data collection - send an email to the customer and get data (post booking, pre travel), will cut down the complexity of the initial booking requirements

I will be shortly writing 2 new forum posts in order to discuss functionality requests for 2 of the forthcoming developments:

* New hotel functionality

* Multi tour bookings / shopping cart

We also slot in many small developments (including reports, payment gateways, bugs and tweaks) alongside these main roadmap items.

Remember also we have published our list of prioritisation factors for new developments

http://community.tourcms.com/forum/topics/factors-we-use-to-prioritise

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Alison Lapping on March 24, 2010 at 9:51am

Hi Alex,

Your proposed developments look fantastic! A number of them will be really useful for my business, as I'm sure they will be for loads of other people. Hope the dates don't slip too much......!

Look forward to your plans for developing the multi tour booking functionality.

Cheers,
Ali

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on March 25, 2010 at 7:21pm

Hi Ali

Thank you!

I think you are going to like the widgets..... they are not quite integrated into the main system yet (but will be very soon). However you can see some documentation about them here

http://www.tourcms.com/support/api/mp/widgets.php

Thanks. Alex

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Permalink Reply by Alex Bainbridge on April 12, 2010 at 12:04pm

Since publishing this roadmap we have slipped a bit (mainly because the widgets took a great deal longer than we expected and the engineering works scheduled for the end of April were partially moved forwards as the necessity to have them in place became a little more pressing

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Permalink Reply by Vicki Roberts on April 19, 2010 at 11:54am

Hi Alex

I was just rereading this and see the plans for customer data collection. I think this is something I would be interested in and wondered if it means being able to ask the customer (booker) any questions we need the answers to pre travel and then having the answers put directly into TourCMS from which we could produce a report.
I am currently working on a different way of doing this so if this is your plan I will wait for a TourCMS solution as it will be more useful in the long run than an independent form and holding the answers in a spreadsheet.

I also saw somewhere about more plans for ski chalet flexibilty - We would really apreciate the ability for customers to be able to book either whole chalets or individual rooms in chalets (if we make them available) rather than the overbooking we currently do (meaning split chalets cannot be booked online). If this is your plan do let me know if I can help.

Thanks
Vicki
At end of season so now looking for ways to be better for next season!!

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Permalink Reply by Paul on April 19, 2010 at 12:16pm

Hi Vicki,
You can already use Extra customer data fields (loaded in Configuration & setup in TourCMS) to capture data. These can be populated by staff or by the customer (via the online booking engine, at the time of booking), however I believe the development is to allow for additional data to be captured post-booking (the thinking being that requiring too much data before someone can book has the potential to scare them off).

Paul

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Permalink Reply by Vicki Roberts on April 23, 2010 at 11:55am

Thanks for this Paul
Yes what I am looking for is to be able to ask these questions nearer travel time as at booking we need basic info only - as you say we dont want to scare them off!!
I look forward to seeing the development.
Vicki