For users of the TourCMS tour operator ecommerce platform

All Blog Posts (99)

9th January 2012 - New release - More tweaks to bookings management, SMS sending and Portuguese

Big roundup of many smaller changes that we have rolled out since the last release note back in November 2011.

User Interface

- Website manager renamed as Channel Manager. Websites also renamed as Channels. (As a reminder, Channels enable you to manage multiple brands or websites within a single account)

- Portuguese booking engine / customer facing documentation (we now support 20…

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Added by TourCMS team on January 9, 2012 at 12:00pm — 1 Comment

6th November 2011 - New release - Tweaks and improvements everywhere

Many changes in the last month or so have gone live. Again most of these have come from your feedback and requirements - please keep it coming.

We have also been involved in a large UK project (announcement coming shortly) and that did take quite a bit of development resource time..... but now that this project is almost complete we can revert back to full time improvements including shortly more CRM functionality, more payment gateways and additional financial…

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Added by TourCMS team on November 6, 2011 at 12:00pm — No Comments

9th September 2011 - New release - Newly enhanced API and other tweaks

Plenty of smaller changes and some massive ones since the last release note:

General small tweaks

* Can now brand the TourCMS back office in your colours and in your name

* Able to add staff users with permission to view bookings restricted by website channel (rather than previously by product filter)

* Easier to delete customers/enquiries - including a new SPAM delete mechanism for undesirable enquiries

* Able to move multiple…

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Added by TourCMS team on September 9, 2011 at 12:18pm — 2 Comments

29th June 2011 - New release - Setup your own affiliate programme (and other tweaks)

Plenty of small changes made to TourCMS since the last release note....

Launch your own affiliate programme

One of the most powerful aspects of TourCMS is the distribution and marketing tools that are part of the TourCMS Marketplace. However upto this point it has been tricky to sign up your own agents quickly (for you and them).

Now you can add a sign up form…

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Added by TourCMS team on June 29, 2011 at 8:53am — 3 Comments

10th April 2011 - New release - New payment gateways, new languages and tweaks everywhere

Wide ranging changes to TourCMS have been released recently. Here is a summary:

Booking engine

* 3 new languages - Chinese, Finnish, Danish

* 2 new payment gateways - Nets (Norway), Sparkassen-InternetKasse (Germany)

* Customer title now has a separate setting to name (yes, no, mandatory)

* Step 1 calendar can now be set to start on Sunday (rather than Monday). Ideal for US customers.

* Can change the text for adults,…

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Added by TourCMS team on April 10, 2011 at 12:30pm — No Comments

24th January 2011 - New release - Booking engine tweaks, API changes, payment gateways, more tokens...

Phew big release this week.... Lots of nice new shiny functionality

API

* Search by grade and accommodation rating

* Change the keyword search to be an AND rather than the default OR

Tour configuration

* Copy the same description (tour/hotel) into multiple website channels quickly. Handy if you are featuring your tour/hotel on multiple channels and you want to share the same descriptions on all. Some…

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Added by TourCMS team on January 24, 2011 at 11:00am — 2 Comments

21 December 2010 - New release - Hotel pricing rules, a few bug tweaks at the start of new credit card functionality

This is the last release note of the year and it contains a bit of a mixed bag of changes and tweaks. Mainly the focus has been on changes made as a direct result of your suggestions and feedback.

Bookings

* Booking name - new switch (in configuration & setup, bookings) to make the booking name come from the first tour/hotel added (rather than the last one added). Generally the default is fine (especially if you are tailor making an itinerary)…

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Added by TourCMS team on December 21, 2010 at 1:26pm — No Comments

12th November 2010 - New release - A few tweaks here or there

A few tweaks, nothing major, however if you were waiting for any of this I expect you want to know it is now there and live :)

API (XML)

* New field - duration (numeric) - to work alongside the duration description field. Handy for partners who want to be able to filter and search by trip length. We had this number available via the website CMS previously but now it is also in the API.

Marketing… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on November 12, 2010 at 9:48am — No Comments

29th October 2010 - New release - Facebook and some changes to outbound email

Not much to report in the latest release. Mainly this is because we continue to work on some engineering projects in order to keep the system running as best it can.

However we do have a couple of changes

Outbound email

* Add attachments to outbound emails (from advanced booking note). This is a very basic templated document sending mechanism. We have more plans - multiple documents, resend previous invoices, component specific… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on October 29, 2010 at 10:34am — No Comments

19th October 2010 - New release - Many booking management tweaks

It has been a busy few weeks for us however this list of changes isn't that long this time. Most of our changes have been in making existing functionality better, easier to configure or harder to get confused by.

Tours / option setup

* Fixed % deposit value possible now for tours/options. The previous "excluded from deposit" and "included in deposit" have now been transferred to this setting - either at 0% or 100%. Obviously now you can do… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on October 19, 2010 at 9:55pm — 1 Comment

15th September 2010 - New release - Cost based pricing makes it easier to sell from a 3rd party contract

A few tweaks to announce from the last week or so...

Cost prices

You can now sell to your customers based on your loaded cost prices. You could use this to maintain a second set of prices for the same product or perhaps to make it easier to load hotel contracts and sell on a markup.

The other advantage of it is that you can load costs in any currency you like - hence now this is a means to fix prices where you maintain a fixed sale… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on September 15, 2010 at 9:56am — No Comments

23rd August 2010 - New release - Setup widgets on your own website plus other tweaks

A real hotch potch of small tweaks on TourCMS this week!

API / Widgets

* Newly rewritten documentation and examples (with sample code) including two hotel live availability search examples. Now very easy to do a hotel/villa search with you just needing to buy a few hours web design services (from your own web designer) to… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on August 23, 2010 at 3:03pm — No Comments

12th August 2010 - New release - Changes to hotel products and a few other tweaks

Good release this week with lots of new tweaks

Hotel products

* Display infant / child ages (for a property) in the online booking engine. Can be set by the property

* Able to configure "free infants" for hotel rooms - they count as children for occupancy rules but are priced free

* New hotel price rule - 1-2 adults per person then 3rd adult, 4th adult

* Show multiple durations on step 1 of the booking engine - i.e. show 2 night,… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on August 12, 2010 at 12:56pm — No Comments

29th July 2010 - New release - More hotel price logic, new APIs and single occupancy rules

Lots to report in the latest release

Booking engine

* Zero priced options on step 2 of the booking engine now show their prices as blank (rather than showing zero price)

* Turn options into questions - e.g. useful for pickup points, accommodation choice, t-shirt size etc. Can be an input box or a dropdown. The customer provided answer will be added to the end of the option name so will appear in your reports / booking documentation… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on July 29, 2010 at 8:45am — 2 Comments

14th July 2010 - New release - Agent login and other tweaks

Many tweaks to notify everyone.... all good news (hopefully!)

API, Marketplace, agents and tracking

* Tour search - products are automatically removed from the tour search API reply if they have error 404'ed more than 10 times in a row. This normally happens when you haven't set up a URL for the tour information page. Products automatically are returned again once the issue is resolved.

* Now showing… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on July 14, 2010 at 9:21am — 1 Comment

25th June 2010 - New release - Focus on changes to help you market more effectively

This week's release....

Marketing

* The widgets are now available in 14 languages - if you take a look at this page - near the bottom - you can see an example in Dutch and another in Spanish.

* Pay Per Click performance report (PPC) - you can now adjust report dates. A new column added to show leadtime by marketing partner. You will probably see that guide websites have long… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on June 24, 2010 at 10:45pm — 3 Comments

16th June 2010 - New release - Improvements and tweaks everywhere!

New release this week........ lots of small changes!

Excel export

* Enquiry export - country name - includes the full country name as a new column

* Enquiry export - address now split into multiple columns (easier to mail merge)

* Booking export - includes the workflow note

* Booking export - can include / exclude bookings that have any staff member on…

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Added by TourCMS team on June 16, 2010 at 1:52pm — 3 Comments

7th June 2010 - New release - Beanstream payment gateway and some other minor tweaks

Many small tweaks this week.

Booking engine

* Set default adult numbers for hotel product online bookings

* Able to hide the adult number dropdown on hotel product bookings

* A couple of language tweaks to the Greek language

* Step 1 - better focus on form elements when iframed - meaning that there is less jumping around when iframe is incorporated into your own website

* Link the image at the top of the booking engine to your… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on June 7, 2010 at 9:54pm — No Comments

27th May 2010 - New release - many changes, tweaks and improvements...

We have been so hard at work improving TourCMS that we have somewhat neglected to publicly announce all the good things we have been building. Time to catch up!

Email sending

* Default email sending from TourCMS now goes via a different outbound route than before. You shouldn't notice any difference although we hope it gets through better to various email services where they are more active at filtering for… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on May 27, 2010 at 2:00pm — 2 Comments

5th April 2010 - New release - tweaks to booking engine price display

A couple of tweaks gone live recently that we haven't announced so best we mention them :)

Booking engine

* Step 1 - New switch to hide prices

* Step 1 - New switch to hide product codes

* Step 2 - New switch to hide prices

* Step 2 - New switch to hide product codes

Documentation tokens

* Can turn off product codes for all multi-component bookings (go… Continue

Added by TourCMS team on April 5, 2010 at 9:31am — No Comments