Thoughts on the booking
Booking choice
This is a continuation of Booking previews with a booking choice screen. The design has been inspired with a metro and google+ interface patterns: large clear buttons that are touch friendly and a calendar that supports both: point and click devices as well as use of drag and drop.
Booking Choice
The design is highly customisable.
– First you can list one or more properties at once via user friendly admin panel. This is useful in scenarios where you either have one home owner with a specific villa to rent but also fits well in a scenario where you’ve got a hotel with multiple rooms to let individually.
– Secondly you can launch the booking widget in multiple language versions and let users switch between languages and currencies easily so that the interface and the pricing would update real time to reflect user’s choice.
– Thirdly you can apply a completely different mask: that is a different presentation set consisting of customised colours, button sizes and image composition. This requires some front end development only but allows any sort of customisation.
Booking add-ons
The admin panel allows for incredible customisation of pricing to differentiate pricing options from a vast set of competitors. This customisation lies at the core of the business model with heavily discounted prices. Discounted offers have been introduced with a range of booking add-ons that can be either mandatory or optional, and complement the home owner’s pricing model.
Booking bolt-ons
There’s in fact several pre-defined add-on scenarios where home owners can define some additional services that can be charged in a range of different ways:
– add-ons as one off payments for the whole stay
– add-ons as one off payments per person
– add-ons charged per person, per day
– add-ons charged per day or per person
– more…
These can be selected by the visitors and configured as part of the booking process. The final price is recalculated immediately upon every change of number of people, length of stay or user’s choice of add-ons.
Booking message
The final step allows users to post a booking message to the hotel owner, essentially facilitating an enquiry process, whereas all the requirements have been specified in the previous step(s): the type of villa or room(s) have been selected, as well as the number of nights and the number of people are already known.
Booking enquiry
In addition users can post individual booking enquirys to the house owners (or hotel staff), stating their detail requirements or requesting further information. The payments are always optional and require confirmation of the hotel or house owners. Until then booking enquirys are held in a queue until they’re confirmed by both parties, or cancelled by either party.
In this scenario home owners are given specific time to respond to the enquiry and if confirmed, users are given specific time to make the required payment to confirm the booking in the system. Cancelling the booking enquiry makes the property (or properties) available for subsequent bookings, which encourages home owner’s prompt reaction for each incoming booking enquiry.
Booking authorisation
Users can create their own accounts with individual home owners or the hotel systems. As an alternative to creating user accounts by specifying individual login names and passwords, users are also are given a wide range of login options to speed up the process with authorisation via Google, Facebook or even PayPal
Booking Account
Each account can be re-used to manage bookings already placed, browse the payment history, download receipts and re-send confirmations. Users can mix and match the login models with different authorisation methods: linking or unlinking their profiles using any combination of authorisation methods.
Some of the authorisation methods require providing specific booking terms and/or setting up API access with each authorisation website. Any of those options and can be switched on or off individually by users using the admin panel provided.
December update
IAI share price. Booking goes live with booking widget in March and public in October.
Disclaimers
Copyright note: all the interface and design elements, as well as functionality presented are copyrighted and owned by respective owners. Reproduction or redistribution is strictly prohibited. Some of the data, including customer, or business name(s) or trademarks are fictional, and do not represent actual companies or exact details of products or services offered by those companies.