Features and Updates 2022/11/08

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The Youth Travel Congress 2022 from Reisenetz will take place in the newly opened BLSV Sportcamp Nordbayern. Starting at 3:50 p.m., we'd love if you tell us if you've ever printed out emails? In this workshop we want to find out, what is already going well with digital transformation and where we still need to find solutions. Mathias Ralf Enderlein and Mathias Methner will guide you through the workshop and are looking forward to many colorful stickys on the whiteboard. Tickets for the congress are available on the website.

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🤩 The highlight

• Early Bird & Last Minute

  The season starts now and it's time to boost business. Vouchers are often used for this purpose. Very up to date Bookacamp has launched coupons that are directly applied, create strike prices and thus draw the attention of customers to the new camps. The coupons can be easily activated for all offers or for selected ones in the coupon configuration and are immediately live. To make sure you don't forget to deactivate a voucher, there is a hint on the dashboard.

  

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✨ Things to know

• Data archived to early?

  At the end of the season you do the seasonal accounting, calculate the commission with the partners and when everything is done, the data is archived to make room for the new season. It feels good every year to start fresh and watch the booking numbers come in. But what if you archived too early and now you need data again after all? Individual bookings can be reactivated a long time ago, and now you can do the same for sessions and events. To do this, you simply click on the session to edit it and you will find the new function at the top of the page. The corresponding bookings will be reactivated directly.

• Forgot travel insurance?

  Bookacamp offers travel insurance directly in the booking process through its partner HanseMerkur. HanseMerkur offers a special additional product for the Corona travel insurance, which makes this offer very interesting for parents. Some parents forget to click on the travel insurance or want to book first and check later if an existing insurance is there. In Bookacamp it is now possible to send a link where the travel insurance can be conveniently added afterwards. Are you interested in the integration to HanseMerkur? We are happy to help you..

• Print Name Tags

  At events and seminars, participants are often given name tags. It is not much fun to fill in the templates for this in Word and then print and cut them out in the right sizes. Based on special sticky labels, Bookacamp exports the names and company names of the participants for you in a predefined format, which can then be printed on the sticky sheets. You can find the explanation for this in your account in the account settings under Integration > Name tags.

  

• Improvements to the invoice overview

  You can download all invoices as PDF. This is useful for example for the tax advisor or simply to close the season. Under Overviews > Invoices you can now find date filters as well as the possibility to search only paid or only unpaid invoices. In addition, the name of the participant appears in the overview, in case you are looking for something quickly.

• Commission matching with agencies and intermediaries

  Data and bookings can be exchanged with other players via our interfaces. Bookacamp processes the booking numbers of third party agents starting this season to simplify list matching for the future.

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Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Features and Updates 2022/06/09

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There has been some interesting features accumulated since the last feature update. The season is almost over and now it is time for a little vacation, catch your breath and find strength for the start of the fall vacation. Surely there is also a quiet minute to get up to date with the following updates.

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🤩 The highlight

• Instant checkout

  Bookacamp can confirm bookings automatically. This is very convenient especially at the beginning of the season - mostly from November to March - because you as the organizer can lean back and the work is done by the software. If you also offer your customers online payment via one of the numerous online payment providers, the customer is now shown the invoice directly after booking and payment can start. This works just like in any online store. The payment method is selected, the payment is confirmed, and the money is in the account in no time at all.

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✨ Need to know

• Filter by bookable offers

  In the back office in the filter panel for the sessions and events there is a new option to search for bookable offers. Especially at the end of the season, this is helpful in advising customers to quickly find the offers where spots are available.

• Cancel camps and events

  There is an option in the session management via the more function to classify a session as cancelled. When canceling a done, all related bookings are automatically canceled in one step. This takes work off your hands, as the cancellation emails and invoice cancellations are taken care of directly.

• Suspend feedback

  From now on it is possible to ignore single sessions in the dispatch of the automatic feedback request. This can be useful in relation to agencies or companies that use their own feedback systems. The new setting can be found in the expert mode in the communication section.

• Trip interruption & cancellations

  The date and background of cancellations and trip interruptions can now be changed. Under Edit booking directly on the respective booking detail page there is the new input field. In addition, bookings with the status cancelled or interrupted will not be considered in the automatic feedback requests.
  Why is this needed?
  To improve the billing with the hostel and to exclude, that automatic emails are still sent. Season follow-up also benefits from the data.

• To improve the capacity query for sibling bookings.

  It is possible to register more than one participant per booking. Our algorithms, which calculate the number of free spots, have been adjusted and now check directly when adding more participants, what the occupancy level is. If the camp is full, the booking is prevented.

• Self-service waiting list cancellation

  Often certain offers are realized via waiting lists, for example because places are allocated via scholarships or companies want to release the registration lists first. Especially when such registrations cost nothing at first, there is quite a high rate of no shows, which means the kids simply don't show up at camp without cancelling. This is annoying, as others would have liked to come along. It makes sense to ask before the camp, if the registration is still up to date. This can be done by using the e-mail bulk function in the system and, brand new, there are also placeholders that customers can use to cancel or deregister their registration themselves. The cancellation pops up in the internal messaging system and the place can be filled with other participants.

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💰 Everything that has to do with money

• Customer's tax number on the invoice

  It sometimes happens that companies want to see their own tax number on the invoice. To do this, the tax number must be entered in the customer record in the backoffice and it will be inserted under the address field on the invoice.

• Customers with direct debit without payment reminders

  The system is able to send an automatic reminder in case of open payments. The activation is done in the own account settings. For bookings that pay by direct debit, this reminder was previously also sent. To avoid misunderstandings, this is now prevented.

• Incoming payments on the cash desk

  If you have ever done accounting yourself, you will know what to do with the cash accounts Bank (1200) and Cash (1000). This is used to separate cash flows for accounting purposes. When parents pay an amount in cash in the location, it is often posted to a cash register with a paper receipt and its own accounting rules. The amount still needs to be recorded in the booking details, otherwise payment reminders or dunning letters could be sent. If one enters the payment, the choice between both accounts is now available. The 1200 bank account is always preselected. Postings to the cash account are ignored in the further accounting, for example via our DATEV interface.

• Improved dunning

  Payment reminder - reminder1 - reminder2 - collection. But in which status is the posting actually at the moment? The dunning system has been internally decoupled from the booking status, so you can see when an invoice is dunned and it allows reminders on cancellation invoices. This is of course accompanied by better filters and better control. Let's hope that these functions are used as rarely as possible.

😎 Teamer-Addon

• Do you already know the profile login?

  The profile login allows your camp counselors to update their own data, maintain questionnaires and documents, and register requests for the next assignments. A new feature is that the team members can download the participation lists of their camps themselves. This means that the data is always up to date. As a bonus, Bookacamp ensures that counselors must confirm privacy requirements and it logs when which lists were saved. Last but not least, there's less paper, which is good for the environment and your wallet.

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Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

38 years of children and youth travel experience 2022/07/27

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There is an excellent and exciting news at Bookacamp - since Monday Mathias Ralf Enderlein is part of the Bookacamp team. Matze E worked for many years full-time at a large children and youth tour operator, which has been using Bookacamp for a long time and has significantly contributed to the development of some features. This is great, because Matze E can immediately fall back on several years of user knowledge. He also gained his knowledge and experience in the industry during 18 years of working as a camp counselor with children and teenagers.

Bookacamp is very happy to have Matze E in the team.

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Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Features updates 2022/03/09

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The hot phase of the Easter camps has begun and Bookacamp accompanies this with many individual adjustments in processes and exports. In addition, Bookacamp supports a special holiday campaign in Austria with the ticketing of 45 camps in Tyrol, Salzburg, Carinthia and Italy.

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More automation

Many processes involved in communicating with the customers can be automated. This includes payment reminders, feedback invitations and the latest travel information. Recently, the participant questionnaire can also been sent out automatically by the system.

Performance

As Bookacamp grows, so do the requirements for large accounts (5-10k bookings per year) and the infrastructure behind them. Bookacamp has put an in-memory storage into operation in the last few weeks in order to quickly deliver important data about capacities and bookings, even if thousands of bookings are managed in one account.

Counselor Addon

Since more and more organizers are now using the integrated counselor addon, there are many smaller improvements to the processes. Notes for an assignment to the camp can be written directly with the assignment. It is also possible to create personalized contracts as an e-mail attachment. A Whatsapp chat can be started directly from the back office with the counselor. Of particular note is a new team feature, which lists information about team composition and roles in the team for all of the season's camps. The new feature also offers the possibility of establishing contact between the team for preparation purposes at the touch of a button.

Aesome Layouts

At the request of new tour operators who have been using Bookacamp since 2022, new views for integration on their own website were presented. All views react to the screen size of the end device and are therefore responsive. In addition, Bookacamp now offers integration via country domains bookacamp.at, bookacamp.be, bookacamp.fr, bookacamp.es, bookacamp.it, bookacamp.ch und bookacamp.org und bookacamp.net

Card-Layout

In particular, if all content, texts and product images are managed via Bookacamp, this view is ideal for displaying the entire website of the tour operator from Bookacamp.

Card-Layout grouped

If you don't have enough individual product images or want to summarize the dates for a camp, you can use the more compact view because it's grouped and therefore smaller.

Camps per month

Tables sorted by date or by camp have always existed, because their filter options make them versatile on the website. This view, grouped by month and date, completes the offer.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Create contracts for counselors & Updates until december 2021/02/12

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Part of the application and recruiting process for the placement of camp counselors and travel coordinators is the assignment to a camp (operational planning) and the issuing of contracts. Bookacamp offers various tools, that depend on the skills of the counselor and the capacities of the camp, which make the planning process easier. Issuing the contracts extends the range of functions, so that individual contracts are created by the system and can be sent directly to the counselor as email attachment.

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Various

• Revision of the voucher system
  We have just got the time of year when vouchers as a Christmas present or an early bird discount for the new camps for the coming season are attractive for parents and grandparents. Many travel providers lure their customers with further discounts, for siblings and returnees. This creates the challenge of ensuring, that several siblings are registerd, or not. Bookacamp now offers freely configurable input fields for names or customer numbers that make it easier to find siblings and previous bookings.
• Corona / measles vaccination
  No hygiene concept can avoid checking the vaccination or test backlog for Corona. To make it easier for tour operators to better prepare for the local conditions, the question about the last corona vaccination is now an integral part of the health questionnaire and can be activated with one click in the account settings. In addition to Corona, there are child relevant questions for the year of vaccination for measles, tetanus and ticks (TBE).

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Bookacamp for Wordpress 2021/08/25

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Many travel companies use the Wordpress software to maintain the content of the website without having to learn a lot of technical know-how. Since Wordpress can be expanded by many functions through plugins, Bookacamp is now offering its own plugin directly in the Wordpress plugin directory. The aim is to make the integration of the booking forms and the overviews of bookable trips as simple as possible and to completely hide the technical background.

The plug-in is installed directly from the plug-in directory and, after activation, shows a menu item to make all settings. Then a Bookacamp element is inserted directly in the editor of the page. The element lists the possible layouts and also offers two combinable filters for the search results. For example, you can only display all trips in which you can surf. Immediately after the selection, the preview is displayed and the integration is completed by clicking on Save and Publish.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Bankexport for credit transfer for overpayment 2021/08/09

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The summer season is drawing to a close. Typically this is the time to get ready for the end of the season to provide an overview of the bookings for which payments are still unpaid or which bookings need a repayment. Refunds occur when a tour operator reduced the travel price, the customer has accidentally paid too much or a trip that has already been paid for has been canceled.

Finding all bookings with overpayment has been very easy in Bookacamp for years, as there is a separate menu item for this. With today's release, the entire repayment process has been further simplified so that overpaid bookings can be transferred to the bank with a SEPA export. A collective file is created that contains all repayment instructions for open bookings. Commercial banks can read this file and use it to make a repayment. This feature ends the manual copying of bank data in bank transfer forms.

Customers who have not yet stored any bank details are asked by email with just one click to store their bank details in the system. The bank details are field-encrypted and stored in Bookacamp. This new feature is enabled for all Bookacamp users and can be activated in your own settings.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Updates until July 2021/07/09

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The summer vacation has started and some of the participants are already back from the camp - sure with a lots of experiences after this long corona break. To find out more about the real life usage of the various functionalities of Bookacamp, we recently visited a camp on site and reviewed the checkin with a QR code scanner. Some of the adaptations below are a direct response to what we learned there.

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Demographics

Parents often get in touch to find out about the age structure of the participants in the camp. In addition to the overviews of the number of boys / girls who have already registered, Bookacamp shows the age structure in the backoffice.

Readonly access

Read access for supervisors is used a lot during the season and answers questions about participants directly in the camp, e.g. if the doctor needs emergency contact details. Read access has recently received a few optimizations that make it easier to navigate on small cell phone displays. In addition, a profile page of the participant can be called up directly in read access.

Transfer information

If parents provide individual travel information, for example because they appear earlier at the check-in, this can now be stored directly in booking and the information appears in the exports and read access. Camp leaders immediately have all the information about arrival and departure ready.

Diary

There are often incidents during the camp that the office should know about in case parents call. If noteworthy events are stored as a supervision note, there is now a diary with which you can get an overview in the morning at the beginning of the working day. With this information you will no longer be surprised by a phone call.

External access data - e.g. language test

If you want to store access data for each booking for an external tool, in order to then send them collectively to all bookings of an event, you can now find this in the booking processing view. One area of usage are language tests before the camp starts. This saves the tedious and error-prone creation of individual emails.

Payment provider Saferpay

In addition to Girosolution, Klarna Sofort, Adyen and direct debit by Bookacamp, there is an immediately available integration to the payment service provider Saferpay. Saferpay has all common payment methods in its range.

Synchronization of the booking status between travel agent and tour operator

If the travel agent and tour operator are both part of the Bookacamp network, the status of a forwarded booking can now be synchronized. This eliminates the annoying request for the booking confirmation for the agent.

Classification of supervisors

In order to structure the classification of the suitability of a supervisor, you can now find some input fields in the profile to note information about the subjective impression and suitability as a supervising person.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Bookacamp integrates Adyen as a payment service provider 2021/05/11

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Many Bookacamp users rely on payment service providers to make online payments as easy as possible for their customers. Bookacamp has added the European provider Adyen with its Pay by Link product to the list of connected services. Thus, all users of Bookacamp benefit automatically and free of charge from the new service provider. Adyen covers a huge list of payment systems. SEPA direct debit, Paypal, GiroPay, Visa, Mastercard and iDEAL in the Netherlands are very popular in German-speaking countries.

The integration with Adyen is done with your own settings. All you need is your own Adyen account.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Customers book HanseMerkur travel insurance directly in Bookacamp 2021/03/04

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Bookacamp celebrates the first insurance policy on March 2nd

After Bookacamp published the payment by direct debit in february, a month later the next big highlight follows: From now on, Bookacamp's users can offer their customers the booking of a travel insurance with HanseMerkur directly during the booking process. Bookacamp is proud to work in partnership with the HanseMerkur. The selection of insurance products is part of the negotiotion between the tour operator and HanseMerkur and they are adapted to the needs of the tour operator. The insurance products protect parents from cancellation costs, as well person and property damage.

How does it work?

After the tour operator has found the perfect products in communication with the HanseMerkur, only the agency number of the tour operator must be stored in Bookacamp. Then the tour operator decides at the push of a button whether the billing happens via direct accounting (billing directly between customer and insurer) or agency accounting (billing between tour operator and customer). Bookacamp individually determines the insurance offers for each booking during the booking process and stores them until the booking is confirmed by the tour operator. The insurance is automatically reconfirmed, so that there is only little effort for the tour operator and customer.

The integration with the HanseMerkur is now available for every tour operator and agent from Bookacamp.
If you want to learn more about the integrations of Bookacamp, please register a free demo account.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Bookacamp & Berlitz Germany integrate their systems 2021/01/25

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Bookacamp serves many tour operators, tour agents and event organizers as a daily tool for organizing your work and is always looking for ways to improve standard workflows. A widespread time waster arise at the interfaces to third-party systems, for example during transmission of bookings between a travel agent and the tour operator. Where in the past bookings were sent by fax, it is now possible to establish seamless integration between different providers.

System integration is now available between Berlitz Germany and Bookacamp, so that bookings can be transferred from Bookacamp to Berlitz at the push of a button and the annoying forwarding of booking data via email can be omitted. This procedure is not only more time-saving than before, but is much less susceptible to errors than copying from emails.

It works that simple:

• Bookacamp's agency system offers an option of connecting to Berlitz with a single click to activate.
• A Berlitz booking is reviewed and confirmed directly in Bookacamp by the travel agent.
• All confirmed bookings are automatically delivered through the interface to Berlitz.
• The bookings delivered are processed at Berlitz and (back)confirmed through the interface.
• Done.

The interface is immediately available to all Bookacamp users free of charge.

If you want to learn more about Bookacamp's interfaces, please register a free demo account.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link of the article

Bookacamp Redesign

1303 updates files later 2021/01/08

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Bookacamp's birthday was in January 2015 - 6 years ago - and we are proud to have processed tens of thousands bookings for tour operators, travel agents and organizers of online and offline events. One of the success factors of Bookacamp is the constant continuous improvement of every component. We are particularly grateful for the many ideas, tips and messages that we have received from already 147 users and would like to say a big thank you for it.

A lot has happened in the 6 years. Addons and features were added and now it was time to update the entire user interface of Bookacamp. 1303 changed files, 45,213 changed and 134,964 deleted lines of source code. What an amazing number.

The new interface is more modern, looks smoother and uses the latest browser features to give both, the users of the Bookacamp Backoffice, but also the many thousands of parents, children and event participants, a special experience when booking camps and registering for events. In particular, the increasing number of users with mobile devices benefit from larger fonts and controls and better loading times.

Feel free to register your demo account and see our new user interafe in action.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

YAGNI & KISS 2020/11/12

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Bookacamp is a software product for the (youth) travel industry and combines excellent knowledge of software development with professional knowledge of the requirements and processes of the travel industry. But there is always the question of which features and functionalities are required in which form in order to make the communication and administration of bookings / events as easy and quick as possible. Since Bookacamp was founded in 2015, we have been working very closely with product owners and pilot customers. That's nothing special - that's how agile software development works. The special thing is that the product owners are users and partners of Bookacamp themselves, i.e. the tour operators and travel agents whose requirements arise from day-to-day business. Bookacamp is very happy to receive this open input.

In order to keep an overview of all requirements, we use a ticket system. In the last 5 years, 1811 tickets have been created in this way, 94 of which are currently open in different sizes. Bookacamp uses two principles to decide which problem a ticket is going to be developed and for what there may be a different solution.

YAGNI - You Arent't Gonna Need It

Every feature and every problem solution has different characteristics and there are often dozens of ways to expand a feature. The tightrope act is to decide which functionalities will be used later and whether there is someone who needs a solution. Unless a requester exists, we often decide not to implement something at the current time and wait to see how usage develops.

KISS - Keep It Simple & Stupid

Some things are easier to do than others - but the general rule is that a simple and understandable solution is preferable to a complex and complicated one. This applies to decisions in software development as well as in the structure of user interfaces and processes.

Author: Mathias Methner

Updates in July 2020/08/08

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June usually is a bit quieter, so major changes to processes and new features do not disturb the ongoing season. A few minor things are still worth mentioning:

• Automatic booking confirmation
  To save more time for standard processes, bookings can now be automatically confirmed by the system. The invoice is generated and sent as soon as a new registration arrives. The new feature can be (de-)activated in the settings menu as required.
• Minimal event registration
  For free (information) events it can be useful to keep the hurdle for registration as low as possible. This minimal registration only requires the name and e-mail of the applicant.

Updates of June 2020/06/05

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43 tickets have been closed and implemented since March. A selection of the most important innovations follows here:

• Temporary VAT reduction
  From july 1st to december 31, 2020, the federal government of Germany decided to cut 3% on the standard tax rate and 2% on the reduced tax rate. What effects this has on the invoicing of the travel industry, whose service period often does not correspond to the invoicing period, must now be clarified. Bookacamp will make the adjustments to the software available before first of july.
• RSS - Don't miss any news
  Many mail programs and browsers have a feed reader to subscribe to news. Bookacamp's german blog now delivers the newsfeed readable for feed readers. So you don't miss any more information.
• Automatic synchronization between agency and organizer
  In order to further minimize the coordination effort between the travel agent (agency) and the organizer, the availability of the free spots can now be automatically synchronized in the background. The current cycle is 1x on the hour.
• Yes / No answers with consent
  It happens, that information is important when booking. An example is the question of whether a child can swim or can participate in certain sports. Consent has been expanded to request a decisive answer on the last page of the booking process.
• Various options per session
  Among other things, it is possible to decide per session, whether information about the t-shirt size or class level of the participant should be obtained. All in all, it is worth looking at the entire Expert Mode tab when creating a session to get to know Bookacamp's high degree of customization.