Exciting news again today, adding 14 years to the number of years of experience in our industry. We are very pleased that Loic Kliemann will support us in software development in the future. Loic is currently doing a dual degree at Deutsche Telekom and will support us in all areas of operations and software development since the beginning of May.
Author: Mathias Methner
You're sitting in the subway to work and you can already look at yesterday's booking figures via email - Bookacamp now makes this possible. In the account settings under Automation - Briefings you can activate our daily, weekly or monthly emails and also attach the sales report as an Excel file. This makes especially sense for the monthly briefing. The e-mails provide information about the status of the activated period, whereby the content of the e-mails can be customized. The emails contain statistics about bookings, cancellations, sales, insurance, registration of supervisors or feedback received.
Our automation can conveniently email the DATEV export weekly or monthly. By entering the recipient group, it is even possible to send the file directly to the tax office. The e-mail template can be individually adapted, for example to send the client number directly to the office. Activation is done in the Automation - Accounting section of
We offer a number of evaluations, both statistically and financially. Our evaluation got a new statistic to see the bookings per day per agency. This can be helpful to identify certain days for sending a newsletter.
At the top of our menu is one of the main tools to quickly navigate to an entity in the tool. What's new is that the search field now reacts to where you are. In the supervisor addon, it changes to the search for supervisors, if you have the discounts open, you can search for the discount code. What is currently active can be recognized by the small icon in front of the field.
Author: Mathias Methner
Directly, as the third gender non-binary was introduced in 2018 and could officially be stated in the German ID card, Bookacamp adjusted its registration forms and processes to support it. Also, the use of a language, that excludes nobody because of their personal characteristics, has been important to us for years.
Previously, we used a notation that represented the gender-non-specific form of the language by a slash. However, it has become apparent that various groups of people - often referred to as LGBTQ+ - is better symbolized by an asterisk - the so-called gender star. Therefore, we have decided to change our language concepts. All texts in our user interfaces are represented by the asterisk * now. The asterisk stands for all persons who cannot be classified in the binary language pattern male & female.
This conversion is not a simple matter, as there is no official set of rules. Manufacturers of screen readers recommend using neutral wording as often as possible. Where it is not possible, the asterisk should be used instead of ":" colon or "_" underscore, as it is currently the most commonly used form of gender-sensitive language.
The changeover process was started today with the change of german texts at our company and is an ongoing process, because - of course - we also adapt our documents and our texts cannot all be read through at once. For quite a lot of wording, there are easy ways to change the language. Others are more difficult. For our english versions it is much easier, because most of all texts are just gender-neutral by language. One example, we look at are texts, which uses pharses like he/she, which now become he*she.
We are aware that the topic is sometimes discussed loudly and very controversially. The fact is that there are people who cannot and do not have to classify themselves as either male or female. We do not want to exclude those persons and are happy if there would be official rules in the future. The last statement of the Council for German Orthography is from 2021/03/16. 2 years old! If one looks at the members of the council (https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/ueber-den-rat/), there is at least a significant proportion of outwardly female persons. A diversity in origin, skin color or age are not to be recognized. In our opinion, this is not a representative picture of society and therefore we are not surprised, that there has been no update on this topic for the last 2 years.
Author: Mathias Methner
Every now and then we were asked whether Bookacamp can also sell vouchers. Especially before Christmas or Easter, this is certainly interesting for grandma and grandpa as a gift for the grandchildren. We have always refused to misuse bookable tours and camps for this purpose, because the wording and the functionalities are simply not designed for this. Reason enough to launch a voucher store that integrates seamlessly with the voucher and billing system, so that the vouchers you purchase can be used immediately to book your offers. The voucher store is now going into public beta and can be activated in your own account settings. Of course, the store is especially interesting when using our online payment providers, because the vouchers are then directly paid and active.
The amount of the vouchers is freely selectable. The vouchers created are designed for printing at home designed and layout with nice background images.
Right now is the time of the season, when interviews in preparation for the training courses this year take place. At each interview, notes can be left on the suitability of the person. In order to be well prepared for the interview and also to have everything at hand during the interview, our interviewer page has been updated and now shows more data from the persons profile.
Files can be uploaded for email attachments or as a library for camp counselors. A file upload can now be updated, for example because this year's packing list has changed. This saves a lot of time instead of updating the email templates one by one.
After an internal test phase, we are starting to roll out the extended security check MFA for all logins. In addition to the user name and password, a further short-time factor is used. This factor is generated via an app on the smartphone, so a hacker needs the smartphone in addition to the access data, making it much more difficult to gain unauthorized access to an account. The use of MFA will initially be voluntary and will be supported by an information campaign about data protection and security.
Author: Mathias Methner
For a long time Bookacamp has offered a pricing model that provides a revenue share depending on the turnover of the booking. The staggered model needed explanation from time to time and did not fit especially for our users with smaller prices, for example for daycamps. For this reason, we are adapting the pricing model and will offer a particularly easy-to-calculate percentage model in the future.
Our existing contracts and agreements are not affected by this change and of course we can still negotiate individual models if it fits better to your business.
Autor: Mathias Methner
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
Author: Mathias Methner
On November 17, this year's Youth Travel Congress will take place at the BSLV Sportcamp Nordbayern in Bischofsgrün. The congress is a great opportunity to (re)meet familiar faces from the branch and to make new contacts. Besides the lecture program there is enough opportunity to network and especially the evening events are an important opportunity for us to get into conversation.
This year Bookacamp as one of the representatives of digital solution providers will use the knowledge from 7 years in the youth travel industry to talk to you about where things are really going smoothly and where we still need solutions for our core business - vacations and care for children and young people. The workshop I printed the emails will take place from 15:50 till 16:50. On site will be Mathias Methner - software developer and founder of Bookacamp - and Mathias Ralf Enderlein, who takes care of everything but programming at Bookacamp and has seen many transformations in his 18 years in the scene.
Those who have a tight schedule are welcome to make an appointment with us starting now. We will be on site from 16 November in the afternoon.
Author: Mathias Methner
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.
Author: Mathias Methner
Since 2015, Mathias Methner has developed the functions on bookacamp.de, acting as a sole proprietorship with personal liability. For the beginning, this has advantages, since accounting and administrative activities require far less time than with other forms of business. The first real live booking was already made oin october 2015. Since then, the system has grown steadily and some activities have been taken over by external personnel.
Bookacamp now works with very large tour operators in Germany and Austria, connects partners from the insurance and online payment industry and processes thousands of registrations, payments, questionnaires and emails daily. This growth is great and has ensured that since the middle of the month additional staff has been working at Bookacamp on a permanent basis.
In order to take care of the accompanying responsibility, to secure financial aspects and to mitigate personal liability issues, Bookacamp GmbH was founded in April 2022 and since July all administrative matters have been settled, so that Bookacamp GmbH with Mathias Methner as managing director has fully started its business activities.
Author: Mathias Methner
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.
Author: Mathias Methner
When Bookacamp started in 2015, the questionnaire system was already an integral part of the functionality. The system is used to define questions about health, social behavior or the motivation of travel participants. The catalog of questions was constantly being expanded, for example with specific questions about sport or for special needs for people with assistance needs.
With the increasing number of daily users, it became clear that the flexibility of the system no longer met the company's own high requirements. All Bookacamp users have already been automatically migrated to the new version and thus benefit from the improved options without any additional effort.
The current beta phase is used to respond to user feedback and to adjust small things. The system is then expanded further.
Author: Mathias Methner
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
As of today, Bookacamp is expanding its portfolio of online payment providers with two well-known names Stripe and Saferpay. The technical provision of both providers is free of charge at Bookacamp and can be activated in your own settings. The variety of online payment providers is due to the fact that the providers offer different conditions for different payment methods.
Most providers offer their customers the common payment methods in Europe out of the box: credit cards (e.g. Visa, Master, Amex), Paypal, Klarna Sofort, direct debit, iDeal and Giropay.
To use Stripe you can activate the integration yourself in the account settings. All you need is your own Stripe Account. Activating Saferpay is also easy and is done using the Registration at Saferpay started.
Autor: Mathias Methner
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.
Author: Mathias Methner
The Youth Travel Congress 2021 will take place in Kyllburg, Germany from November 17th to 19th. The interesting program of the visitor day on November 18, 2021 can be viewed on the website. For an appointment on November 18th or 19th, we look forward to hearing from you.
The payment pages should guide the customer to pay for the invoice as comfortable as possible. Bookacamp integrates SEPA direct debit, Adyen, Saferpay, Klarna and Girosolution and this covers the range of the most common online payment methods. The payment pages have been revised whether to put the visual focus on the payment and to move the information around it in the background. The same principle is now also applied to the booking summary page.
Author: Mathias Methner
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
Because of the summer holidays in August, this month is often marked by many small individualizations in exports and Bookacamp reacts very quickly to inquiries, especially if they make sure the camps run smoothly. Still, there is a small list of interesting features that are now ready to use.
Since last year it has already been possible to take reservations and thus block capacity at short notice. This is useful when, for example, parents ask about it because their application for leave at work has not yet been approved. Since the beginning of the month, these reservations can be converted into a booking in self-service, so that customers only receive a link by email and can do everything there. This eliminates the need to type in data from e-mails in the office.
With Bookacamp's feedback addon, customers can be asked about their experience with the registration process as well as their evaluation for the camp. The rating is divided into aspects specific to youth travel, such as supervision, catering and the program, whereby the selection of ratings can be determined in the addon's settings. In addition to the aggregated evaluation of the feedback per appointment and camp, an evaluation per agency is now also possible. This overview enables travel agents to analyze the quality of the trips in discussions with the tour operators and to improve them if necessary.
Author: Mathias Methner
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
Fortunately, it did not take 78 minutes before a participant had to be excluded from a camp, but only 78 minutes before Bookacamp was able to deliver a requested feature.
Why is that special?
Many services on the Internet have delivery times of days to weeks, depending on the development and release
process in the company. Bookacamp knows that fast delivery times for bug fixes or urgent features can make
life easier for tour operators, especially in the current high season. The software and system landscape
behind Bookacamp is able to roll out every change to the source code to the production environment in 30
seconds.
This technological foundation has ensured, that this week an urgently needed excel export for corona situations could be adapted during an 88-second phone call. From Bookacamp's point of view, such short-term, individual changes to specific needs of the tour operator are not a necessary evil, but rather give us pleasure, because they make the life of the users immediately easier.
But what is travel exclusion about?
Fortunately, it rarely happens, but there are participants, who have to be excluded from a camp due to their
personal socio-educational situation. Tour operators usually do everything in their power to prepare their
participants for a nice trip - if the educational concept and team size are still exhausted, participants my
be excluded. Nobody likes to do this, but it is sometimes necessary for the camp to run smoothly. Another
reason is outstanding payments or aggressive communication that excludes a specific customer from being a
contractual partner. In order to meet this group of customers, tour operators now have the option of marking
a booking for future travel exclusion. That doesn't automatically mean, that these bookings will be blocked
- people keep evolving. It means that these registrations will go into a queue and will be checked before
confirmation by the tour operator.
Find an overview of releases per day of the last couple of weeks. It has been 92 releases on july so far.
Author: Mathias Methner
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Bookacamp now supports the booking of a round trip, which means that the booked transfer combines the arrival and departure with a total price. This completes the offer for different models of transport and you can decide for yourself how individually the arrival and departure options should be booked.
With the feedback add-on, customers have the opportunity to submit their feedback for a camp. The
invitation can be sent automatically in the background. Bookacamp then automatically sends the feedback
invitation
and informs you about the invitations sent in the internal message system.
The summer holidays will soon begin and it will be time to remind your customers of the possible outstanding
balance. Bookacamp is also able to automatically send reminders for this.
There are new templates and processes to take the dunning process to a more official level. As always, the contents of the reminder e-mails can be customized. A booking is moved to the dunning process when you click on the booking detail page under Payment > Paymend reminder 1/2.
Author: Mathias Methner
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
In mid-March, Europe's largest data center near the river Rhine burned down. Various media reports, that the data of many server and website operators have been irrevocably lost, because backups were missing or in in the same data center. This rises the question, of how Bookacamp can deal with the valuable data of its users?
Data - in the case of Bookacamp, these are databases and files (photos and documents) of both the users of Bookacamp as well as Bookacamp itself. The most important data is in the databases, which are backed up every 10 minutes. Backup means a full copy of the databases is created and written to a file. These backup files are immediately fully encrypted via GPG (Wikipedia) and after that they are - not readably by third parties - copied to a cloud service. This procedure alone is sufficient to guarantee almost 100% data backup. Another protection mechanism is, that with every backup on the data is copied to a failover system at another data center operator. The same procedure is used for files, here the backup takes place twice a day.
Another mainstay of the backup strategy is protection against ransomware (Wikipedia). Often times, the character of this malware is, that all data, backups included, is encrypted by this malware and you must buy the key for decryption . The only effective protection against this is to keep your own backups unreachable for the malware. For this reason, Bookacamp performs Offsite Backups once a quarter
Last but not least, backups are of no use if they are not regularly tested and imported into test systems to check the recovery processes. Bookacamp has automated this process so that every transfer to the failover system tests the recovery process. In addition, completely empty operating systems are started every morning, necessary packages are installed and the current backup data is imported - this ensures that Bookacamp is up and running on the new server in a short period of time.
Author: Mathias Methner
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
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.
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
What does Bookacamp have to do with shopping?
Not much, actually. The special thing about today's story is the integration of Bookacamp on the
Website from hockeyshop.de and
sportshop.com through our partner
Sportscampus. Sportscampus has been organizing sports camps for young people for over 20
years. Started with hockey, meanwhile Sportscampus offers golf and tennis camps, even international ones.
Bookacamp offers extensive opportunities for collaboration with external agencies. This includes the access to the agency portal, which each user can set up him/herself. In addition, there is the possibility of assigning bookings via agency links to the agency and thus builds an affiliate and partner program.
At the beginning of the year, Sportscampus is offering an early bird discount for a short time. It is worth registering now.
Author: Mathias Methner
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
Author: Mathias Methner
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.
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.
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
Author: Mathias Methner
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:
At the latest shortly before the trip, it is necessary to inform the hostel about the number of people arriving, times, information for the kitchen and bookable extras such as meeting rooms and disco. There are so-called hostel messages, with the help of which you can send all the information to a hostel at the push of a button. A particular strength of this notification is noticeable when the assignments of the counselors to the camps have been made in the system, because then all information is bundled together.
This feature is immediately activated for all users and can be accessed via the administration of the sessions. Is there a lack of easy mailings in your current system? You can start a non-binding demo directly on this page.
Author: Mathias Methner
43 tickets have been closed and implemented since March. A selection of the most important innovations follows here: