Bookacamp News


On the following pages you will find our regular news and updates.

Latest & Greatest Updates Summer Edition 2024/10/15

✨ Useful information

😎 Counselor-Addon

𖨆𖨆𖨆𖨆 Group Suite

🏒 Insurance

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Mileston 1/3 Group Suite reached 2024/02/16


Bookacamp has been working for many months on the features that need to be available for booking and managing entire groups. It's not just about accepting a reservation by email, but also about making a group booking binding. With everything included.

We have divided the project into three parts, whereby the large base - and this is also the reason for the long development period - is necessary for all three milestones and requires completely new room and capacity management. All of this is seamlessly integrated during ongoing operations.


Milestone 1 - non-binding reservation request

We have provided new group registration forms because when booking entire groups, the arrival and departure dates are not known and must be selected. Whether a travel period is free is calculated live based on the group size and stored capacities. The first use case with which we will test and improve these systems in the real world is the business of arranging group trips and school trips as agent. We are very excited that these features will be used by one of our long-term partners very soon.

Screenshot Ressource Scheduler


Milestone 2 - binding booking

A binding booking includes the management of customer data, offer documents, flexible invoicing and room planning. The central element of the planning is the so-called Resource Scheduler, a calendar-like tool for overviewing your own workload.

Screenshot Resource Scheduler


Milestone 3 - PMS Property Management

Based on all other functions, we are expanding group management to include those features that are necessary for managing the entire house. This includes logins and overviews for kitchen planning and housekeeping, the integration of quotation creation for bus transfer providers and material and resource planning for everything movable, such as technology for seminar rooms, instruments and also the planning of rooms that are not intended for the accommodation of guests.


If this has made you curious and you would like to get a taste of these tools, please contact info@bookacamp.de and we will arrange an appointment.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Latest & Greatest Updates December Edition 2023/12/15

✨ Useful information

πŸ›’ Shop

😎 Counselor-Addon

🧾 Accounting

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Latest & Greatest Updates November Edition 2023/11/18


Shortly before the Youth Travel Congress on November 30th there is another update for our functions and features.

✨ Useful information

🎫 Ticketing

😎 Counselor-Addon

🧾 Accounting

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Sell Christmas vouchers via our shop system 2023/09/24

Today we're looking at our new shop system, which you can use to sell vouchers for Christmas. With our latest releases we have connected all of our online payment providers (Stripe, Adyen, Girocheckout, Klarna Sofort.) and of course the SEPA payments that are popular in Germany. This allows the customer to pay for and use the voucher ordered immediately. When paying via online payment providers, the vouchers are activated immediately and automatically.

✨ This is how you use the shop system

1. Activation

Open your account settings and navigate to the Shop box. When activating, you confirm the conditions and are immediately ready to enter your desired vouchers in different amounts. A new left main menu item appears with the heading Shop.

2. Add products

You can enter your vouchers in the corresponding sub-main menu item Products. At this point you choose the amount of the purchase price. The purchase price and the voucher value can differ from each other, so you can offer your customers an incentive to buy. You can use our image templates to offer vouchers that match the theme - for example for Christmas.

screenshot product overview

3. Integrate shop

You can either send the shop as a link or add it to the menu of your website, or you can embed the shop as a post in an iframe on your website. The layout of the shop adapts to the booking forms on your website. You can find more information and the link below your product overview. There is also a help page linked there.

screenshot shop interface

4. Payment

If you do not use online payment through one of our providers, you can offer payment with SEPA transfer or our SEPA direct debit. With both payment methods, you have to activate the purchased vouchers yourself after receiving the money. It is much more convenient with an online payment. We will be informed of the payment directly, so that Bookacamp automatically activates the vouchers and sends the associated confirmation to the customer by email. So you don't have to worry about anything else.

screenshot shop payment

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Latest & Greatest Updates August Edition 2023/08/25


We used the summer to look at and implement a lot of things from the feedback from our users. In the summer it is very important not to disturb the everyday office life as much as possible and to react quickly to the things that are reported to us during the high season. Here is the list of notable updates.

✨ Useful information

𖨆𖨆𖨆𖨆 Group handling

βœ‰οΈ Emails

😎 Teamer-Addon

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

EYCA - The European Youth Card 2023/07/21

The European Youth Card (EYCA – European Youth Card), issued in Germany under license by Reisenetz e.V. (German Association for Youth Travel) by EYCard Deutschland GmbH, is an advantage card valid throughout Europe for young people (up to the age of 30) and grants more than 30,000 different advantages when traveling in Europe. From discounts in hostels, airlines, ferries, hotels, museums, amusement parks etc. to restaurants. This includes (for guests living in Germany) travel health insurance from ERGO – for one year, for any number of trips, worldwide (including the USA / Canada!).

The card is available online for €19 at www.jugendkarte.de. Some organizers at Bookacamp provide their travel guests with the youth card free of charge after the end of a camp as a great, valuable extra. This is very easy to do by sending a voucher code to the participants or parents after the end of the camp.

Instead of €19, organizers who use Bookacamp only pay €12 - and of course only for redeemed card codes. For Reisenetz members, the costs are even reduced to just €9 per youth card voucher code redeemed! It still includes the annual travel insurance (foreign travel health insurance) for any number of trips. If you are interested, Ralf Olk / EYCard Deutschland GmbH will be happy to help olk@jugendkarte.de.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

52 years child and youth travel experience 2023/05/16


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

Link to the article

New features and updates 2023/05/12


🀩 The Highlights


✨ Useful information


😎 Teamer-Addon


⭐ Feedback-Addon

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Bookacamp switches to gender star 2023/03/28


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

Link to the article

New features and updates 2023/02/21


🀩 The Highlights


✨ Things to know


πŸ” Security

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Bookacamp updates the pricing model 2022/11/18


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

Link to the article

Features and Updates 2022/11/08


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 highlight


✨ Things to know


Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Meet Bookacamp on the Youth Travel congress 2022 in BischofsgrΓΌn 2022/04/11


On November 17, this year's Youth Travel Congress will take place at the BSLV Sportcamp Nordbayern in BischofsgrΓΌn. 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

Link to the article

Features and Updates 2022/06/09


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.


🀩 The highlight


✨ Need to know


πŸ’° Everything that has to do with money

😎 Teamer-Addon


Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Bookacamp becomes Bookacamp GmbH 2022/07/28


Bookacamp Inh. Mathias Methner as sole proprietorship

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 GmbH

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

Link to the article

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


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

Link to the article

Bookacamp releases new questionnaire system 2022/05/16


Feature Overview

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.

  1. The system now generally distinguishes between a questionnaire for minors and adults.
  2. The default questionnaire is set centrally in the account settings, but can also be deactivated there. If a special questionnaire is required for a camp, for example because the level of knowledge for the language knowledge is to be queried, this can be done for each camp and thus overwrites the default setting. Another example is the difference between day camp and overnight camp.
    screenshot releases per days
  3. A new administration interface allows you to define questions using drag-and-drop. Each question can be defined as a mandatory field. The headings and help texts can be freely changed.
    screenshot releases per days

Future development

The current beta phase is used to respond to user feedback and to adjust small things. The system is then expanded further.

  1. Although it is currently possible to change the order of the questions in the questionnaire, the actual questionnaire does not yet react to this setting.
  2. Bookacamp will offer controls to use headings, text and page breakers.
  3. The feature for requesting data during the booking process, currently referred to as consent, is integrated directly into the questionnaire as free questions and thus allows any content to be entered during the booking process or in the questionnaire.

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Features updates 2022/03/09


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.


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.

Screenshot Card-Layout for bookable camps

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.

Screenshot grouped Card-Layout for bookable camps

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.

Screenshot tables for bookable camps, grouped by month

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Bookacamp integrates two new providers for online payment processing 2022/02/02


Stripe & Saferpay

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

Link to the article

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


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.


Various

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Updates until November 2021/11/03


Jugendreise Kongress 2021

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.

Revision of Payment Pages & Booking summary

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.

screenshot payment page

Various

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Bookacamp for Wordpress 2021/08/25


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

Updates until August 2021/08/23


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.

Reserviations

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.

Feedback per Agency

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

Link to the article

Bankexport for credit transfer for overpayment 2021/08/09


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

78 minutes until travel exclusion 2021/07/20
A report about release frequency and the new travel exclusion feature


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.

screenshot releases per days

Author: Mathias Methner

Link to the article

Updates until July 2021/07/09


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.


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

Updates until June 2021/06/03


Roundtrip for arrival and departure

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.

Automation

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.

Collection process - reminder 1 + 2

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

Link to the article

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


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

Backup strategies 2021/03/22


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

Link to the article

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


Bookacamp celebrates the first insurance policy on March 2nd

logo HanseMerkur

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

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


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:

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

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Shopping with Bookacamp 2021/01/18


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. https://www.sportscampus.com/termine-2021 - It is worth registering now.

screenshot hockeyshop

Update December 17, 2023 the links to the shops are no longer valid and have been removed.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Bookacamp Redesign

1303 updates files later 2021/01/08


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.

bookacamp logo

Author: Mathias Methner

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Updates in December 2020/12/05


✨ Our Updates

😎 Counselor Addon

⭐ Feedback-Addon

Author: Mathias Methner

YAGNI & KISS 2020/11/12


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 October 2020/10/20


✨ Our Updates

😎 Counselor Addon

Author: Mathias Methner

Updates in July 2020/08/08


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:

Hostel Summary / Accommodation Information 2020/07/08


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

Updates of June 2020/06/05


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