ROAM » System Updates

Sell Activities via Online Travel Agencies

greg — Thu, 25 May 2023 19:19:41 +0000

Roam has been connected to a service called Rezdy. https://www.rezdy.com

Rezdy will connect you to many OTAs, such as Expedia, Trip Advisor, etc.

Contact Azra at azra.ljaljic@rezdy.com for more information.

This is for Activities only, but they can have included items.

Set up and Limitations

Set up

Part of the set up is done via the Company Setup, Rezdy page. The Rezdy Contact# is the customer# you assign Rezdy in your system. The apiKey is a random set of characters or phrase you use for security, so that only Rezdy can access your system. No spaces are allowed. Inquiry Code is what inquiry code to assign to guests acquired through Rezdy.

For each Activity that you want to sell via Rezdy you need to list them with the rate you want to use, separated by a vertical line, ex: ABC|99
One Activity|Rate per line.

You will need to send Greg the following info:

The code of a new Roam user you set up for Rezdy
What your Roam currency code is
Which Area code to use
Which Cancellation Reason code (best to set up one just for Rezdy
Which Notes code to use
Your Company code (only one can be used)
An Email Address for notifications

In each Activity setup you must ensure that the item description is a minimum of 15 characters long. As well, the “Plain Text Description – NO HTML” field on the Web Info page must have an entry of at least 100 characters. Not having either of these will mean the Activity won’t get imported into Rezdy. The Photo URLs are optional.

Limitations

Charges: Only Adult and Youth, so don’t use rates not using Adult and Youth.

Taxes: Rezdy only supports Percentage, Fixed, or Per Person. All others will be ignored. Percentages are simply charge times the percent. If you have included items that have a different tax rate, the Rezdy calculation will differ from Roam. Don’t do that.

Reservations from an OTA can be cancelled at any time. You will be notified.

Guest Info: It’s very limited, you will get first and last names, plus an email address

Payments: Rezdy takes the payment and pays you minus their commission. Roam will record two payments: One is for the net payment you will receive, and one is for the commission.
This balances the reservation, and lets you keep track of the commissions by reporting on the specific payment code

Add to Reservation from Online

greg — Thu, 25 May 2023 18:51:05 +0000

A guest can now add to an existing reservation from the online booking system. There are 2 ways to access this.

The first is each future reservation listed in the Dashboard can be chosen and new items added. Once a reservation is chosen the guest is directed to your home page. This is set in the Company set up, Online page, top right entry. Either leave it blank, enter a /, or enter a fully formed URL, ex: https://www.example.com

When checking out a list of future reservations is listed. The guest can choose one, if they chose one from the Dashboard it’s automatically selected. Or they can choose to make a new reservation. Everything else works the same as if the guest had been making a new reservation.

There are a few limitations.

The guest has to re-login to checkout, even if they had logged into the Dashboard
The initial calendar date isn’t set to the arrival date of the reservation being added to
If, when adding to a reservation a reservation-wide discount code is entered, it will apply to the whole reservation – even the previously booked items

Completion Letters

greg — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 14:48:37 +0000

There is a new feature (currently only for Activities) that allows you to send the group leader a letter upon completion of an activity.

In the activity set up you need to select the letter from /letters/co to send, optional header and footer files, and the subject.

Once per hour the system scans for any Activities that have completed, Start time + Duration (hours), and any letters are sent. As well, a summary of letters sent is emailed to your admin email account.

New Online Login Process

greg — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 14:36:47 +0000

Previously if a guest did not have, or could not recall, their password a temporary or existing password was mailed to them. That has changed.

The new process is that a 6 digit numeric PIN is emailed to the guest, and the login page changes to ask for that PIN along with the new password.

For the process to work the PIN needs to be used within 15 minutes, the 2 passwords must be the same and more than 6 characters long. Also, the email address entered must be the same as the PIN was emailed to.

If all the above is correct, then the new password is saved and the guest logged in.

When editing a guest profile the password is optional, as the guest would have had a password to access their profile. Entering a new password will reset it.

New Features in 3.1

greg — Wed, 22 May 2019 13:45:55 +0000

Be aware that many new features only work in 3.1 and that calling up a reservation made in 3 may lose features entered in 3.1, like Costs or the Checklist. Same warning applies to the Company or Item setup. Do not expect a feature entered in 3.1 to be retained if you edit that same feature in 3.

Reservations

Costs

Item costs are calculated and the total shown on the main reservation page. The individual item costs can be listed on certain reports. The source of costing information is in the item setup, under Prices. The format of the cost must follow the price, ie per person, flat, daily, fixed, etc.

Checklist

Checklist questions will now popup when initially saving an item. The questions themselves are specified in the Item Setup, under Checklist. All questions must be terminated with a ‘?’, and be answerable as yes or no. The responses are viewable under the More option in the reservation item.

Activity pricing by time

Activity prices can have an optional time specified to allow for time-based pricing. If the booked time matches a time price that price will be used, otherwise the non-time based price will be used.

Combined Pricing

In addition to Per Person and Fixed pricing there is now Combined. Combined is a combination of flat and per person. For example, X$ for a boat, $Y per person. Activities can now have a quantity (under More in the booking page). That quantity is either manually set or can be automatically set by making an entry under Trip Scheduling Criteria, where you specify the number of people per boat.

Company Setup

Credit Cards

You can select which credit cards you accept. This is basically to limit which credit cards can be used in the office and online.

Online Checkout Fields

You can customize which fields need to be completed when a person checks out online. Some fields are mandatory, but others are not. You can specify which optional fields are required.

Online Times

By default all item times are listed online, full or not. Full times are not selectable. If you prefer not to show the full times you can control it with the ‘Show Full Times’ checkbox on the online page.

Custom CSS Online

The online system is built using the Bootstrap 4 CSS library. If you wish to override any of that CSS you can supply the URL of your own CSS file in the online page. Your CSS should be overrides, not a replacement.

Send Invoice on Exit

If you want to be reminded to send an invoice when you exit a reservation then you can check the ‘Send Invoice on Exit’ checkbox on the Rsv page

Item Setup

Combined Pricing

This combines flat and per person. Your Price descriptions and prices should reflect that. The first spot is for the flat portion and the following spots are for adults and youth. The flat portion is set to the quantity of the item. See Combined Prices in the Reservation section above for information on quantity in Activities

Activity Pricing by time

When setting up activity prices there is a spot for time. It is optional. If you enter a time (and prices) then when an activity with that time is booked those prices will be used. You must also setup a price without a time. This will be used for custom time bookings and as well as the online calendar when no time has been specified.

Roam 3.1

greg — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 14:22:58 +0000

The mailing list, reservations, payments, documents, gift certs, and rain checks have been redone. This was for a number of reasons. Roam 3 was built using some tools which are no longer supported, it wasn’t different device size aware, and internally it was overly complicated. Over time the rest of Roam will be updated as well, but it will take a year or two as it’s a large system. The order in which sections are re-done will depend on the popularity of each section. Most used functions will be first.

There are differences:

Searching the mailing list has been expanded to also search reservations, GCs, RCs, and payments. Each of those can be accessed directly from the search results.
Some actions will be over more than one page. For instance, to create a new mailing list entry would be one page, and inquiring/updating an entry would be another page. This simplifies some actions and cuts down on some screen clutter.
Credit card payments will no longer pop open a page for Slim CD. Slim CD is still used, but behind the scenes. Consequently, how a credit card payment is entered is a little different.
Issuing RCs is done right from the payment page. No more accessing the RC page
There is no more mini menu of 5 buttons at the bottom of the mailing list/rsvs page. Pages/tabs will open as needed.

New Mailing List Fields

greg — Thu, 12 May 2016 13:48:55 +0000

There are (upto) 5 new optional mailing list fields called Tags. They do nothing other than record miscellaneous data you may wish to keep. To activate these fields they need to be named in the Mailing List Defaults tab in the Company setup. Once named they will appear on the mailing list page under those names. You can also specify if each field is mandatory or optional. They will automatically appear on some reports but will have to be added to others, on an as-needed basis. On reports they will go by their internal names, Tag-1 through Tag-5. On the Data Select and Download the named fields will appear on the People/Miscellaneous tab, but when choosing the fields for output they will be named Tag-1 through Tag-5.

For those with multiple company codes the Mailing List Defaults only need to be setup under your Default company. The mailing list is unaware of multiple companies.

Small additions

greg — Mon, 02 May 2016 13:09:28 +0000

There are two new small additions to the system:
When you are in the mailing list searching for a guest there is a new button labelled ‘History’. This will show all customers and reservations you have accessed in the past 7 days. Clicking a customer# or reservation# will retrieve that entry.

There is a new field on reservations labelled ‘Inv Banner’. This is a list of company codes. The purpose it to be able to make a reservation with one company code but to print the invoice using the letterhead of another company (the Inv Banner company). If you do not need this feature just ignore it as things will work as they were unless you choose a different Inv Banner company.

Online system Version 3.1

greg — Fri, 25 Mar 2016 17:54:39 +0000

Online Changes

Ensure that any rate allowed online is active and also has Allow Online checked. Otherwise the guest will not be allowed to book the item.

The pages themselves have a completely different look and are responsive. At least one new page needs to be setup on your system. See below for details.

Online Setup

Currently there are 5 functions, and 3 new ‘widgets’ (and counting), that guests can carry out online:

Reservations
Payments
Gift Certificates
Liability Waivers
Information Request Forms
Guest Dashboard
In-page calendar
Comparisons
Google Analytics/Gtags

Before you get started there are some things you need to have beforehand:
For Reservations, Payments, and Gift Certificates, you will need:

An SSL Security certificate for your website (new for V3)
A Slim CD processing account
A Slim CD API User name – slimcd.com, Config, API Access Credentials, check LOAD, click ‘Submit Query’, then enter the User Name into your credit card tab (company setup) (new for V3)
Specific pages setup on your website (one new one for V3)

There is some commonality in all the cases where a web page needs to be setup. When you see a line like:

xxx refers to your Roam ID. If you login with abc.opalstacked.com then your Roam ID is abc.
The

To make your button (or any other element) clickable it must have a class of R3Book. Also, your button needs to have certain data attributes. These attributes are, depending on item type:

data-cat – item category – A,L,R,M,O,S,T,P
data-code – item code, as per your item setups
data-rate – item rate
data-opt – package, or rental2, option#
data-unit – a specific lodging unit
data-date – specific item date (optional)
data-cocode – specific company code (optional)

An example button:

New in Version 3 is that the R3Book elements are not treated as buttons opening a popup but as links to a page. The example button above will get turned into a link:

Rather than setting up a clickable element, such as a button, and having Roam turn it into a link, you can just create the link instead, following the pattern above. But do not add the class=’R3Book’ or else Roam will try to create a link around your link.

Booking Page

This is the page where the guest makes their choices about the item they are booking. This is new to Version 3. In past versions this was a popup rather than a separate page. This change was done for a number of reasons:

A popup actually lives in your page and it’s difficult for your page and Roam to live on the same page;
A separate page is easier to make responsive;
And a separate page can have it’s own URL address so you can link directly to the Roam page from, say, an email.

An example of the URL for the above button would be:
bookingpage.html?cat=A&code=D1&rate=1

If your booking page was named bookingpage.html.

The name of your booking page needs to entered into the Booking entry under the Reservations section in your company setup. The http portion is not required.

Your booking page needs to have the following line:

Also, the page needs to have a div with an id of R3Booking:

Note the difference between book3 for the item pages and booking3 for the booking page.

It would be best if this page was very minimal. A responsive logo, perhaps some css to set the base font and colors.

Checkout Page

This is where the guest would login, pay for, and confirm their reservation. If they do not have an account with you then they can create a new one.

The url of this page is entered into the Checkout entry under the Reservations section in your company setup. The http portion is not required.

Your booking page needs to have the following line:

Also, the page needs to have a div with an id of R3Checkout:

Note the https on the script tag. Your checkout page must be secure, ie https. To use a temporary checkout page for testing, enter it into the spot marked Test to the right of the Checkout page, the Company Setup.

Success Page

This page is used to thank the guest for making their reservation, and optionally provide them with more information and record the sale in Google analytics.

The url of this page is entered into the Success entry under the Reservations section in your company setup. The http portion is not required.

Your success page needs to have the following line:

You can have Roam display certain information in your page:
For the reservation#, provide an element with an id of ‘R3rsvno’
For the total sale, provide an element with an id of ‘R3total’

If the reservation was placed onto the waitlist, Roam will attempt to show an element with an id of ‘R3waitlist’. An example would be

    
    Text about the waitlist

FailurePage

Not much is needed on this page as it’s simply to inform the guest that there was a massive failure in the reservation process.

The url of this page is entered into the Failure entry under the Reservations section in your company setup. The http portion is not required.

Payments

This is where the guest or any group member can make a payment. Your page needs the following line:

Note the difference from the older version, which used app=pac_members22

The page needs to have a div with an id of R3Payment:

This URL goes into the Home Page entry under the Payments section of the company setup.
Not the https on the script tag. Your payment page must be secure.

Success and Failure pages are also required, and the URLs are also entered into the Payments section. Roam has no interaction with these pages therefore no Roam code is added.

Gift Certificates

If you wish to sell Gift Certificates online then you must setup a stand-alone page with the following:

The page needs to have a div with an id of R3Giftcert:

This URL and the URLs for the success and failure page must be entered into the company setup under Gift Certificates.

Note the https on the script tag, your Gift Certificate page must be secure.

Liability Waivers

The Online waiver pages are all done for you. All you need is a webpage to host them in. The code below is the minimum needed. The code also allows for you to provide the URL with the reservation and group leader numbers so that the guest does not need to enter them.
If your waiver URL was mysite.com/waivers then your URL would be:

https://mysite.com/waivers?rsvno=xyz&glcustno=abc

The code to include on your page for the waivers is:

The page needs to have a div with an id of R3Waiver:

Note the use of https, above. Your liability pages should be secure.

Information Request Forms

Information Request forms are used to gather the names and addresses of prospects, and optionally follow up with them.
This form can work in many ways and thus has quite a bit of configuration.

At the bottom of the section, add:

Note that this is still version 2.2

The request forms require an html

element with an id of ‘R3Signup’.

As this form is interactive the email address is the first field requested in order to possibly locate that individual in your Database.
If the email address is on file, then the user must: enter the password to their account, request it be emailed to them, or re-enter their email address.
Configuration occurs 2 ways: hidden fields and specially named inputs.

Hidden Fields

custno – leave blank
source – must be signup
cocode – must be set -user supplied
letter – must be set -user supplied
subject – must be set -user supplied
notecat – must be set -user supplied, where to store any notes
egrp – optional -user supplied, can also be done via an input
bcc – optional -user supplied
page2 – must be set -user supplied

Specially Named Inputs

All inputs should follow this pattern:

Specifically, each field needs a name, an optional class of ‘mandatory’ if the field is mandatory, and data-verbose set to the description of the field, used if the field is mandatory.

List of possible input field names:

frstname – First Name
lastname – Last Name
grpname – Group Name
addline1 – Address-1
addline2 – Address-2
city – City
emailadd – Email Address
zipcode – Zip/Postal Code
phoneday – Day Time Telephone#
phonenit – Night Time Telephone#
phonecel – Cellphone#
phoneoth – Other tel#
birthdt – Date of Birth

List of possible select field names:

region – List of Country States (populated by Roam)
ctrycode – List of Countries (populated by Roam)
gender – List of Genders (populated by user, M, F, U-unspecified)

List of possible textarea field names:

comments – will be saved in the notecat category (from hidden fields, above)

List of possible checkbox field names:

bulkemal – Send mass emails (do not supply a value)
bulkmail – Send mass mails (do not supply a value)

Form buttons:

btnSave – Submit the form
btnClear – Clear the form

Choices populated by Roam:
Other than the country/regions, there are 5 more fields that can be populated by Roam. They are:

Group Type field, used by groups to indicate what type of group they are
Inquiry code to indicate how a person heard about you
Preference code to indicate what a person’s interests are
Email Groups to indicate what email newsletters a person would like to receive
Info Codes to indicate what information a person would like to receive

These are all optional.

To have Roam create these fields you must include certain elements in the form.

Group Type: add a (single) with a name of inqcode
Preferences: add a div with a name of prefcode
Email Groups: add a div with a name of emlgroup
Info Codes: add a div with a name of infocode

The Preferences , Email Groups, and Info Codes will be populated with check boxes. Use the div styling to contain the display size and scrolling.

Rather than using Roam-generated Group Type and Inquiry values you can set them manually. Create form fields with the names
‘grpcode’ and ‘inqcode’, but do not use a ) and name the fields ‘pref’ + the preference code,
‘egrp’ + the email group code, and ‘info’+ the information code. If an field, then value must be a ‘t’. A user should be able to choose any number of these fields.

For a full fledged, stripped down, working form (which you may copy and enhance), see:
http://roam3.adventurebooking.com/pac_signup.html

Guest Dashboard

The dashboard allows a guest to view all of their reservations and quotes. If either one is selected then all of the booked items are shown. If a reservation is selected then the payments and completed waivers are listed. Quotes can be converted to active reservations – space permitting. Also, the guest can make a new payment, email a payment request to another guest, complete a waiver, or email a waiver request to another guest. Also, the guest can purchase a Gift Certificate, as well as update their contact information.

In-page calendar

You can now insert an availability calendar of an item right into your webpages. You will need to include the same script as used on your booking pages (app=book3). To have a calendar inserted simply provide a div tag with the class R3Calendar where you would like the calendar to appear.

The cat, code, etc are the same as you would supply on an R3Book element (above). The month displayed will be either the month the item is first available, the current month, or the month containing the guest’s arrival date – if they’ve entered that information. If they have, and that information gets changed, the calendar(s) will update.
There is a choice of 3 layout patterns: calendar, which is just simply a calendar with colored dates indicating availability; list, which is a list of the dates with space, one date per line; or string, which is a long line of dates with space, comma separated. All dates are clickable to book. To specify which layout option to use use the attribute data-layout=”, with either calendar, list, or string. Only use list or string when there is a limited list of dates with availability, as dates within the next 2 years are listed.

Comparisons

These are used to list specific items for a certain time frame. The items can be clicked to view a description and there is a Book Now button to book the item. This can be used to list Activities, Lodgings, or Packages. Activities and Lodgings will also display prices. Packages can’t display pricing as the price is dependent upon the items chosen within the package.
These require a div with an id of ‘R3Activity’, ‘R3Lodging’, or ‘R3Pkg’ and an attribute of data-codes=’list of codes’ to display. The codes for Activities and Lodging or just a comma separated list of codes. Packages need to be in the form Package code/Package option#. Multiple codes/opts are separated with commas.
In the item setup you select which rates to use for the price display by checking the ‘Comparison’ check box.

Google Analytics using Gtags

To use Google Gtags to track your online users, add the following code to the head portion of your pages. The code needs to be on any page with a Book Now button, the Booking Page, the Checkout Page, and the Success page.

The events tracked are:

view_item – when an item calendar page is displayed
add_to_cart – when an item is booked (added to cart)
remove_from_cart – when an item is removed from the cart
view_cart – when the cart is displayed
select_promotion – a valid discount code is entered
sign_up – a new profile is created
join_group – any preferences selected when creating/changing a profile
begin_checkout – when the checkout page is displayed
login – any time a guest logs into their account
purchase – when success page is delivered, or quote converted to active

Enhanced Discounts

greg — Fri, 20 Feb 2015 20:39:44 +0000

To make discounts more flexible the dates in which a discount are valid are now set day by day rather than for a date range. Previously there was a Booking date range and an Arrival date range. This has been replaced by a grid that covers every day of the year. For a discount to be valid it has to be used on an item or reservation that is both booked on a valid date and arrives on a valid date. If either date is not valid the discount is not applicable. These date ranges apply to online as well as office reservations. Previously, discounts without dates applied in the office were valid, that is no longer the case. All discounts must now pass the booking and arrival date test.

If you had date ranges previously they will be converted to the daily format. If the date ranges were left blank then they will be converted to 1/1/2015 and 12/31/2015 so that the discounts will work this year. You will need to update the dates for 2016 and beyond.

The advantage to the new way is increased flexibility as to when the discounts are valid. For example you can have a broad range of booking dates but only for reservations arriving on weekdays, or Tuesdays, or Sundays, etc. And vice-verse, reservations booked on certain days but arriving on any day could qualify for a discount.

New Online System – More

greg — Mon, 02 Feb 2015 21:35:01 +0000

Online reservations can now be saved as Quotations, and there is a completely new feature called Incentives.

When it’s time to checkout the guest will have the possibility to choose to save, but not book, their reservation. It’s not worded as a Quotation, but that’s how Roam will save it. There isn’t a possibility for them to recall the quotation, but there may be in the future. Currently they have to call in and have it made active. Down in the payment section there is a checkbox to indicate if they want to save the reservation without booking. If so, text will appear telling them that the reservation will not be not booked, but the items will be saved. Any reservations saved like this will be placed into a Follow Up stream, if one is setup.

Incentives are a new feature. Each item can have its own incentive text (html). When a guest is on a page with Book Now buttons the text for any items attached to visible buttons will display. The text for the first button will come up in about 35 seconds, and then any subsequent texts will appear every 30 seconds after that. This text will scroll in from the left side of the page and remain for 15 seconds unless the little box is closed. If any box is closed by the guest then no more text boxes will appear on that page. If the page is scrolled and new buttons come into view then the process restarts. But, no item text will repeat. If a new page is loaded the whole process starts fresh.

The idea behind the feature is to encourage a person to book. So you could offer a coupon#, a link to a private page with a better rate, a link to a similar item, or just a message of some kind. It can be used for anything, but best used as an incentive.

New Online System

greg — Mon, 26 Jan 2015 18:00:10 +0000

There’s a new version of the online system. Mainly it’s an update to how it looks and works with smaller devices. It should work fine on smartphones now.

There is also an addition to the booking page to handle Add-ons and Upgrades. Also, discounts can be applied to individual items.

For both Add-ons and Upgrades there are certain steps to be followed.

Add-ons and/or Upgrades sections need to be completed in the item setups.
Any item with an Add-on or Upgrade needs to have its homepage filled in. This is because there will be a link displayed for the guest to get more information. The homepage URL needs to be a relative URL, ie /items/act123.html, and not an absolute link, ie http://www.funstuff.com/items/act123.html

Add-ons and Upgrades are listed when an item is booked. Only the Add-ons and Upgrades for that item are listed, otherwise the display can get very messy. An Add-on, if booked, is added to the reservation. An Upgrade will replace the item just booked. There is one complication with Upgrades. A rate is specified when setting up an Upgrade, which may or may not be the same rate as a user would get if booking the item directly from your website. If the user clicks the link to view the item we lose the connection to the Upgrade rate and only know about the rate specified in the website. So, for the guest to get the Upgrade rate, they have to book the item when it pops up in the list of Add-ons and Upgrades that appears when an item is booked.

This update is not automatic. Your booking pages need to be changed from
app=base2 and app=book2
to
app=base22 and app=book22

The checkout page needs to be changed from
app=base2 and app=checkout2
to
app=base22 and app=checkout22

Discounts can now be entered for individual items. Care must be taken when creating the discounts in order to ensure that discount codes are either meant to be for all items, or linked to specific items. Discount codes can make their way around the internet.