Website functionality
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Interested to know when the next update to the website functionality might be coming along?
There are a few issues and also a few things that would be very helpful to have
Issues
The main one is initial prices are shown without fees like VAT or cleaning then only when the customer goes to book are these added. 1. I'm not sure this is even legal under EU law and that's why Booking etc now includes all mandatory fees in the pricing. 2. It's not great from a sales perspective as it sets a false expectation especially if you are charging vat as the price is suddenly hiked by 20% as the customer sees it.
Only today I had a customer say, "it says prices from £xyz, when can I book at that price"? The answer is currently never as those are without VAT or cleaning fee, not a great answer to have to give them.Additional Functionality required
- The ability to offer coupons for either fixed rates/date and percentage discounts
- The ability to offer upsell items, early/late check-in, hampers, chocolates etc etc
- Change the "Book Now" button to say something else as it puts people off as they think they are about to book before even getting actual prices after picking dates
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The Guest Portal would also be good to be able to use but currently, both the guest numbers eg number of adults and children and price paid via OTA's not including cleaning fees are inaccurate in Tokeet so it's not great to give the guest access to a portal where key info is wrong. Ideally, those would also be sorted so we had a usable guest portal.
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Don't forget that the tokeet websites ignore any min night stays you have set and allow people to book really short stays when you have set long min night stay requirements in rate genie. This is the biggest thing holding us back from having public ready websites in tokeet. Cant wait for the fix to happen one day? Maybe? If we are lucky?
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One more thought on this one, length of stay discounts on the websites would also be useful. We have been caught out by undercutting ourselves on longer potential bookings as OTA's like AirBnb offer length of stay discounts and this can mean the prices are lower there than direct.
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Hey guys, thanks for this feedback. We are actively working on the new version of our website product. The goal is the deal with all of these outstanding items once and for all. Please stay tuned for more details in the future.
Regards.
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@Kwesi-Steele for planning purposes. is there a broad estimate of when this can be expected? This year? next year?
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Hey @Ryland-Nelson let's say early next year for now. If it comes sooner great.
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I'm at the point of considering switching to creating my own WordPress site to get round various limitations and issues. Are there any plans for this to be built on WordPress (which makes it much easier to extend and control things myself)
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Hi Alistair - having a Wordpress plugin for our booking engine and other widgets is a great idea, but with the development resources currently being focused on making a brand new website-building feature, there's little time to spend on that.
However, you can still manually embed any of the Tokeet widgets in a Wordpress site (or any website really) - check out the instructions for embedding widgets here: https://www.tokeet.com/help/add-ons-and-widgets
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sure hoping the "brand new website-building feature" will be coming sooner rather than later. my business is being seriously held back by not being properly setup to take direct online bookings.
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@jtbennett Thanks, I'm hoping to avoid having to go down that route but it's going to depend on when the new website functionality comes out and what it can do. One issue is that currently, I embed some javascript onto the standard Tokeet website which gives me an online chat function and potential guests do use it so I don't want to lose it. However, it seems to cause an issue on the refresh of the page (page just comes up blank second time round) So I'm hoping the ability to embed some javascript will work correctly on the new sites as currently supports advice was just to remove it. If you want a sample to test let me know as it would be great if this worked properly on the new version.
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@Alistair-Wood Hi again Alistair, sorry about the delay. I'm no expert with the current Tokeet website system (I'm not a developer for Tokeet), but I believe that some data is loaded via AJAX (or equivalent JS lib/framework commands for loading dynamic content) and the main site's content is loaded in an iFrame.
That means refreshing a page will drop you back to the initial load state of whatever is in your URL bar, to start. Anything that's been clicked in that window previously that doesn't append a URL query string will be lost.
Sorry if this all seems like a long tangent, but you can see why a new version is being created though - there's some limiting foundational issues with the designs being turned out.
Nevertheless, you can send me the sample page to look at - maybe there's a simple workaround for the time being. You're welcome to email it to me if you prefer - joel@tokeet.com
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@Kwesi-Steele Hi Kwesi is early this year still on track and any chance of a rough idea what the changes and updates might look like? I keep holding off doing my own site via WordPress to see what's coming but we are basically now getting zero bookings via the Tokeet site so I'm going to have to do something soon if it's not fairly imminent.
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Hi Alistair. At present, the new website builder is still in development, but the timetable for release has still not been determined. I do not want to discourage you from pursuing a more urgent solution, if you deem it necessary. We just hope that you give our website builder update a look when we release it in beta. It will be free to test, at that time, so if you prefer the results that we provide, hopefully you will be one of our early adopters.
