Hi everyone!

We hope you all enjoyed the 'tournament of the year' - we certainly saw increased tourist activity both through BookIt and around BookIt HQ on Wellington waterfront at the Fanzone. Most importantly though, our boys in black have managed to pull out another history-making performance and bring the Webb Ellis Cup home!

Things are settling down a bit now, so it might be a good time to take a load off and relax. This month we've got some interesting facts and figures, insight into what we're working on here and more. Enjoy!

Interesting stats throughout the 'Tournament of the Year'

You won't be surpirsed to learn that we've seen an increase in booking activity over the past few months. Tourists have flocked from around the world to support their respective motherlands and New Zealanders have played host in a fantastic way.

We noticed large increases in bookings and arrivals over 2010 as per the charts below. We've also seen big lifts in international travellers with a suspicious rugby bias:

Christmas and New Year - Updating your inventory

With the festive season fast approaching, it's worth making sure that your BookIt inventory manager is up to date to avoid double-bookings.

If you're using a channel manager to facilitate your BookIt inventory, that's great. If you update it manually but need a refresher course, here's how to do it:

1. Login to your BookIt account and click on 'Inventory Manager' at the top
2. Scroll down to see a list of your products along with its allocation on each date
3. Find the dates using the calendar on the top-left or the '1 Week/2 Weeks' buttons at the bottom
4. Inside the corresponding box for the product and date, put the number 0 to show no availability
5. Click 'Save' underneath the calendar to lock in the changes

This should ensure that travellers aren't able to book for dates you're unavailable. Have questions about this process? You'll find our customer support contact details at the bottom of this newsletter.

Well, that’s it for another month. Before we go, we wanted to share this brilliant news from Tourism Dunedin's annual report: "...we integrated the country's best online booking service (BookIt)... within the first 6 months of 2011 Tourism Dunedin had already surpassed end of year online targets."

Awesome!

Thanks for reading, and remember - if you have any questions about your BookIt account, please feel free to contact our support stars on support@bookit.co.nz or 0508 BOOKIT.


Kind Regards,
The BookIt team

We’ve just completed a major revamp of the Bookit booking process. The new process is cleaner, feature-rich and requires only 1 or 2 steps to complete bookings. Early indicators are that the new booking process has directly increased conversions by up to 30%.

If you use BookIt on your own website you’re already running on the new version. We’ll be sending a detailed feature summary so look out for this in your inbox soon.

It has been a busy start to the year for the BookIt development team and we've just released our new 'daily inclusions' feature.

What is daily inclusion data you may ask?

It is a short summary of what your guests will enjoy with the room/product they book. Inclusion data should describe what the customer is paying for, eg "includes buffet breakfast for two and free wi-fi internet", rather than a full room description. This information will also appear on the Travelbug confirmation page and the traveller and operator confirmation emails.

Here's how it looks on Travelbug:

How to load inclusions data

If you are a customer of Siteminder, Seekom or STAAH you just need to ensure you have loaded inclusion data at that end and BookIt will do the rest. Take a look at your listing on Travelbug to see how it looks.

If you are not using one of the channel managers above you will need to load and manage the inclusions directly in your BookIt account.

1. Login to BookIt
2. Click on the 'Inventory Manager' tab
3. Click on the 'Manage inclusions' link
4. Enter your default inclusions for each product. Where a rate includes just the room, enter "Room only"
5. Click 'Save' when you are finished

If you need to enter separate inclusions for individual dates, click on 'Override inclusions' - again don't forget to click 'Save' when you are finished.

Both the BookIt booking confirmation email and booking details pages will include the relevant inclusions data for the booking, so you and your team know what the guest has paid for and is expecting.

Login to BookIt now

If you have any questions at all, please contact us any day of the week between 9am and 5pm on 0508 BOOKIT or support@bookit.co.nz

Happy inclusion-ing!

Great news Travelbuggers!

Travelbug itineraries are now supported by the world’s leading itinerary aggregation website – TripIt. TripIt turns chaos into order by making it easy for anyone to organise trip details into one master online itinerary, even if arrangements are booked at multiple sites.

Here’s how it works:

1. You make a booking on Travelbug ( and why wouldn’t you?  )
2. You receive your Travelbug confirmation email and forward it to plans@tripit.com
3. TripIt generates an itinerary for you which is then viewable on the TripIt website, or using one of their many supported apps including the iPhone and Blackberry handsets
4. You can then share this itinerary with whoever you want via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and so forth. You can even add it to Outlook

Here’s how an itinerary looks all nicely formatted and viewable anytime, from anywhere, on the TripIt website: 

So get booking, and happy itinerary-building!

Cheers,

Daniel and the Travelbug team

This week, Trade Me's accommodation website Travelbug, announced the first annual Travelbug Awards for 2011. The awards recognise excellent performance by accommodation operators who list on the website. The awards winners were selected based on statistics derived from the BookIt booking engine.  Criteria for judging the awards included number of bookings, quality of guest feedback, management of real-time inventory and availability.

Travelbug has the widest range of bookable accommodation in New Zealand and all properties are automatically eligible for the awards from holiday parks to hotels.

The five categories of awards presented are as follows:

Best in Region and Best in District awards are Travelbug’s highest accolade and were received by the top operator in each of Travelbug's geographic locations. To those operators who received this award, congratulations!

The Best Reviews Award is effectively judged by guests who have stayed in the properties. Operators with a 100% "thumbs up" result across a minimum number of reviews received the award. These hard working operators can proudly display the Best Reviewed 2011 award to show potential guests that their property is a great place to stay.

The Platinum Award is received by only the very best performing operators. The benchmark for this award is very high with only around 5% of properties being successful in receiving the Platinum Award, so well done to the winners! 

The Gold Award recognises excellent achievement within the judging criteria and again only awarded to the very top performers. This award was presented to properties who performed within the top 10%.

Daniel Bridges, Head of Travel at Trade Me, explains that the awards have been gratefully received by the properties.

"The response has been overwhelming. With a range of large and small properties on Travelbug, we have received some really great feedback from operators who are thrilled to be recognised for their hard work."

"To recognise the winners further, we will be adding a notice on the winners’ pages on Travelbug over the coming weeks. This will be a useful tool for visitors to Travelbug when selecting accommodation.  The team here also has some great ideas for the 2012 awards and work is underway to build on this great first round of awards." explains Daniel.

An announcement of Awards for Christchurch operators has been delayed due to the earthquake and these will be presented in the coming months.

For more information please contact support@travelbug.co.nz or call toll free on 0508 266548.

Best in District 2011 Winners

I'm pleased to say that the reseller API now allows multiple accommodation categories to be queried. Instead of passing a single PIMCode parameter you can now pass a comma separated list of PIMCode parameters.

E.g. "HOT,MOT,BAB" - this would return all hotels, motels and bed and breakfasts.

If you pass nothing to the API it will return all types. The full list of PIMCodes are as follows:

Hotels	HOT
Motels	MOT
Bed and Breakfasts	BAB
Backpackers	BAK
Apartments	APT
Lodges	LOD
Holiday Parks	PRK
Holiday Houses	HSD

Our friends over at Travelbug and Holiday Houses are giving you the chance to win a $3,000 Kiwi holiday.

All you have to do is enter your details online and you could win accommodation of your choice, up to the value of $3,000. You can also get extra entries if you recommend friends and they enter too.

Enter here.

Good luck!