It’s been a while since we’ve sent an official product update. We assure you it’s not from a lack of things to tell you about. It’s because we’ve been busy.

Since we last wrote, in October, we’ve released 17 software updates to RezTrip 2. We fixed 347 issues. We released 121 enhancements, 17 new features, and completed 124 engineering improvements.

In April we wrapped up our beta testing period (thanks to all who participated) and we’ve now been officially live for 3 very productive and profitable months. Many of the tasks we’ve been working aren’t visible on the surface, but thanks to our engineering team’s attention to detail RezTrip 2 has achieved 99.9% uptime — including scheduled downtime for releases.

Last week we released a major update, and we’d like to showcase some of the more interesting and exciting features. Here’s the list in brief; continue reading if you want more detail. And if you have any questions, please let us know!

Latest Updates:

1. RezTrip Facebook App
2. Internationalization: RezTrip is now multilingual!
3. Flip.to social marketing integration
4. Managing RezTrip rates & inventory through EZYield and RateTiger
5. PCI Compliance
6. Cascade of yield controls on the rate grid is now optional
7. Shorter, easier to remember URLs to get to RezTrip
8. LMS / HTNG 2-way reservations & ARI interface
9. Run reports for longer date ranges

 1. There’s now a RezTrip Facebook App! Add the app to your hotel’s Facebook page so that guests can search for rooms directly from Facebook. This can significantly increase conversion rates for social marketing campaigns.

2. Reztrip is now multilingual! We now speak English, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese. And while we were at it, we polished up our English. We think you’ll agree that the language of the booking engine is friendlier and more straightforward.

While we’ve taken care of translating standard labels and strings on RezTrip, you will need to manually load translated names and descriptions for your rooms, rates, promotions, policies, bed types, etc. If it’s got a name or a description in English right now, you’ll need to translate it. We’ve made sure that RezTrip is forgiving in this regard, so if you forget to load a name in another language, it will default to your default language.

3. Flip.to social marketing. Travel Tripper has partnered with Flip.to—in our mind one of the most interesting social marketing tools in the hospitality industry—to provide yet another means for building buzz for your hotel.

Flip.to lets you entice guests—after they’ve made a booking on RezTrip, but before they view the confirmation—to share their upcoming trip with friends on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The key is that Flip.to tracks how many leads an individual booker has generated. This opens the door to creating results-based incentives for your guests. For example, reward guests with a free night if their posts or tweets result in 10 of their friends signing up for your newsletter.

4. RezTrip rates and inventory can now be managed through EZYield and RateTiger. We love the RezTrip admin and Rate Grid, but we know that you aren’t always eager to manage another external system. We’ve partnered with the EZYield and RateTiger channel management tools so that RezTrip’s rates and inventory can be managed alongside your other channels, in a single place.

5. Travel tripper is now PCI-DSS compliant.Or in other words, Travel Tripper now meets the credit card industry’s security standards as a level-2 service provider. This means that our servers and your data are air-tight.

Travel Tripper goes a giant leap beyond the requirements of PCI-DSS in a very important way: we do not store credit card data for any longer than is necessary to deliver the payment information to you. Once you’ve received a reservation notification, by e-mail and / or XML, you will be the sole custodian of the credit card data.

As part of PCI-DSS, we’ve had to tighten down security policy in a few noticeable areas:

• You’re now required to have a strong password, and to change your password every 90 days
• When creating users, RezTrip will now auto-generate a password and send a notification e-mail to the user. When they log in for the first time, they’ll be asked to change their password
• If you don’t log in to RezTrip for 90 days, your account will be disabled (let us know, and we’ll let you back in)
• If you retrieve credit card numbers from the RezTrip admin via the secure token/link you receive with reservation notifications, please note:

You will need to retrieve card numbers for bookings made before April 12 by July 25. And going forward, card numbers must be retrieved no later than one week after the guest’s departure.

6. Cascade of yield controls on the rate grid is now optional. You can now choose whether or not you want to cascade yield controls when loading rates and inventory. If you’ve set two-night minimums on just a few of your floating rate plans, now you can update pricing across all your floating rates without overwriting that two-night minimum you previously set up. This is also helpful if you yield your higher room categories different than your standards but still want to take advantage of RezTrip’s simple rating tools.

The quick-fill bar on the rate grid now also lets you decide whether or not to fill in yield controls.

7. Reztrip RezTrip can now be accessed via shorter URLs. The only URLs you’ll need are yourhotel.reztrip.com and yourhotel.reztrip.com/admin/ and now you’ll be able to remember them without a bookmark!

8. LMS / HTNG 2-way reservations & ARI interface. RezTrip’s 2-way HTNG 2008A interface for sending reservations and receiving availability, rates and inventory was recently certified for use with Agilysys’s LMS property management system. This is in addition to our Opera OXI interface noted below. We’re moving full steam ahead with connectivity work, so please let us know your connectivity needs and continue to watch this space.

9. Run reports for longer date ranges. We’ve heard you loud and clear in this regard, and since RezTrip continues to become more and more performant, you can now run reports for longer date ranges.

This week’s update of course still includes the many features and enhancements from previous releases. Here are just a few highlights:

Collaborative shopping and travel planning with Facebook & Twitter. Guests and shoppers can share their current search or even their basic reservation details, e.g. “I’m staying at your hotel from July 20-21.” It’s also possible to post or tweet a link to any RezTrip promotional landing page. Please look for the e-mail, permalink, Facebook and Twitter buttons in the RezTrip shopping cart and on landing pages.

Ability to sell fenced rates (restricted by access code) on RezTrip promotional landing pages. Landing pages are key for tight integration with your online marketing campaigns. Now you can not only tightly funnel traffic to landing pages on RezTrip, but also restrict access to specific promotional rates by a code which the guest must enter.

Support for third-party web analytics & tracking. We know how important it is to know the ROI on your marketing spend. Travel Tripper provides built-in support for Google Analytics, but now we can also implement third-party analytics and tracking scripts in addition to GA.

Micros Opera OXI interface. RezTrip can send reservations to Micros Opera via the OXI interface. This interface is officially certified and supported by Micros, so please contact your Micros rep if you’re interested in having RezTrip deliver reservations to Opera.

Performance enhancements. We’ve made continual improvements to the speed and responsiveness of RezTrip, including faster initial load times, availability searches and reservations. We have also made huge strides with the responsiveness of the admin’s rates and inventory page, aka the “Rate Grid.”

Infrastructure & IT improvements. The Travel Tripper engineering team is constantly at work to ensure that RezTrip resides on rock-solid infrastructure. We’ve improved logging of client-side errors; we’ve optimized the database in many areas; core components of the app including GWT and MySQL have been upgraded to the latest versions. We have also scaled up our infrastructure as we add customers, so rest assured we’ll only continue to improve in this area.

And of course, there’s still much, much more to come!

Thanks for reading, and also for your help in making RezTrip what it is—the smarter booking engine!