Version 3.5 of IOS Hotels published

Hotel rating and reviews, synchronize reservations, affiliates and global overview.

IOS Hotels 3.5 is a huge update as it introduces many new features. IOS Sync©, first introduced in IOS Rentals, is now also available for IOS Hotels. With IOS Sync you can receive reservations from third party systems, or send reservations to them. Since version 3.5 hotel rating and reviews are supported. Also added support for affiliates and discount coupons specially for affiliates. Finally, added Global overview feature, new extensions become available, and many other smaller improvements and fixes we made. We present you IOS Hotels 3.5.

Rating and reviews

After the end of a reservation IOS Hotels will send a notification to the customer to rate hotel's services. The notification will be send automatically a couple of days after the check-out date. The customer can rate hotel's services using a star rating system in the range of 1 (Bad) to 5 (Excellent). He can also optionally write a review. Submitted reviews stay unpublished until a hotel manager accept and publish it. In IOS Hotels Control panel you can see and manage reviews by clicking Reviews on the side menu. Reviews are also available when editing a reservation.

To display reviews in a page of your site you will need the IOS Hotels API Reviews plugin. You will also need to provide the URL of the page you integrated the reviews plugin to the main client plugin. This is required to be known by IOS Hotels to send the rating notification email to the customer. So, don't forget to edit the main, client, plugin and provide that URL.

In hotels portal mode reviews can be seen in hotel's page by clicking on the relevant tab.

IOS Sync

IOS Sync© allows you to synchronize reservations between different systems, applications and web sites. You can sent local reservations to a remote third party system, or receive reservations from a remote system and import it into IOS Hotels. You can even synchronize reservations between 2 different IOS Hotels installations. This 2-way synchronization is been performed totally automatically. IOS Sync is smart and flexible. No matter how different the 2 systems are, you can synchronize them without having to modify the source code on the remote site. If custom integration code is needed, then this is been applied in IOS Hotels part only.

By default IOS Sync supports responses in the following formats: HTTP Status Code, Plain text, IOS XML, IOS JSON, Generic XML and Generic JSON. If an other format is required you can implement it in a CRF file (Custom Response File). Inside CRF a special PHP interface allows you (if needed) to handle the communication between the two systems in a very custom way, solving this way any incompatibility issues. If you have programming skills, you can do this by your self. Else you can hire a developer, or hire Is Open Source. BTW, we provide developers documentation for IOS Sync to our customers. In order to use IOS Sync a special license is required. You can buy such a license from our shop.

Affiliates and discount coupons

Affiliates are partners of a hotel who can get a discount, or get paid, when they make a reservation to the hotel on behalf of a customer. When you add or edit an affiliate you can assign a discount coupon to him. If you do so, then this coupon gets locked to be used only by affiliates. No one else can use it even if he knows the coupon code. The same coupon can be assigned to multiple affiliates if you want. This way you can have special discounts for affiliates.

But how IOS Hotels plugin detects an affiliate? IOS Hotels plugin is installed on Wordpress, Elxis, Joomla (not fully supported), or other CMS. When the user is logged-in in the CMS, IOS Hotels plugin loads automatically his local account details and checks his email address. If it finds an affiliate with the same email address then it matches the user with that affiliate account. So, to be able for a user to be detected as an affiliate the user must login and must have the same email as the one configured in IOS Hotels dashboard. And what about standalone PHP plugin implementations? In this case you can provide current user affiliate ID as a PHP constant (IOSHOT_AFFID). Contact us if you need more help with this.

When the plugin detects an affiliate it displays him his discount coupon in booking form and prompts him to apply for the discount. After the booking process is complete the reservation has automatically been assigned to the affiliate in IOS Hotels platform. From within IOS Hotels you can easily find which reservations has been performed by an affiliate. A similar principle applies when using the hotels portal mode.

Global reservations and hotels overview

If, in IOS Hotels control panel, you have access to more than 1 hotel you can see the reservations of all these hotels in a single page without having to switch to the other hotel. And not only that, you can fully manage these reservations without having to switch to the other hotel control panel. Also there is a special page which lists all of your hotels including their number of reservations, the last reservation, a link to their public page (portal mode), and more. Global overview makes managing multiple hotels much easier.

New extensions available

• Plugin Affiliate bookings: Detects if the current user is an affiliate and if yes displays to him a list of his reservations. Available as a plugin for Elxis and Wordpress.
• Plugin Reviews: Displays hotel reviews and rating. To customers it displays a form to submit a new review. Available as a plugin for Elxis and Wordpress.

Read also

• IOS Hotels for hotel portal sites
• IOSR Hotels v2.2
• Update to IOSR Hotels v2.0
• Module IOSR Login
• IOSR Hotels API development finished

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