Overview
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Campground Master supports Online Reservations in a few different ways, depending on your needs. You can use one part of it or any combination of parts:

·Retrieve reservations made through Friend Communications' online service, Reservation Friend.  
 
·Retrieve reservations from the online service Webervations.com, and also update the availability data for your park.  
 
·Retrieve and extract reservation data from formatted E-mails (like form submissions from your web site, or E-mail notifications from other online services). Multiple E-mail formats can be handled in case you get requests from more than one source.  
 
·Create "vacancy grid" web pages with availability data and upload them to your own web site.  

Refer to the Online Reservations Setup section for the various requirements for each part.


General Guidelines for Taking Online Reservations

While Campground Master is not a real-time online system in itself, it can integrate with 3rd-party reservation services like Reservation Friend or Webervations.com if you want the customer to get instant feedback (e.g. the reservation is accepted and they get a confirmation immediately, without your intervention). You can also achieve near-real-time functionality with your own web site if you constantly update the online availability information (e.g. after any local reservation change) and check for new online requests regularly. Naturally a high-speed Internet connection is recommended for this, especially if you get more than a few reservations per day.


Avoiding Conflicts Between Online and Offline (Local) Reservations

In general, accepting online reservations is only fool-proof if you set aside certain sites to be used only for online requests, since the person online can't see your local system at exactly the same time as you. Without this separation of sites, you could potentially be making a reservation on the same site and for the same day as someone online, resulting in a conflict. Campground Master lets you designate which sites are to be shown as available online (assuming you use one of the options to upload availability data, either to your own web site or to Webervations).

If separation of sites isn't practical, you can also minimize potential conflicts by taking requests only for a certain type of site instead of taking requests for a specific site number. The customer would select the type of site, and you would select an appropriate site for them as you process the request locally. You can also combine this with limiting the number of sites available online. For instance if you have 40 cabins and 50 tent sites, you might designate only 20 cabins and 20 tent sites for online availability

You can also specify a number of "online release days" as a buffer -- for instance, you may specify that online reservations can only be made for dates at least 3 days in the future (or any number of days you think is appropriate). This allows you to handle short-term walk-in customers without worrying about conflicting with online reservation requests.


Handling the Online Requests

All online reservation requests must be "processed" and "saved" locally in Campground Master by a human operator -- they aren't automatically added without your knowledge. This requires an operator to view the reservation request and make sure everything is in order before saving it.

While this isn't quite as convenient as a fully-online system, it does help eliminate "junk" requests from the Internet, duplicate customers, missing information and other problems with automatic systems. For instance you can respond to requests with incomplete information before accepting them. You can also reject requests from known trouble-makers, and keep someone from causing problems like reserving entire blocks of sites without intending to show up. If you don't guarantee a specific site as requested, you also have the option of selecting a more appropriate site before confirming the reservation.

While processing online requests, the operator can assign a site if necessary, process a credit card deposit, send a confirmation E-mail to the customer, and save the reservation into Campground Master. Assuming that most of the information is filled out properly by the customer on the web site, this is a fairly quick and easy process and eliminates the need for customer information to be typed in manually.


Further Topics:

Retrieving Online Reservations  
 
Online Reservations Setup  
 
Page URL http://CampgroundMaster.com/help/overviewonlineresv.html

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