Alongside Solidres 4.4.0, eleven add-ons and the Lumina template have new releases. Three more add-ons now install as Joomla packages, the Hub and the invoices take up the new tourist tax, iCal sync stops losing imported dates when a download fails, the Experience booking form is rewritten, and Lumina now works in right-to-left languages.
Solidres 4.4.0 is out, and its headline is tourist tax. Until now a property had one tourist tax setting: an adult rate, a child rate and a night cap. That fitted some towns and not many others. It could not hold two levies, every new rate had to be typed in on the day it started, and two of its charge types did not compute what they promised.
In 4.4.0 tourist tax is a feature of its own, built into Solidres itself. The release also brings a set of booking and payment fixes, two security fixes, and pages that print properly from a device in dark mode.
If you sell the same room on your own website and on one or more booking sites, something has to tell each of them when a night is sold. When nothing does, two guests book the same room, and one of them gets a phone call nobody wants to make.
There are two ways to pass that message along, and both are sold under the same word: sync. They move very different things. iCal sync moves blocked dates, after a delay. A channel manager moves availability, rates, restrictions and the reservation itself, as they change. Which one you need depends on your property, and for some properties the lighter one is enough.
If you run a small property, the chances are that most of your bookings arrive through online travel agencies, the OTAs. It works. The platforms bring guests you could never have reached on your own, the bookings keep coming, and you pay a commission on nearly every night you sell.
That arrangement has a name worth saying out loud: you are renting your demand, not owning it. The visibility, the terms and, in a real sense, the guests belong to someone else, and they can change without asking you. The answer is not to leave the OTAs. It is to run a booking channel of your own beside them, and to make it the one everything else follows.
Every Solidres template we have shipped — Emerald, Greenery, Infinity, and the older Adora, Bluebee, Luxuria, Orient, Revive and the rest — is built on Helix Ultimate. That was a reasonable decision at the time, and it came with a bill you have been paying ever since: a template that cannot render without its companion system plugin, a page grid stored as a drag-and-drop JSON blob, SCSS compiled on every request, and a header, nav and footer whose markup does not live in the template at all — it lives inside the plugin, where you cannot read it, let alone override it.
Today that changes. Lumina is a new Joomla 6 template for Solidres, written from nothing, with no framework underneath it. It is aimed squarely at boutique and independent properties — one beautiful hotel, or a small collection — and it is built around the one journey that matters on a hospitality site: search, choose a room, book.
