Features highlights

Complex Tariff

Complex Tariff allows you to configure tariffs that match multiple conditions: customer group, date range, charge type (per room per night or per person per night or package per room or package per person). It also allows you to create and show multiple tariffs for the same room type in the front end, for example, a guest can choose between "Standard tariff with breakfast $100" and "Standard tariff without breakfast $90".

When you select 'per person per night', you can enter a price for each person (including adult and child) that you defined for that room type. You can even specify the age range of child that you want to apply the price as well as limit the check-in date.

Check this online tutorial for more details about setting up tariff with Solidres.

Flex Search

This new plugin automatically suggest alternatively available dates for your guest if their searched dates are unavailable, it provides significant improvements for both owners and guests: owners have a greater opportunity to retain guests instead of losing them while guests can choose another date to stay at their favorite accommodations instead of having to spend their valuable time to find another one.

In the initial release, when guest's searched dates are not available, Flex Search will find other available dates by increase guest's check in and decrease guest's check out and record available dates to show in front end. In the plugin parameters, you can adjust how far Flex Search should search and how many lengths of stay you want to show in front end. Note that this plugin does not perform an exhausted search because it'd affect your site performance. We will add more search strategy in subsequent releases.

Embed Form

Embedded Check Availability form: now Hub owner can allow a partner to embed a check availability form into partner’s external sites, the embedded form will forward all booking request to Hub site and forwarded guests will complete a reservation in Hub site instead of partner’s external site. This is not only a great way to increase traffic and revenue for Hub site but also a convenient way for a partner to have an internet booking engine integrated into their site.

SVG icons for facilities

We are back to our blog to share a new exciting feature for HUB+ subscribers: SVG icons for asset/room type’s facilities. Are you still using icons made by image files or font icons? You should get rid of them and try our new SVG icons set, made exclusively for Solidres and enjoy the state of the art icons in Solidres. Below are some screenshots of the new feature which will be made available in Hub plugin 1.8.0 (requires Solidres for Joomla 2.7.0+).

Front-end asset view showing facilities icons:

Front-end room type view showing facilities icons:

Backend facility management:

Facility edit form where you can assign an icon for it:

Registration Card

Adding support for Registration card has been requested multiple times by our users and now we are able to introduce it, please see details in below screenshot. Our Registration card feature allows you to design the card layout by dragging and dropping fields easily and conveniently without touch any lines of code, it can be used by non-technical staffs as well. There are many predefined fields to choose from. When your guest check-in at your accommodation, you can just print the registration card and all the guest’s info will be filled automatically, your guest only need to sign it, it helps to make the check-in process faster than before. This feature will be available in Invoice & PDF plugin v1.2.0 (Joomla).

Custom fields for room form

The Custom field is one of the features that Solidres users use the most. However the current custom field feature is limited to customer’s fields only, now we are improving it to add support for room form as well, it will allow the administrator to define custom fields for room form easily, just like the customer’s fields. Please check the following screenshot for more details:

Payment History

In the upcoming Solidres for Joomla v2.7.0, we add a new feature called Payment History, it allows recording all payments made for a reservation so that owner can track them easier and clearer. The owner can also add custom payment manually if they want alongside with online payment.

Book whole apartment or separated rooms

We received many questions from our users, especially from apartment owners who want to allow guest to rent their apartment in full (all rooms) at a discount rate or guest can rent separated rooms. It is now possible with the new Complex Tariff plugin and Solidres for Joomla 2.7.0. New Complex Tariff plugin has a new tariff type called “Per room type per stay” that allows owners to set a special discount rate if guest book the entire apartment, it is very convenient and easy to set up.

One page reservation

Traditional reservation forms (and generic forms) are boring and confused (nobody like to fill in forms by the way!). We try our best to make reservation process a nice experience for your guests with our one page AJAX powered reservation form.

Hub

Hub plugin turns Solidres into a booking portal which can serve unlimited assets / unlimited vendors (partners). More info can be found in our Hub introduction blog post at this link.

Hub plugin is the most complex plugin, the main features are:

• Front-end partner's dashboard: a partner is a user who has full access to his own assets only. With Hub plugin, a partner can manage assets, room types, reservations, coupons, extras, limit booking, discounts, statistics, feedbacks and experiences from front end without having to access the Joomla's backend. This kind of separation of duty increase your site security and simplify backend ACL configuration
• Allow searching availability for multiple assets: by locations, by categories, by name. Then on the search results page, you can filter the results by price's range, asset's rating, categories, facilities, themes.
• Subscription feature: you can charge your partners for listing assets in your site by creating subscription levels with predefined pricing, effective time, trials time, number of assets a partner can list in your site. You can also configure whether a subscription is recurring or not.
• Commission feature: you can charge commissions to the specific user group for reservation made through your site, commissions can be configured as a percentage or fix number per reservation. Commission and Subscription can be used together or separated as you wish and they are a very powerful tool to generate income for your site.
• Asset approval: this feature allows admin to approve any submitted assets before listing on their site, it can be used in combination with Subscription feature.
• Dedicated menu type: Hub plugin has a dedicated menu type to show assets from certain categories or locations.

The Hub dashboard

The frontend management UI is pretty much the same as the backend, we keep them consistent to make your management tasks become easier.

The frontend reservation asset list screen

The frontend reservation asset edit screen

HUB subscribers can also download supportive modules like Advanced Search, Assets, Location Map, Filter, My Recent Searches

Media Management

Our Media Management feature allows you to manage media items in one central place. It is easy to insert multiple media files at once with modern HTML5 uploader (it could fall back to Flash uploader if your browser does not support.). You can assign media files to your reservation asset or room type with just one click. For more information, please visit our tutorial "How to use Media Manager" in our documentation section.

Invoice & PDF

Our Invoice plugin has 03 professional invoices layouts for you to choose:

Layout 1:

Layout 2:

Layout 3:

Joomla users please wait for Solidres v2.5.0 release.

Report & Statistic

Stay on top of your data with Solidres's report and statistic feature, your data is visualized with nice charts and tables, quickly navigate through different data set with predefined date range filter. You can also specify custom date range as well as comparing two date ranges.

The dashboard is added to allow a quick overview of the availability of all assets or a specific asset. It also allows you to quickly block room or make a quick booking via dragging effect. It is more convenient than the old limit booking UI.

Camera Slideshow

Camera Slideshow comes with two packages: a module and a plugin. Both provide the same functionality, the module is used with Joomla's module positions while the plugin is used in the reservation asset's details page.

There are many options for you to customize the look & feel as well as the functionality of Camera Slideshow.

Limit Booking

Limit Booking plugin makes it easy to take some of your rooms out of availability pool. The user interface of this plugin is very straightforward, just enter title and description, then select a limit booking date range and select rooms that you want to apply. You can also use the Refresh Room List button to update the availability status of your rooms instantly.

User plugin

User plugin allows your guest to register an account with your site (optionally) while making a reservation. With an account, your guest will enjoy a much more convenient and faster-booking experience. You can also manage their accounts at the backend.

Your guest also has their own dedicated dashboard in the front end, after logged in to it, they can perform the following tasks.

• Manage their own reservations and cancel them (if the permission allowed).
• Manage their profile.
• Manage their feedbacks (requires Feedback plugin).
• Manage their wish list (requires Hub plugin).
• Manage their experience reservations (requires Experience plugin).

Seamless user profile integration between Solidres customer and Joomla user system. The below screenshot show both Solidres customer profile and Joomla user profile edit screen, they are both synchronized and can be edited from both sides.

Advanced Extra plugin

Advanced Extra plugin enhances the core Extras system in Solidres. It offers more charge types like:

• Per room
• Per booking
• Per booking per stay
• Per booking per person
• Per room per stay
• Per room per person
• Per room per person per stay
• Percentage of room daily rates

Discount plugin

The discount plugin adds the ability to define discount rules for Solidres. There are 4 types of discounts: Discount on the length of stay (night or day), Discount on a number of booked rooms, Discount on number of days booked in advance, Discount on room type availability.

• Discount on the length of stay (night or day): this type is useful when you want to create discount like "Discount 10% for guest who stays from 7 days to 14 days".
• Discount on the number of booked room: for example "Discount 20% for guest who books more than 3 rooms."
• Discount on the number of days booked in advance: for example "Discount 15% if guest book at least 30 days before arrival"
• Discount on the room type availability: this discount can be used to automatically give discount according to your room type availability, for example, "Discount 10% if our Double Room has 70% free rooms; Discount 5% if our Double Room has 30% free rooms."

Discounts can be accumulative or not.

Feedback plugin

Feedback plugin allows the owner to collect guest's feedback about their stay. Feedback can be published on the front end via Feedback module. The owner can manage feedback from backend or from front end Hub Dashboard. There are 2 ways to create new feedback: manually by site admin/partner or by the guest.

Feedback can be created by guest with this workflow: a reservation's status is changed to "Checked-out" → Solidres sends an email to guest asking for feedback about their stay → Guest follow the link in email to the feedback form → Guest submit feedback → Site admin/partner review and publish it → Feedback shows up in front end.

Below is the screenshot of feedback management screen in the backend.

This is the front end of Feedback plugin which shows feedback of a certain asset.

This is the front end of Feedback plugin which shows the scores based on feedback's criteria, feedback criteria can be managed from the backend.

Experience (Tour & Activities)

Solidres was built for online booking businesses like hotels, apartment/villas, resorts, B&B. Due to high demand from our users, since June 2016 we added a new plugin called Experience. This plugin is dedicated to Tour&Activity (Attractions, Adventure, Sightseeing ) booking.

What is the main use case of Experience plugin?

There are two main use cases:

• To build online booking site for tour & activities for the traditional tour operator companies.
• To build online booking site for local experiences (organized by local people), this is the new trend in the tourism industry, example sites are Airbnb.com Experience, Vayable.com, Triip.me

What is the main functionality of Experience plugin?

Site admin and partners can manage experiences (info, availability, pricing) and its related components (like categories, transportations and experience booking) from the backend of the site or from front end Hub Dashboard (require Hub plugin).

Experience’s prices can be set per pax (for example $50 / pax) or set different price per pax depending on the number of pax (example: $50/pax if book 1 to 5 pax and $45/pax if book 6 to 10 pax).

In front-end guest can search for Experiences by start/end location, category and price ranges, then guest can book online directly. There are 4 payment methods available at this moment: PayPal, Pay Later (Cash), Bank Wire and Offline. In addition, while searching guest can also filter to find their favorite experiences by category, price range, owner, transportation, and duration.

Experience plugin also has an integration with Feedback plugin and Solidres. Integrating with Feedback plugin allows you to show the review of your experience in the front end while integrating with Solidres will show nearby accommodations with your experience, so that guest can find accommodation for their travel as well.

Since Experience v0.9.0, we added Extras support for Experience, just like Asset, it offers a more flexible way to book extra items with your experience.

For Joomla BUNDLE+ subscribers, you can download a new module called Experience Extra module which can be used to list your experience's extras items on the front end.

Access Control

As an administrator or hotel owner, you want to restrict your hotel's staffs to specific features in the backend, for example, you only want to allow your receptionist to access the backend reservation menu only and you don't want them to access other sections like assets/room types? This plugin is what you need for this kind of tasks.

Marketing tools

Online marketing and advertising are not new nowadays, but they are often neglected by business owners or they are not being paid enough attention.

Understand online customer trending and behavior, attracting and retain them are hard. Understanding those difficulties, Solidres has integrated with the following services to assist business owners with their online marketing and advertising campaign.

• Google Analytics
• Google Adwords
• Facebook Pixel

Those plugins are available for all subscribers.