Booking systems and resilience

How to communicate with your potential renters - how to turn site visitors into enquiries, and enquiries into bookings.
Jenster
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Booking systems and resilience

Post by Jenster »

At the moment I am using freetobook as my main booking system, but I find I am spending a lot of time also transfering the booking details onto a spreadsheet that I have saved on my laptop and backed up on Dropbox. My concern is that if the internet goes down for any reason, I would not have access to guests details, bookings etc if I relied completely on ftb.

I was just wondering what other people do about this issue? It seems unnecessarily cumbersome to enter details twice but I feel safer doing it for a belt and braces approach. Thanks.
farley
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Post by farley »

Hi Jenster
I'm 'old school' so I just print up each guests booking form and keep them in a file. It's low tech but it works for me :)
SusanMay
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Post by SusanMay »

I'm with you in that I keep a spreadsheet as my definitive place for booking details. I actually like it that I can have extra columns for things, comments about the guests (!), whether I've paid the cleaner for that booking etc. I've only the one cottage so an extra couple of minutes per booking doesn't add up to much time anyway. There's also the chance that you might move booking systems in the future so I think it's nice to have the trusty old reliable spreadsheet.
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greenbarn
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Post by greenbarn »

Apart from being time consuming, copying information from one place to another is going to introduce errors at some point.

I don’t know anything about Freetobook, but as a PIMS user I can download everything I could want (customisable) as an Excel doc; does FTB not have the same facility?

Failing that, how about screen grabs of the FTB entries? You can’t do anything with them, but they’d be an accurate record.
One to ponder....
Giraffe
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Post by Giraffe »

Like farley I keep a paper copy of guests' bookings. And I worked in IT for 30 years!
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e-richard
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Re: Booking systems and resilience

Post by e-richard »

Your fears are real and I sympathise, but I fear you are trying to solve the wrong problem.
Jenster wrote:......My concern is that if the internet goes down for any reason, I would not have access to guests details, bookings etc.
The Internet does not go down. Its just far too big to fail.

You may lose your connection to your phone line, but there are many other ways to connect to the Internet.

Perhaps a better solution to your concerns would be to investigate using a smart phone or tablet on 3G or 4G, or perhaps having access at a neighbour or at work or even your local Starbucks. There are many solutions that do not entail copying everything manually.

I would also be extremely surprised if, at the other end, FTB did not have extremely robust connection and failsafe backup procedures - probably far superior to anything you would consider as a private individual.
** Richard
PIMS: Holiday Rental Management system
They say we learn from our mistakes. That makes me a genius !
Jenster
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Post by Jenster »

Thanks for all the replies. I worded it badly - of course I know that the internet in general won't go down, but if my wifi or phone went down then I couldn't get online easily. There will always be other ways to access the internet, but not as easily or conveniently as having a local copy of my spreadsheet. Of course my laptop could also die at the same time as losing wifi/phone signal but you can't cover everything :roll:

I think I will stick with my spreadsheet for now. It is my 'master copy' for all bookings from every source (I tend to just block out dates in ftb for bookings from other sources) and I quite like having it all laid out in front of me, spreadsheet style. I tend to copy and paste email addresses etc so the risk of transcription errors is minimised, and I double check everything. But I will check out if ftb has a download function (I expect it does) as this might make things easier. Thanks.
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