SuperSaaS offers several features that may be of specific interest to the accommodations industry, for example:
This page shows an example set up for a Bed & Breakfast, resort property or a small hotel. If you only want to show availability and not allow people to book over the internet, the booking functionality can be easily switched off as the tutorial will show.
Although you can use a SuperSaaS reservation schedule by itself, you will probably want a few web pages describing your rooms and listing contact information and such. If you don't have a web page for your rooms yet there are free services on the internet that help you set these up, such as bed & breakfast listings from Business Support.
When you create a reservation schedule you get a web link to your schedule that looks something like "www.supersaas.com/schedule/Your_Hotel". You can then put that link on your web page with a label such as "book here" or "show availability". You could also put that link on a flyer or an e-mail.
Click "Signup" on the top of this page and fill out the form. Be sure to pick an account name that will make sense to your customers, since it will show up in your web address. The system will send you an e-mail with a link to enable your account. Apologies for this inconvenient step, but it helps to keep spammers off our site. Once you have clicked the link in your mail you can log in, which will take you to the Dashboard page.
In the right hand menu click "New schedule" to go to the new schedule wizard. Most of the questions the wizard will ask are self explanatory. The first question about whether you want a "resource" or "capacity" schedule can be answered either way for a Bed & Breakfast, but a resource schedule fits best for this example. If you want to use the payment module or have more than five rooms a capacity schedule is more appropriate. You can click the help link in the top right corner for a more detailed discussion about the difference between the two.
The final page in the wizard will give you your web address, you may want to write that down. If you only have one schedule you can leave off the last bit from the address, the schedule name, and the system will still find it.
For a Bed & Breakfast you will want the schedule to work with whole days, not with hours and minutes as is the default. To do this click 'Configure' and then on the 'Resources' tab enter "Round all times to nearest: day". You will also want to set the minimum length of a reservation to 1 day.
Feel free to click around all the other configuration pages to see what else you can do. For example, on the "Configure Process" page you can set up e-mail reminders. For e-mail reminders to be sent at the correct time it is important that you check that the time zone is set correctly. The time zone setting is on the 'Layout Settings' page that you can reach from the dashboard. (The system guesses your time zone based on your country, but for countries with multiple time zones this may not be right).
If you don't want to use the schedule for online booking, but just to show availability, then you can go to the "Configure Access" page and select the option "Only you can make any kind of change to the schedule".
For a B&B the month view is usually more appropriate than the default week view. You can change this at the top of the "Configure Layout" page. Since we are working with whole days setting the visible hours to run from 0:00 to 24:00 ensures the entire chips appear on the schedule (or "Midnight to Midnight" if you use a 12 hour clock). You may also want to change the colors and the graphics on the schedule to look more like those on your own web page.
There are two places where you can change the Layout: firstly, the "Layout Settings" on the Dashboard page which applies to all the schedules on your account, and secondly the "Configure Layout" page you reach when you click the "Configure" button on a particular schedule. Changes there apply only to that schedule. Note that when you upload your own logo you are asked to point at a file on your computer, but when you include a link to a picture in HTML code you are asked to point at a graphic that should be present on a web site somewhere. Also on the layout pages, many of the system's important informational messages can be changed to your liking.
In case you are not open all week you can use the "Opening Hours" page to close off the days when your not open. You find the "Opening Hours" page on a tab at the supervisor screen which you reach by clicking the "Supervise" button. On the days that you are open you will want to enter 0:00 as the opening time and 24:00 as the closing time, this enables the system to show availability correctly. (Use 12:00 am to 12:00 am on a 12 hour clock). In step 3 we set the minimum length of a reservation to 1 day (24 hours), so on days the opening hours are not set from 0:00 to 24:00 the system would otherwise assume there is not enough room for a reservation.
You can use the "begin and end date" to restrict booking to a particular season and similarly the "Special days" tab allows you to block out periods that your rooms are not available. If your rooms are already booked over the phone or through another channel, it is better to enter them as reservations in the schedule rather than as special days. This will ensure the schedule is colored appropriately (ie, 'occupied' color rather than 'holiday' color).
Once you have finished tweaking everything to your liking you will want to try out the schedule from a users point of view. As long as you're logged in as administrator your schedule looks a bit different from what a regular user will see. For example, a regular user typically cannot change other people's appointments, whereas you of course can. Another important difference is that changes by the administrator do not trigger confirmation emails since this would flood your mailbox quickly while you are working on the site.
So to check the way the e-mails and the site look to a regular user you should log out with the link in the top right corner and then go back pretending to be a user. To do this you go to the web address for your own schedule, since this is where your users will arrive, do not go to the SuperSaaS home page. If you were looking at the schedule when you logged out you can also just click the back button in your browser, but then you also need to click the "refresh" button or it would look like you were still logged in.
Once everything works to your satisfaction just put the link to the schedule on your web page, or send it to your users in an e-mail. You can always come back and make additional changes to the schedule, almost all options can be reconfigured while the schedule remains running. You can also use your own domain name name instead of supersaas.com, the set up is slightly more complex and is explained on the 'Layout Settings' page.
On the supervisor page you can also find a link to download your schedule automatically to Google calendar, Apple's iCal or recent versions of Microsoft Outlook. In this way you can check you schedule in Outlook instead of going to the site.
Feel free to experiment with the different settings to see what happens to your schedule. To get a good sense of what your customers will see it is a good idea to log out, go to the web address for your system, create a user account and then log back in. If you want to add payment functionality you can find out more in the payment tutorial.
Feedback on this page is highly appreciated.
