Posts Tagged: public booking requests

The “Booking Request” features of MIDAS, allow people to check venue availability and submit booking “request” for your rooms.

By default, all booking “requests” must then be approved by a venue’s administrator (manager) before becoming a “confirmed” booking.

Back in MIDAS v4.27, we introduced an option to allow booking requests received from certain email addresses/domains to be “Auto-Approved“.

“Auto-Approved” booking requests do not require a manager’s authorization. As soon as the request is received, it’s automatically approved by MIDAS – just as if the user had made a regular “confirmed” booking.

For v4.30 we’ve extended the “Auto-Approve” options for booking requests. You can now alternatively have requests automatically approved based upon the “type” of booking request that has been made.

Auto-Approve Booking Requests Based Upon Their Type
Auto-Approve Booking Requests Based Upon Their Type

With this option enabled, booking requests that have had a matching booking type selected at time of requesting will be automatically approved.

All other booking requests will still require a venue manager’s approved as before.

So for example, you could configure this option so that all “internal” booking requests are automatically approved, where as all others require approval.


Conditional Auto-Approval For Booking Requests

The Public Booking Request feature of MIDAS allows non-users to check the availability of your rooms, and submit booking “requests” online. No user account or login is required in order to make a public booking requests.

When a booking request is made, “managers” for the requested venue are notified by MIDAS. They can then log in and quickly approve, reject, or modify the pending request.

The ability to have different managers for different rooms allows incoming requests to be filtered to the right department/person within your organization.

Public Booking Requesting is one of the most popular features of our software. It is a well feature widely used by our customers in their booking operations.

Auto Approval of Booking Requests

Back in October 2013 – with the release on MIDAS v4.04, we introduced the option to have all booking requests “auto approved”. With this option enabled, MIDAS would automatically approve all incoming booking requests with no manager intervention required.

Many customers don’t need this functionality, and instead prefer to manually review and approve each incoming booking request.

But for organizations such as large universities which allow students to book their own study rooms, the ability to have booking requests auto-approved is a real time saver.

Selective Auto-Approval

To extend this auto approve functionality though, we’re introducing a new option for MIDAS v4.27:

Automatically approve booking requests that originate from certain email domains or addresses
Auto-Approve Booking Requests from certain domains/addresses

Now, if the “Auto-Approve Booking Requests” option is enabled, there are two choices;

  • All
  • For these email addresses / domains

The “All” option retains the previous auto-approve behavior. If selected, then all incoming booking requests will automatically be approved by MIDAS (subject to availability).

The “For these email addresses / domains” option allows you to instruct MIDAS to auto-approve requests from certain email addresses or domains. This setting will take a comma separated list of email domains or individual email addresses.

If a person makes a booking requests under an email address which matches this setting, their request will be auto-approved by MIDAS.

If a booking request is made from under an email address which doesn’t match this setting, then venue managers will be notified and would need to manually review the request.

This powerful new auto-approve option can have some real benefits!

For instance, you could set anyone “internal” to your organization to have their booking requests auto-approved, whilst still requiring external requestors to have their requests manually approved.

How To Get MIDAS v4.27…

MIDAS v4.27 isn’t yet publicly available. It is expected to be made available to Beta Testers soon, with a full public release shortly after. In the meantime, why not check out some of the new features that were included in v4.26 ?


Improvements to Booking Types

The next update (v4.17) to our room booking and resource scheduling system, MIDAS, is just around the corner. So we’re giving you a first look at some of the new features and improvements in v4.17.

In this post, we’ll look at the improvements coming to “booking types”. Booking Types allow you to color-code bookings based on their “type” making them easier to spot in the booking grid. Furthermore, you can assign discounts to each booking type. This allows charging different rates depending upon the type of booking.

You can also set booking types to be “tentative“. Bookings assigned as “tentative” will automatically be removed if not confirmed in a timely manner.

This time last year, for v4.14, we introduced the ability to set a default booking type on a per-client basis. For v4.17, we’re also giving you the ability to specify a global default booking type. If set, then any bookings added without a booking type being specified, will automatically be assigned the default type. This is especially useful if you’ve “hidden” the booking type selector from view, as you can still assign bookings a default booking type.

Additionally, following customer feedback, we’re making it possible for you to limit which booking types are available for selection on the public web request/booking screens. Many organizations have “internal” booking types/classifications. They may not wish to make these available for selection by external clients. This new feature will allow this to be achieved!

You’ll find the new “Public?” and “Set as Default?” options on the Manage Booking Types screen. This may be accessed via MIDAS Admin Options → Manage Booking Types. These settings can be set independently for each of your booking types. If a booking type is set as being the default, this will be indicated by an “*” after its name in the “All Booking Types” list.

Set Booking Types as Public and/or Default in MIDAS
Set Booking Types as Public and/or as the Default type

New Public “Book Online” feature

With MIDAS v4.15 just around the corner, we’re offering a “first look” at some of the highlights coming in the next update to our web based room booking and resource scheduling software.

From the very outset MIDAS has included an ability to allow non-users to check availability of your facilities and submit booking “requests” online. “Non users” are visitors to your website, members of the public, etc.

These booking “requests” then go into a pending booking requests queue. Administrative users can quickly approve or reject each request. Approved booking requests then become “confirmed” bookings.

You can find out more about how this works in our “Accept Booking Requests Online” video tutorial.

We know that our customers love this long-standing feature of MIDAS. Put simply, it makes their lives significantly easier. That’s because it allows people to check room availability themselves, without having to phone/email/speak to an administrator.

We also know that some of our customers would like the Public Booking Request features to go one step further. You’d like to allow non-users to check availability, book and pay for their booking instantly there and then (rather than having to be invoiced for their booking at a later date)

That’s why in addition to the “Web Request” features of MIDAS, for v4.15 we’re also introducing a “Web Booking” feature.

The “Web Booking” process is very similar to the traditional “Web Request” process. The difference being the addition of a payment step, allowing the individual to pay to confirm their booking.

Here’s How It Works:

  1. A person selects the date(s)/time(s) they wish to book, and MIDAS checks their availability.
  2. If available, the person can enter more details about their booking and continue to the payment page.
  3. At this point, the booking is temporarily added as a “tentative” booking until the person completes payment. At this point the tentative booking automatically becomes a “confirmed” booking.

If the person fails to complete their payment in a timely manner, the temporary tentative booking will automatically expire, and the person would need to re-start the booking process. By default, this time frame is set to 15 minutes, but can be changed by an administrator.

As per the native invoice payment methods offered within MIDAS, both PayPal (with IPN correctly configured) and Stripe are available for Web Booking payments. Stripe however is recommended over PayPal.

The “Web Request” and “Web Booking” features share a set of common settings. So we’ve redesigned the previously named “Web Request” tab on the Manage MIDAS screen to become the “Public Settings” tab:

New Public Settings
New Public Settings

As you can probably tell from the above screenshot, the new auto-venue selection option we unveiled earlier this month, will also be available for “Web Booking”.

The combination of new auto-venue selection and Web Bookings helps make MIDAS even more suited for hotels, B&B’s, hostels, and other overnight accommodation businesses. Your customers will now be able to truly “book online”!

You may like to check out some of the other features of MIDAS v4.15 too!