IMPORTANT: Server Maintenance

Hello everyone,

Due to server maintenance, the system will be down tomorrow, December 11, 2018, from 10pm GMT to 2am GMT. 

During this time, you won’t be able to use the system. However, if you load the Bed view and Reservation view before 10pm GMT, you’ll be able to view your reservations during the maintenance. You can hover over each reservation and view details, but you cannot make changes.  

We understand that this is frustrating, and we apologize for the inconvenience. As soon as the system becomes available, the icon at the bottom right corner of the screen will turn green. You’ll also receive an email. We appreciate your cooperation. 

Thank you,

FrontDesk Master Team 

Don’t forget!

Hey everyone,

Don’t forget! You still have the chance to win $150 USD and a portable party-starter. 

All you have to do is invite a friend to try our system. We’ll give them 10% off, too. Click the tabs below for details about rewards and how to get started!

Cheers,

FrontDesk Master Team 

1) If you refer a friend before December 25, you’re entered to win a UE BOOM 3 speaker.

2) You get $150 USD for every friend that becomes a client.

3) Your friends get 10% off the first 6 months.

*A client is someone who pays for 6 months. A referral is counted when you CC referral@frontdeskmaster.com and send the referral message to a friend. December 24 is the last day we will count referrals for the UE BOOM 3 speaker giveaway.

Just copy, paste and send to friends, but don’t forget to CC referral@frontdeskmaster.com. 

This is an invitation to the system I use to manage my hostel. You can use this link to learn more about it, sign up for a free trial, and get 10% off your first 6 months.

13th November – Release Notes

Hello everyone,

We are happy to inform that yesterday we released a FrontDesk Master update (v.35). Please see below for the release notes and work in progress.

Have a great week!

FrontDesk Master Team

Work in progress (Nov):

  • Passport scanner (ID cards scanning debugging)
  • Housekeeping improvements
  • Online Check-in (contact us for beta testing!)
  • City tax handling in Take Payment & Invoice window

Price Strategies Improvements

First, you are now able to set restrictions strategies also for the child rates (ie. rates for which prices are automatically derived from other rates). Second of all, you can now set up multiple strategies for the same period of time to allow gradual price change.

Example 1 – different time frame

20 – 30 days before the arrival 30$
11 – 19 days before the arrival 32$
1 – 10 days before the arrival 35$

Example 2 – same time frame, different availability

20 – 30 days before the arrival 30$ if availability more than 10
20 – 30 days before the arrival 35$ if av. more than 5 less than 10
20 – 30 days before the arrival 40$ if availability less than 5

Coupon Usage Report

In the report section you can now find the report showing the statistics related to the coupons you were adding to bookings.

Referral Summary Report

In the report section you can now find the report showing the stats of the referrals assigned to the reservations.

Enable/Disable Occupancy Pricing in Booking Engine

You can now decide if you want to use Occupancy Pricing on booking engine. The occupancy pricing allows you selling private rooms for different price to different number of people.

DGP Report (Spain) & per person printouts

We have released some final improvements for a DGP Report (DIRECCIÓN GENERAL DE LA POLICÍA) for Spanish properties as well as per person printouts. which are required in some cities. Please check!

IVA / VAT Automation (e.g. for Chile)

We have implemented improved logic for IVA / VAT calculations which allows  automatically calculating the respective tax if the certain conditions are met, e.g. certain currency or nationality is marked in the booking.

Major Bug Fixes

[DEV-2529] – Strategies not refreshing in A&R Calendar
[DEV-2602] – City Tax, Lisbon – bug
[DEV-2929] – Dashboard – paid bookings appear on the outstanding payments list
[DEV-3249] – Pulling appropriate Exchange Rate when giving change
[DEV-3283] – Can’t add new strategy
[DEV-3347] – Take Payment & Invoice – incorrect invoice template taken
[DEV-3381] – Daily Production – incorrect data in the report
[DEV-3390] – System is taking too long to block beds
[DEV-3394] – Dashboard – cancelled guests counted in Arriving Guests and Guest in House Tonight category
[DEV-3419] – Exported invoice shows weird value on Balance column
[DEV-3472] – Strange nameless user active
[DEV-3524] – Daily Production – table formatting changes
[DEV-3553] – Item Manager – Error when checking “track inventory” radio box
[DEV-3575] – Bug when deleting reservation note
[DEV-3627] – Booking Engine chat does not work
[DEV-3645] – Reports – City tax report is showing incorrect info
[DEV-3707] – N/A information in Postal Cose and address fields
[DEV-3713] – Invoice – error on Save and Print
[DEV-3764] – Guest Demographics Report – Wrong guest number or empty report
[DEV-3799] – Can’t see well the buttons and all expenses categories in Withdraw window
[DEV-3803] – Incorrect Total Due in reservation after cancelling a guest in a reservation
[DEV-3807] – Hostelworld – exceeded quota of API calls for setbeds
[DEV-3815] – Problem when splitting reservation (double split)
[DEV-3820] – Booking Engine – Terms & Conditions don’t look the same as in Email & Printout manager
[DEV-3843] – Reservation View – filtering by dates doesn’t work
[DEV-3845] – Disappearing reservation
[DEV-3848] – Mandrill – Change of sender’s field
[DEV-3865] – All Issued Invoices – owner name not exported to Excel
[DEV-3919] – Inactive emails sent to guests
[DEV-3938] – Booking entered the system with incorrect price
[DEV-3967] – Reservation View – can’t see RATE column on new prod server
[DEV-3970] – Av. & Rate Calendar – the manually edited prices per occupancy reflected incorrectly in child rates
[DEV-3985] – Missing link on the new server
[DEV-4004] – Linked rates not updated in the calendar

Hey everyone,

Guess what? You could win an awesome bluetooth speaker, just by sending an email. Refer a friend before Christmas, and you’ll automatically get entered to win. 

Plus, if that friend does become client, you’ll both get even more rewards. For you, it’s $150 for every successful referral. For them, it’s 10% off the first 6 months. 

Check out the tabs below to get started. 

Cheers,

FrontDesk Master Team 

See You in Lisbon Next Week?

(Also, we’re hiring – Customer Coach for Brasil!)

Hey everybody!

We’re sponsoring HostelSkills Conference #6. It’s next week, October 18 & 19 in beautiful Lisbon.  You can expect useful speaker sessions covering everything from Instagram marketing to revenue-boosting rate plans. Check out the full agenda here, and don’t forget to come get a drink with us! 🙂

Hope to see you there,

– FrontDesk Master Team 

 

Non-Refundable Rate in Hostelworld

Hello everybody!

If you use Non Refundable rate in Hostelworld:

Please do not map the rate in Channel Manager (see here). Hostelworld informed us that they will not roll out direct price updates for Non-Refundable rates until late October and FrontDesk Master must remove this functionality until then. If you keep the rate mapped, the system tries to send updates what results in the error returned by Hostelworld and may affect Standard Rate updates.
We will make necessary adjustments to allow only recognizing Non-Refundable bookings until this time.
In case of an doubts or questions, do not hesitate to contact support@frontdeskmaster.com.

Thank you!

—  Best Regards,
FrontDesk Master Team

Hostelworld API Outage

Dear customers,

We are sad to inform that Hostelworld is experiencing issues with its API. Please note that the problems happened several times within last 2 weeks and unfortunately there is nothing FrontDesk Master can do to overcome it.

We all hope the API stability will be improved soon and irrespective of the root cause we apologize for the inconvenience.

FrontDesk Master Team

27th June – Release Notes

Hello everyone,

We are happy to inform that earlier today we released a FrontDesk Master update (v.33). Please see below for details.

FrontDesk Master Team

Control staff access to the system outside of shift switch

A new permission which allows you to decide if staff can access the system outside of their shift switch.

Check in Property Management / Staff / Edit Roles & Permissions

GuestView Improvements

We made some changes to improve the window. Now, we are showing only the guests with complete details (name, email, etc.) And also we added an option to export the list of guests to Excel file.

FACT Integration Improvements (Portugal)

You can open you Fact dashboard directly from FDM.  Also, in case you need to create an invoice manually, you can create one directly from FDM

Libre DTE Improvements (Chile)

We improved the integration with LibreDTE.

  1. Point of Sale transactions generate the respective BOLETA.
  2. You can re-download the FACTURA, BOLETA from Accounts, All Invoices and Reservation

Tamal – Invoicing integration for Israel

We have released another integration. This time for Israel. Here you can see how a typical invoicing integration works. CLICK HERE

Major Bug Fixes

[DEV-2695] – Booking engine booking – Guest notes not received on email notification
[DEV-3065] – Reservation: after changing and saving data in Guest Details, the guest list changes order
[DEV-3078] – Issue with Deposits in tooltip
[DEV-3102] – Cant add new booking methods
[DEV-3123] – Paid reservation appears as due
[DEV-3194] – Price Manager – prices per occupancy not changing with different currencies
[DEV-3203] – Dashboard – Total Outstanding not showing any information. It shows only 0.
[DEV-3240] – LibreDTE / Primavera – generated invoices now showing on All Issued Invoices list
[DEV-3333] – Bookings are showing incorrect Total Due on Bed View
[DEV-3350] – Take Payment & Invoice – invoice generated over amount with commission included despite the configuration
[DEV-3372] – Updates after cancellations (auto-replenish problem on Hostelworld)
[DEV-3395] – Fact – invoice created for a guest from another not related reservation
[DEV-3404] – Can´t upload bookings from file
[DEV-3432] – System doesn’t update availability when Cancelled booking has its status changed to Confirmed
[DEV-3436] – Problem with editing notes

Preparing Your FDM for the GDPR

As you are probably aware, new data protection law (GDPR) goes into effect May 25th. At FrontDesk Master, we are following the developments and taking the necessary steps to be compliant and also provide you with tools which will help you comply with the regulations.

While it shouldn’t be considered a legal advice, please have a look at short information which may be relevant for you and your property.

What is GDPR?

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aims to protect the fundamental right to privacy and the protection of personal data of European Union (EU) citizens.

This regulation affects any entity that processes EU citizens’ personal data. Whether or not you or your business is located in the EU, if you have EU site visitors, or if your marketing campaigns target EU citizens, this affects you.

The full text of the GDPR can be found here and a glossary of all the legal terms you’ll need to know can be found here.

What is Personal Data?

The GDPR applies to ‘personal data’ meaning any information relating to an identifiable person who can be directly or indirectly identified in particular by reference to an identifier. This definition provides for a wide range of personal identifiers to constitute personal data, including name, identification number, location data or online identifier.

If you are unsure what it means, ask yourself a question:  

– Based on the information I possess could I possibly identify the person? Can I find who is it (also using technology)?

If you could possibly find out who is the owner of the data you have you are collecting the personal data in scope of GDPR!

What is the difference between a Processor and a Controller?

A Controller (Hostel or Hotel) is the entity that determines the purpose, conditions and means of the processing of personal data, while the Processor (FrontDesk Master) is an entity which processes personal data on behalf of the controller.

Note!

The GDPR treats the data Controller (Hotel or Hostel) as the principal party for responsibilities such as collecting consent, managing consent-revoking, enabling right to access, etc. A data subject who wishes to revoke consent for his or her personal data therefore will contact the data controller to initiate the request, even if such data lives on servers belonging to the data processor. The data controller, upon receiving this request, would then proceed to request the data processor remove the revoked data from their servers.

What does the GDPR mean for you?

As a data Controller you must be GDPR compliant!

There are two words which best describe the requirements: transparency and communication.

GDPR requires that you must be very transparent with your guests why and what data are you going to collect, how long are you going to store them and how you are going to use them. There is a difference between storing data because of legal requirements or booking processing versus due to the marketing reasons. It is your responsibility to inform the guest about it and to obtain a relevant and explicit consent, if for instance you want to build up your marketing database and send guests birthday cards or a promo codes.

It’s retroactive - it applies to personal data you already have!

Sorry to say that but to our knowledge, it applies to everything you have already collected. And unless you have a lawful reason ie. you are legally obliged to store the data or you have an appropriate consent to store the data, you shall either erase the data or get it into compliance (collect explicit consent!).

If you want us to to remove your past reservation data in bulk, please contact us at support@frontdeskmaster.com.

Ahh… let’s just forget about it

We strongly recommend to avoid such notion given the GDPR allows fines up to 20 million Euro or 4% of your annual profit whichever is higher!

Stay calm and don’t panic. GDPR was not introduced to collect fines but we all need to act responsibly and consciously towards the full compliance.

What you need to do and how FrontDesk Master can help you?

Step 1

Establish a legal basis for collecting your guests’ data ie. Get Consent

Obviously when accepting bookings you do have a lawful reason for collecting guests’ personal data. However, you should still make sure that your guest was informed about:

  • What data are you collecting?
  • How long are you are storing them?
  • How are you going to use them and why?

For instance, you may need to inform the guest that you are legally obliged to store certain data for 3 years after the check-out or you may request a guest’s consent to store the data for marketing purposes.

Just to be clear, the consent must be explicit and unambiguous and distinguishable from other matters.  

FrontDesk Master will help you in several ways:

  1. Printouts made automatically per each guest may help you collect the necessary consent in a traditional way. See how here.
  2. Collect Consent during Booking Engine reservations. New functionality will allow you to not only make guest accept your Terms of Stay but also collect explicit marketing consent. (In Preparation).

Step 2

Store only what you need!

As we previously mentioned, GDPR refers to collecting and storing the personal data which allow identifying the person. Look at this 2 examples:

  • John, USA, Age: 20 -25

Undoubtedly, in the first case you do have data in scope of GDPR protection. In the second case, if that’s all you have you do not have the data which allows identifying the person and you can store such data for statistical purposes forever!

You can Anonymize Personal Details after check-out!

FrontDesk Master will let you anonymize guest details automatically some time after the check-out.

It means that personal details  will be turned into dummy details allowing you to maintain the statistics and comply with GDPR.

The tool will start working next week!

Important!

At FrontDesk Master, we believe that anonymization may be one of the best ways for you to deal with your past reservation data but remember it is your responsibility as a Controller to take actions and determine what to do with the data you collect to comply with the new regulations.

Step 3

Ensure Guest Rights

In accordance with GDPR your guests have Right of Access and Right to Rectify/Delete.

It means that anybody whose data is in your system has the right to obtain confirmation of what data you stored, modify it or request to delete the data. It means that if your guest wants to know what data you collected, you must offer him or her the right to view it and potentially modify it or deleted it (if there is no lawful reason for further storing the data ie. legal requirement, binding reservation, etc.)

Online Guest Account by FDM

Online Guest Account can be accessed by any guest whose data is in the system. From there guests will be able to see what data you store. He or she will be able to manage the consent they gave or even delete their profile (if you allow it).

You can already test the access to the account here but only on newly made bookings (for now). You can also find Online Check-in settings in Property Details.

What has FrontDesk Master done to comply with GDPR?

We have implemented and are implementing changes.

We have worked to prepare our services for GDPR. We reviewed our data processing activities, and are making any changes that are needed to comply with GDPR such as implementing appropriate technical and organizational measures

We have released updated Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy updates

We have published updated versions of Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy  which consist of necessary information regarding FrontDesk Master’s data practices. In next days, Property Administrators will be prompt in the system to acknowledge and accept the changes.

See here Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.

Please note that while we want to make it easier for you to comply with the new regulations by releasing new tools, you may need to seek a legal advice to ensure you comply with the new regulations. 

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us at support@frontdeskmaster.com.

FrontDesk Master Team