The results are in…

The results are in and your votes have been tallied. Given the number of different ideas developed internally and suggested in our interactions with our faithful outfitters (that would be you), the survey gave us a great way to get everyone’s input to help us focus our ongoing development to ensure new features are as widely useful as possible and we continue our tradition of being a user driven software. Based on the survey results, our priorities for the new features in the coming months will be on the following functionality.

So without further ado here is the 2016 development plan! (And the crowd goes wild… Ok, so that’s overboard, but you should be excited.

  • More accounting reports, including cash flow projections: This was the most requested feature and is something that we will address soon. We have a number of new reports already in the works, including a cash flow report, a minor update to the end of day balance report and new reporting features to more easily access important date ranges. And, although not exactly an accounting report, based on conversations with outfitters at the AO conference, we will be introducing a report akin to the overview report from Version 1.
  • Revamped discount and promotions (easier setup, e-commerce support, more control): The current system for managing discounts and promo codes, although functional, has some key limitations and is not entirely intuitive. We are going to work to improve this process by creating a more streamlined interface, adding support for one-time use codes (like those used by Groupon or LivingSocial), adding support for better per-guest promotions, adding support for per-add-on discounts and expanding discounts to other areas, such as photo sales and e-commerce sales.
  • Up-sell items online, such as recommending additional trips or retail items when reserving a trip: Outfitters have expressed an interest in being able to cross-promote items on the guest-facing site. For day trip operators, this may mean suggesting complimentary trips or camping sites, while for other outfitters, this may mean promoting retail goods that will be useful during the trip. We are planning a cross-promotion feature that allows defining related and recommended items that will be shown after adding an activity or item to the cart.

We are tremendously excited about these new features, as well as some other ones that we have been working on internally, that will be launching over the coming months. We expect some of the features to be available in the very near future and we are aiming to have versions of all of them ready at the beginning of the summer season. We will continue to refine and polish the features as they are deployed.

We’ll call out some of the features in our newsletter and blog, but we recommend following our Twitter feed, as we provide timely notifications of new features and other important updates. (By default, our tweets appear on the Arctic dashboard.) If you have been following our feed recently, we are highlighting a number of updates that were recently deployed. It’s a great way to learn about new features and tools in the system.

 

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