A new feature has been added to the “new reservation” page meant to assist with monitoring the number of reservations per launch, especially when it comes to sublaunches. After selecting a trip, a table with the number of openings, reservations and remaining free spots will appear allowing for you to visually confirm the proper number of openings before proceeding with the reservation.
A new field has been added to the trip editor that allows you to select a river. Although only a few rivers are listed now, selecting a river allows you to access reports and forms specific to that river (for example, BLM Manifest or Forest Service Registration Form). With time, the collection of supported rivers will grow, making it easy to prepare reports specific to your trip.
In other news, big pages (such as the home page and the launches page) have been optimized for much faster loading. Although the speed was not an issue before, this will ensure Arctic Reservations ability to scale to larger amounts of information.
This message was contributed by Zachary Collier, from Echo River Trips:
I’m headed to Idaho for the summer and just wanted to say thank you. You’ve done an amazing job with the reservation system and I really appreciate your openness to suggestions, your hard work, and dedication. I’m looking forward to your six day chess lesson on the Middle Fork next month.
This weekend brings an upgrade to the support system. Now when you use the contact support page of the site or e-mail support@arcticreservations.com, a new trouble ticket will be opened. This helps us organize support requests and keep track of which requests have been handled. With time, you will be able to see open trouble tickets from within Arctic Reservations.
Please make sure you contact support using one of the two methods described above. This will help to expedite your request.
Update: The trouble ticket system just did not work. Most customers found it easier to e-mail their questions in or call. And occasionally, trouble tickets would get deleted or ignored. So the system has been removed. Hopefully we will role out a better trouble ticket system later… but until then, keep calling and e-mailing!
Minor Changes
A new user permission level allows you to hide financial information from a read only user. This is good for guides who want to access reservation and launch details, but do not need to see pricing information.
This weekend brought many new updates that have been in the works for the last couple weeks.
Reports are now managed according to trip river. When you create a new trip, select which river it is from our listing. When you select the river, reports associated with that specific river (ie, BLM permits or boater registration forms) will instantly be available to you. Since this is a new feature, there are only a handful of rivers, but with continued feedback from our customers this will grow as more rivers and more reports are added and maintained.
The Overview report has been upgraded to include financial information, regarding how much has been billed, payments that have been collected and other helpful tidbits. And with this new information comes a much nicer visual layout. In addition, information from the overview report now appears on individual launch detail pages. Now you can see the user days or financial information for a specific launch easily.
The Arctic Reservations Software has won first place in the commercial category for this year’s WebFest Competition. WebFest is a USC sponsored program that gives awards to the best projects in four different categories. This year marked the most submissions yet, so the announcement of first place comes as quite an honor. Thanks to all our great customers for your excellent feedback and suggestions!
This was back in March… I was waiting in hopes that they would update their website to show the winners for the different categories, but it does not seem like its going to happen for a while.
The Arctic Reservations design has been upgraded with a new menu system, making navigation from tool to tool even easier. Now, menus use popup functionality to eliminate the need to scroll up or down in order to see the whole menu. I know that in some cases, popup menus can be a pain, but for compact navigation and for easy access to specific tasks, they seemed like the most appropriate choice. In addition, the menu floats in the left bar, so even if you scroll down, it will be in the exact sample place. This saves you the trouble of scrolling all the way back to the top of the page in order to use the menu.
This new feature has been tested in the following browsers: Internet Explorer 7, Firefox and Safari. If it worked in those three, it should work in any other browser that supports Arctic Reservations. If you run into problems or have feed back, just use the contact support link or e-mail support now.
Customer records now allow international address information. By selecting a country other then the United States, the zip and the state field are replaced by province and postal code.
The comment feature for the blog are available once again. Sorry about that being off for a day!
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Our new sales website went live today. Just the design that is. Some of the pages still need to be tweaked and updated. The new design is much more graphic and, in general, pleasing to use (I think). As part of the change, the blog now matches the rest of the sales website design. Please note that the blog URL has updated to: arcticreservations.com/blog. The old URL will continue to redirect visitors for the time being. In addition, this means the feed has moved to arcticreservations.com/blog/atom.xml. If you are using the feed to get the latest news, make sure you update your subscription, as the old link will be taken offline eventually.
Notes: The pricing page has been removed. Information on pricing can now be found in the Frequently Asked Questions section.
We would love to hear your comments on the new design.
