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Case Studies
Cottage Rental Agency - CottageRentalAgency.com
Online Booking Solution
Cottage Rental Agency (Seaside Development Corp at the time) was using a legacy DOS based Property Management System called First Resort. This system offered an online booking interface that was very slow and didn't function will with concurrent users and was very slow to show booking rates and availability information. NearSource developers at Mindvisions developed the Veristay (link) online booking solution to overcome the issues they were having with online booking.
Using Veristay in conjunction with Mindvisions proprietary CMS Hypergenius, Cottage Rental Agency was provided with the ability to setup descriptions, photos and amenities for each property and allow them to link to the properties in their PMS. They can also enable and disable each property, specify which units are lock-offs of bigger units. Another important feature was the ability to create an Owner site where property owners can log on and view their properties and their rental activity and make owner reservations.
The biggest benefit of the Veristay system was the actual online booking / search interface. Users are now able to search for specific units that match certain amenity requirements such as Number of Guests, Number of Rooms, Location, etc and search for units that are available in specific dates. The search results show a list of matching units, and when a unit is clicked on, the user can see the property description, photos and an availability calendar that shows which dates are available. They can switch months in the calendar, and they can click on different units to compare. After the user decides on a property they can click on the "book now" button which shows a customized version of the First Resort PMS booking page that shows the rate and allows the user to reserve the property. The Veristay system then sends an email to the guest and to the property manager.
This was accomplished by building a Veristay Data Connector that exports unit availability information from text log files every 15 minutes to keep the available dates as current as possible. A Nightly export/import tool was also created that imports new units, updates amenities and refreshes the availability information for all units. Veristay custom PMS modules were added to the Hypergenius CMS system so they can view all online reservation requests, send up follow up emails, and manage all of their units.
After several years of using First Resort, Cottage Rental Agency decided to change their platform to Visual One PMS which offered an online booking interface and a more user friendly interface for the Rental Agents. However the online booking interface did not fit the requirements and did not allow agents to manage property amenities, descriptions and photos as well as the Veristay module created for Hypergenius. The availability calendar was too slow for their needs and the work flow from a property search to an actual booking was too different from the current process. Cottage Rental Agency opted to upgrade the Veristay platform to work with Visual One. To do this a new Veristay Data Connector was created and this imports availability information every 15 minutes and a complete data refresh is done nightly.
Cottage Rental Agency is still using Veristay after more than 5 years, and NearSource currently provides a lot of different web development/maintenance services for them. The Veristay platform has been used by different companies such as Long And Foster and WaterColor Inn & Resort.
