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You can now mark your tables as wheelchair accessible - and then allow guests with additional needs to book these tables.

Read more details about this new feature here.

Webhook Notifications

You can now get notifications for booking cancellation and creation via a Webhook. This is a powerful way to keep your system and BookingNinja in sync. You can specify the webhook location in the notifications section

Booking Discounts & Coupons

If you want to offer users the ability to have a percentage or fixed amount of the billing charge then coupons is just the feature for you! You can create coupons which can be restricted to just a certain event or session, or have them be globally usable.

Fixes

- Fixed custom data not always recording correctly.
- Improved speed of certain acts by adding them a queue.

Additions

- You can now set times which to not accept bookings, for example, disable ALL bookings from 6 PM through to 9 PM tonight.
- Booking time overrides section is simplified and made to look better in mobile UI.
- Added ability for a forced closure to span multiple days while also having a start & endpoint of time.
- Upped the autorefresh rate of booking listings from 15 minutes to 2 minutes for paid plan holders.
- Sessions can now be linked to directly, and the widget code has been updated to allow limiting to session
- You can now set a deposit type as required (for example at least 1 adult is required)

Booking Time States
We've added helpful indicators for bookings in terms of if they are late, overstaying or how long left their booking has.

Fixes

- Fixed the table chain functionality not working for some users
- Added more unit testing for fringe cases

One of the request we've recently received is to move Stripe connections from being a global account setting to a venue setting. This means you can have a different Stripe account for each venue, while keeping them under the same account. Happily this is now Stripe is handled.

We've been working on the smaller things that are aren't game changing but do make life a bit nicer.

As always we will continue to improve all aspects! If you got a request or comment then do let us know.

We've spent the last day and a bit working on improving our email deliverability rates. In the world of sending out emails, there are countless things that can get in the way (spam blockers, domain issues and plenty more). So in turn to try to improve our email deliverability rate for emails such as the email confirmations & booking notifications we've pretty much fine-tuned every system and invested in better email delivery infrastructure.

In turn, this means we're are now tracking around 99.8% successful email delivery (and a large part of the last 0.2% is people just not using a valid email address). This will mean you'll have fewer people contacting you wondering if their booking has been confirmed. We've also used this time to spruce up the email confirmation - have a look at the new look below! 

Howdy doody! I

t's been an incredibly busy week for many of our users and equally busy for us here at BookingNinja. We spent a lot of the downtime where bookings were in a lull working on upgrading our systems and we've made huge progress on that front. Just some of the updates since the last time we spoke include:

We've also spent a long time improving our backend systems to ensure stability and a better ability to update in the future. As venues have reopened we're going to be moving to weekly releases rather than the more instant daily releases we've been doing thus far. This will give us further time to test features, but equally to ensure you don't get any shocks with things changing in the middle of service. 

More than ever we know that venues are having to inform their customers of rules or policy that has been put into place to deal with the on going cornovirus pandemic - so with that in mind today we're pleased to roll out a new feature to help manage customer expectations. Prebooking Messages.

Prebooking Messages are simply information that appears before the booking form. It can be used to explain the rules and limits your venue has, or equally it could just be used to introduce your booking form. These messages can be setup in the settings page.

You can even change the text of the continue button so you could in pratice have the button be an agreement button!

We've got lots of to talk about this week as we continue our move towards the new version of the site, so let's get straight into things.

New Booking Form

We've made some major updates to our booking form, all of which are designed to give you more options and make it easier for your customers to book. Here are the highlights:

More Booking Page Updates

It's been a week since the new page came out of beta! We've been listening to customer suggestions and feedback, and have some useful new changes:

Improved Settings Pages

More and more of our settings are being imported to our new settings page within the app. Each time we move settings over, we're trying to organize, simplify and explain what settings do what.

We've made new settings pages for social media links, custom fields, and booking limits. In particular, we've made the booking limits settings page far easier to understand and edit, so check it out.

Minimum Booking Limits

Don't want to take bookings from smaller groups? You can now set a minimum booking limit of any amount on the booking limits setting page.

What's Next?

Our continued task to move over settings from the old design will continue, along with cleaning up and bug fixing all our basic options.

We're also working on several big user-suggested features! If you have a feature you want, let us know on the suggestions page or via chat, and we'll see if we can implement it.

New Bookings Out of Beta!

The new version of the booking page that was in beta a few weeks ago has now been rolled out to the whole site. For more information on the features of the new page, check out our last update.

Right now the older sections of the site are still using the old design, but we'll be bringing all features and updates into the new design gradually over the next month. This new version of the site will make taking and modifying your online bookings easier than ever before.

Intercom Live Chat

We've changed our live chat provider to Intercom, as we've had some problems in the last week with our old chat software not sending or receiving messages when it should have been. Sorry for the inconvenience!

We're currently rolling out a beta version of the booking overview page. We've upgraded this page with the feedback you've provided in mind and have focused on improving usability, speed, and functionality. This new booking page forms part of a wider rebuild of BookingNinja.

To try this new booking page click the "Try beta" button next to the create booking button. We'll be in beta for a few weeks while we collect user feedback, then we shall move over to this new page.

Features of New Booking Page

Auto Refresh - Your booking overview page will now refresh when new bookings come in. No need to swipe down or press F5 anymore. The system checks for bookings every 5 seconds so you'll always have the information when you need it.

Cleaner UI - We've brought elements closer together so you can view more bookings at once, while also cleaning up the UI and using colours to better reflect booking states.

Easier Editing - The new booking page brings together more information about the customer. In addition, you'll be able to quickly edit and add new bookings, with shortcut keys for adding a booking on a given day.

Fixes

- Refunded payments now reflect that in the bookings listing
- A refunding bug where payments could not be refunded inside the application has been resolved
- Slot times now reflect correctly when making a booking.

We're currently working on Version 2 of BookingNinja. This will be a major overhall improving stablity, functionality and visuals.

During this time we're looking for your direct feedback - so if you have any questions or comments about what you'd like BookingNinja to do for you then get in touch.

You can contact us directly at team@bookingninja.io - we'll respond to all emails' sent.

In the mean time you might notice some elements visually styled different in the admin panel while this transition peroid is entered.

We've fixed an issue impacting some customers where you could not create a new booking in the admin panel.

This did not impact bookings created by users.

Today we've decided to communicate more with our customers, and let you know exactly what we're working on here.

Our new changelog will keep you in the loop not only about bug fixes but everything from brand new features to security updates and all things inbetween.

Stay Updated

We're looking forward to talking about all our changes, updates and improvements to our service as we move forward. We hope you'll keep an eye on our progress and let us know what you think!