Last several months we had absolutely no time to update you. After we passed booking.com certification we were very busy with switching our existing customers to direct connection. This already helped them to save their money on intermediate channel managers. Also we signed up couple large customers and were working on their custom multi-property booking engines. So now we know how to make it in responsive design. Finally new customers want new directly connected channels and we are currently in the middle of that long process.
However, we are not swamped and still pushing forward. Here’s some good news we proud to share:
+ Due to high demand from our customers who manage apartments we established 2-way connection to Airbnb. So Colibri syncs availability and prices and, of course, getting reservations (including pre-requests, which appears in PMS as pending reservations and waiting for approval). Unfortunately Airbnb has no external API so we are currently using scraping. This means our script emulates user actions when updates prices or when fetching reservations/updates/cancels (availability syncing via automatically generated calendar file). This way of integration is not very reliable and requiring lots of support. So we are very hope Airbnb will hear us and lots of other voices and will open their external API soon.
+ For newly connected customers we created ability to load all their existing reservations from the booking.com, so it’s no longer necessary to load reservations manually. The same feature for our other directly connected channels (Expedia, Agoda, Hotel.de and Airbnb) will be added shortly.
+ Simple allotment module has been added. It will be expanded in frames of long-promised Agency module.
+ We know that our first image organizer was overloaded by features so it was very hard to use buggy piece of crap. So we made a completely new image organizer. We took out most of rarely used features, made much more friendly user interface and added nice features like ability to describe photo or filter photos to see only un-tagged images.