Bookacamp - news

Introduction Klassenfahrten Kompass (School Trip Compass) 2024/11/24

Today we are pleased to introduce Bookacamp's newest partner, the Klassenfahrt Kompass (www.klassenfahrten-kompass.de). The Klassenfahrt Kompass is a portal for group trips with a focus on school trips.

The aim of the compass is to give school classes orientation in the jungle of different providers and offers. Schools can filter numerous school trip offers according to their needs and quickly find the optimal school trip.

Compass works with numerous school trip providers who want to advertise their school trips via Compass and make them accessible to a broader target group. The main goal of the providers is to attract new customers and to retain them in the long term through positive experiences. Another advantage is that your own offerings can be utilized to the best possible extent.

The Klassenfahrt Kompass is a project of the RheinFit Sportakademie, which has been organizing and brokering holiday camps since 2012 (e.g. Campfuchs - www.ferien-camps.de) on the market.

If you are a school trip organizer yourself and are still looking for support in marketing your trips, the Klassenfahrt Kompass would be happy to hear from you.

Author: Christoph Schipper

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Latest & Greatest Updates Summer Edition 2024/10/15

✨ Useful information

Cancel offer with your own email template
If you need to cancel a session, for example due to low participation numbers, there is the email template (|booking-session-cancellation|). This template can therefore have different content than the previous email about cancelling a booking.
Gender-based waiting list
Previously, booking a waiting list was only possible if all places in an offer had already been booked. The system now reacts more sensitively and you can put yourself on the waiting list even if a regular place can still be booked for a different gender.
Automated Whatsapp communication with Chatlyn
Chatlyn is a marketing automation tool. Transferring contacts to Chatlyn was step one. For some time now it has also been possible for Bookacamp to send a trigger to Chatlyn so that automated WhatsApp communication processes start from Chatlyn. This happens after the booking is confirmed and when customers are checked in, for example to inform the parents that the child is safe on site.
Bulk mailing to group registrants
Using the session, it is possible to send a bulk email only to group registrants. In contrast to normal collective email sending, group email templates are supported.
Nationality in demographic overview
The nationalities are now also listed in the demographic overview that is available for each session.
Display of the camp management on the booking details page
If a position is defined as a management position in the Teamer add-on, the system determines and displays the camp management when the booking is opened. This is useful during and after the season if parents contact you and you want to see the contact person on site directly.

😎 Counselor-Addon

Cusgtom questions in master export
The master export is an Excel list with a lot of data from the database that can be exported for further processing, analysis or data backup. For a few weeks now, this has also included the questions and answers to the free questions that can be asked when applying or in the questionnaire.
Traffic light system in operational planning
We have always had a color nomenclature when planning the assignment of your staff. We adapted these, used more contrasting colors and added a legend.
Link profile login to confirmation
In the account settings, you can activate the invitation to create a profile login automatically when you confirm your assignment. Beforehand, it is checked whether the login already exists.
Predefined roles in profile login
The login for staff now has quite a few different access rights. Please contact our support if you would like us to combine the rights into roles so that you only have to press one button to assign all the rights to the role.
Received email for note from counselor staff
If a note for a booking is stored in your profile login, you can activate an email notification in your personal settings.
Bulk actions for the change of season
If you are currently switching to the new application phase for 2025, the following will be of interest to you: In the season change feature, you can now run actions for many supervisor profiles at once. This includes deleting and archiving the profiles, but also resetting them to the profile status confirmed.

𖨆𖨆𖨆𖨆 Group Suite

Services per group
With group offers, it may be that an offer is not made per person, but only for the entire group, for example because booking a bus has a total price. When entering the transfers, additional services and activities, you can choose whether it is a price per person or the total price for the group. This feature is quite new and is therefore activated upon request.
Block periods of entire room categories
Previously, you could already block individual rooms for a certain period of time. We have expanded this function so that entire room categories can now be blocked. This is useful, for example, in winter, where accommodation in tents can be rather inconvenient. This way you don't have to click on all the individual rooms.
ReservationOn request
If the system determines that there is not enough space for a period and group size, it will normally display the session as unbookable. If you still want to have the contact, you can activate in the account settings that the periods can be booked on request.
Limitation of the day of the week
When entering each program offer, you can decide whether the start of the offer is only possible for a specific day of the week. You can make school trips always start on Mondays, for example.
Invoice itemstype and suggest
Group invoices can be saved as draft invoices. This means you can make changes and remove and add services while the offer is running without creating a new invoice and canceling the old one. When adding, the system suggests existing packages, which you can then select directly. This will insert the price immediately.
Placeholders for payment information
The group email templates have been expanded to include new placeholders to exchange information about invoice amounts, down payment amounts, and remaining payment amounts.
Validity periods for program offers
When entering program offers that can be booked directly, the calendar can be restricted so that, for example, winter offers do not appear in summer.
Automated creation of offer documents
For a reservation or booking confirmation, the system is now able to create letter-like documents for printing or sending by email. The texts of the templates can be stored and edited in the account settings.

🏢 Insurance

Valid insurance in case of booking cancellation
If the organizer cancels an offer and the booking has active insurance, the insurance would still appear on the cancellation invoice. Because the cancellation comes from the organizer, we have made it possible to remove the insurance so that the booking can be canceled for zero euros.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Mileston 1/3 Group Suite reached 2024/02/16

Bookacamp has been working for many months on the features that need to be available for booking and managing entire groups. It's not just about accepting a reservation by email, but also about making a group booking binding. With everything included.

We have divided the project into three parts, whereby the large base - and this is also the reason for the long development period - is necessary for all three milestones and requires completely new room and capacity management. All of this is seamlessly integrated during ongoing operations.

Milestone 1 - non-binding reservation request

We have provided new group registration forms because when booking entire groups, the arrival and departure dates are not known and must be selected. Whether a travel period is free is calculated live based on the group size and stored capacities. The first use case with which we will test and improve these systems in the real world is the business of arranging group trips and school trips as agent. We are very excited that these features will be used by one of our long-term partners very soon.

Milestone 2 - binding booking

A binding booking includes the management of customer data, offer documents, flexible invoicing and room planning. The central element of the planning is the so-called Resource Scheduler, a calendar-like tool for overviewing your own workload.

Milestone 3 - PMS Property Management

Based on all other functions, we are expanding group management to include those features that are necessary for managing the entire house. This includes logins and overviews for kitchen planning and housekeeping, the integration of quotation creation for bus transfer providers and material and resource planning for everything movable, such as technology for seminar rooms, instruments and also the planning of rooms that are not intended for the accommodation of guests.

If this has made you curious and you would like to get a taste of these tools, please contact info@bookacamp.de and we will arrange an appointment.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Latest & Greatest Updates December Edition 2023/12/15

✨ Useful information

QR codes on print media
The QR codes with the booking link can be generated for each event. These are displayed in the backoffice and can then be saved as an image. To do this, open the integration guide for the events (the thing with the globe at the top of the menu) and find the links for the QR codes for each individual event. QR codes are found more and more in print media and flyers and are ideal for quick navigation to websites.
Link to the questionnaire in the booking confirmation
When people book, they usually receive a confirmation of booking receipt, which is intended to show that someone is taking care of the booking and that you don't have to call and ask. The email templates for both individual and group registrations can now contain the links to the participant questionnaires.
Invoice text with new placeholder
From our experience, it is good if there are very specific deadlines with dates and amounts on the invoice. We received a message that the placeholder (|final-sum|) for the invoice amount minus the down payment amount was missing and inserted it.
Archive file uploads
The list of files can get quite long, especially if you use different certificates of participation for different events. What is no longer needed can be archived in the file management. Then it will no longer be displayed when you send an email.
Online payment for group bills
We have taught our integrations for all payment service providers (Stripe, Adyen, Girocheckout, Saferpay, Sofort.) how to handle the payment of group bills. This means that the payment panel appears either on the payment page, which can be linked in our emails, or, in the case of automatic booking confirmation, directly on the booking confirmation page.

🛒 Shop

Merchandise
From the beginning, the shop was designed so that it could offer both vouchers and advertising materials. We have now also activated the shop for merchandise. This is interesting if you want to offer clothes with your logo.
Test purchase
Setting up the shop always involves a few test purchases until the content of the emails and the look of the voucher images are perfect. Anyone who has tried it should mark the purchase as a test purchase and then cancel the purchase. Then no one complains later because there is an invoice lying around that was never paid.
Archive
When purchases are completed and the list becomes too long, a purchase can be archived.
Legal
We have introduced various options in the account settings for the shop to cover legal issues. This includes a text field whose contents are displayed before purchase. Here it is a good idea to inform that vouchers are not paid out in cash or are only valid for certain offers. In addition, you can define links to terms and conditions, revocation and data protection that differ from the other offers.
Communication
Depending on your own preferences, you can switch the order confirmation and the email for sending vouchers on or off for the shop. Deactivating the first email makes sense if you only offer online payment, as the second email will be sent immediately upon receipt of payment.

😎 Counselor-Addon

Handbook for counselors
Many already use the profile login for carers. In order to further expand this tool as a knowledge base, you can store a link to a manual in the backoffice under Administration > Camps. This link will then be displayed in the profile login. For example, you can record information about the special features of the location.

🧾 Accounting

Cost center per category
This is for all accounting lovers who can hardly contain their affection for a DATEV booking stack. All of our services can already be accounted for, meaning they can be provided with an SKR (standard chart of accounts). You have to activate this centrally in the account settings. If it is activated, the (accommodation) categories of events and camps can now be assigned a cost center. This information will later be inserted into the DATEV export and is therefore available for further processing in the accounting program.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Latest & Greatest Updates November Edition 2023/11/18

Shortly before the Youth Travel Congress on November 30th there is another update for our functions and features.

✨ Useful information

Archive search extension
You can now search for the customer's email address and telephone number in the archive.
Attendee lists with guests
At events it may happen that due to the printing of lists and name tags you want to add guests who should not book via a normal booking form. For this purpose, we have introduced guest management for each event. You can find the magical new feature in our more submenu under the event menu.
Federal state in Master Export
If the federal state is not requested as an input field in the booking form, the system will determine and insert the federal state in the master export based on the postal code in Germany.
Improvement in entering bank details
If people enter the IBAN with spaces, we have made our data validation more resilient so that the spaces are automatically removed. This reduces the support effort if a direct debit cannot be entered.
Ask for the telephone number of the participant
You can find the activation of the input field for the participant's telephone number under Expert mode > "Additional fields" when editing the session or the event.
Renew paid amount on invoice
It happens that parents contact us because the invoice does not show the final amount paid. Instead of renewing the entire invoice, the system now offers the option to only update the payment amount on the invoice. You can find the new feature in the Renew Screen when renewing the invoice, which you can access on the booking details page.
Account balance better explained
The account balance on the booking details page is highlighted in more logical colors and has been given more understandable labels so that you can better see whether a booking has been balanced or not.
Resize uploaded images
Our infrastructure has added a component that automatically compresses uploaded images to a small size to reduce image loading times.

🎫 Ticketing

Checkin-Indicator
The booking details page now shows in large size that the booking is checked in.
Checkin information update
The name of the person making the booking now appears on various check-in pages, so that the check-in staff have a better overview.

😎 Counselor-Addon

Improved data filtering
Profiles that have been canceled or rejected are no longer displayed in the placement planning or in the birthday overview.
Improvements in the questionnaire
If the time availability is later than the start date of a training course, the training will no longer be available for selection.

🧾 Accounting

Postbank has new export format for our payment importer
Postbank seems to have adapted the format for our import of payments from the bank. If you have an account with Postbank, please let us know at support@bookacamp.de so that we can update the importer.
Payment importer
When importing payments via a bank export, we now save the file name of the import file to ensure better traceability.
Date of dunning status
In our dunning status filters, we not only display the status of the dunning notice, but also the last updated date.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Sell Christmas vouchers via our shop system 2023/09/24

Today we're looking at our new shop system, which you can use to sell vouchers for Christmas. With our latest releases we have connected all of our online payment providers (Stripe, Adyen, Girocheckout, Klarna Sofort.) and of course the SEPA payments that are popular in Germany. This allows the customer to pay for and use the voucher ordered immediately. When paying via online payment providers, the vouchers are activated immediately and automatically.

✨ This is how you use the shop system

1. Activation

Open your account settings and navigate to the Shop box. When activating, you confirm the conditions and are immediately ready to enter your desired vouchers in different amounts. A new left main menu item appears with the heading Shop.

2. Add products

You can enter your vouchers in the corresponding sub-main menu item Products. At this point you choose the amount of the purchase price. The purchase price and the voucher value can differ from each other, so you can offer your customers an incentive to buy. You can use our image templates to offer vouchers that match the theme - for example for Christmas.

3. Integrate shop

You can either send the shop as a link or add it to the menu of your website, or you can embed the shop as a post in an iframe on your website. The layout of the shop adapts to the booking forms on your website. You can find more information and the link below your product overview. There is also a help page linked there.

4. Payment

If you do not use online payment through one of our providers, you can offer payment with SEPA transfer or our SEPA direct debit. With both payment methods, you have to activate the purchased vouchers yourself after receiving the money. It is much more convenient with an online payment. We will be informed of the payment directly, so that Bookacamp automatically activates the vouchers and sends the associated confirmation to the customer by email. So you don't have to worry about anything else.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Latest & Greatest Updates August Edition 2023/08/25

We used the summer to look at and implement a lot of things from the feedback from our users. In the summer it is very important not to disturb the everyday office life as much as possible and to react quickly to the things that are reported to us during the high season. Here is the list of notable updates.

✨ Useful information

Occupancy status separated by season
Two cards appear on the dashboard. One for the current year and a second for the upcoming year. This allows us to separate the seasons. The start date of the session for classification is decisive. Furthermore, the archive is now also taken into account in the calculation, so that the numbers do not change when you close the season.
Improving filters for pending payments
The menu item Accounting > Outstanding payments has received new filters. You can now select invoices for offers that start in a specific time range. The background is that you want to ensure that all bills are paid before the participants arrive at the camp.
Sub-seasonal price adjustment
Previously, after a price adjustment when changing a booking, a discount had to be used in order to keep the original basic price of the session. This is no longer necessary. When changing the booking, you can choose which basic price the change should be made with.
Edit answers to free questions in the questionnaire
Previously, to edit the answers to custom questions, you had to edit the booking. This is now possible directly when editing the participant questionnaire and is therefore much more intuitive. In addition, the questions and help texts are now also displayed directly on the booking detail page. This innovation also benefits customers, because the summary is also used for printing after the questionnaire has been submitted.
Discounts with start date
Have you ever gotten up at night to activate a discount? You do not need to now. When entering the discounts, you can choose a start date and time. At this point, the discount will automatically become active.
Print out participant lists
Lists of participants with the names and duration of the offers are often required for offers, that are funded by the authorities. You can now download this as a PDF for each session. You can find the new feature in the session list under more > attendee list as PDF. Above the table is your logo, followed by information about the session and listing. Furthermore, a column is provided in which the legal guardian can sign.
Defining the discount calculation
When calculating discounts, the order in which the discounts are applied can play a role. We have now established that all percentage discounts always apply first, followed by all discounts with a monetary value.
Travel documents sent?
A new filter > Travel documents allows you to find all those bookings that have not yet received the email with the travel documents. These can be sent directly from there. The menu item can also be opened aggregated by session.
Until when can an offer be booked?
Previously, all offers were displayed as no longer bookable 24 hours before the start. If it is not an organizational problem to allow very short-term bookings, you can now set the number of hours yourself in the account settings. The item is located in the Booking system > sessions section.
Transfer complete round to organizer
Some offers are managed in a Bookacamp account until the actual tour operator needs to receive the data. So far, the transfer of individual bookings was already possible, which admittedly is not much fun for sessions with 40 participants. Starting this season, entire session can be transfered completely.
Old invoices in the archive
The archive has been expanded to find all invoices per year from there. This also works if the related bookings have long been archived. This is useful if data is still missing for the tax return and needs to be submitted later.
Sorting by capacity
Each sesion has columns for the current booking status. The last column of the total number of bookings / maximum capacity can now be sorted numerically in ascending or descending order.

𖨆𖨆𖨆𖨆 Group handling

Accounting
Our group management has received a few new functions for accounting. Open amounts and account balances are displayed in various places and group invoices appear in the list of outstanding payments. The well-known functions for individual bookings are gradually becoming available for groups as well.
Test booking
Even with groups, it can happen that you have to try things out. That's why the group administration now has the well-known test booking button. Thus, the whole group and the associated bookings are marked as a test and are excluded from the capacity calculations and billing.
Communication
We have provided email templates for group communication. The new templates are for acknowledgment of receipt, cancellation, change of group booking, invoice, payment and travel information. These templates can be customized via group communication for each session. We recommend using the default settings as often as possible and only using individual templates in exceptional cases.
Adjustment of payment terms on the invoice
We have placeholders to represent the payment terms for down payment and balance payment on the invoice. For short-term bookings, the down payment target could be behind the final payment. We have changed this so that the date of the deposit can no longer be later than the date of the main payment. If the date of the main payment is before the date of the deposit, the date of the deposit will be "today" with the note (immediately).
Collected questionnaires
In the case of groups, one questionnaire may still have to be answered for each participant. The questions about medical matters are person-dependent. To make this easier, there are placeholders for group communication to send the questionnaires per person in a single email to the applicant.

✉️ Emails

Important changes to bulk emails
Sending a large amount of emails at once can take a long time and often break off. The reason is often that the providers of the sender addresses have a limit in order not to be considered as the sender of SPAM. We have changed our systems so that bulk emails are cached first. From there, a job runs in the background that sends the e-mails one after the other and can therefore also handle a limit. The cached emails are marked as such, so you can see if the email hasn't been sent yet.
Response to emails
Our emails are sent from the address set in the account settings. So far, the answer has also gone to this address. If it is better if customers reply directly to your personal inbox, you can now specify this in your personal settings and change it for each individual email. That way, the answers to questions get to you directly, instead of getting lost in a bulk mailbox.
Recipients of emails
When sending individual templates, the recipient is preselected from the booking. Here you can now also enter a different address that differs from the booking.
Insert agency in feedback mail
Placeholders for information about the agency can now be inserted in the e-mail templates for the feedback invitations. This is useful for naming the tour operator there.
List answers to open questions in email
The new placeholder (|booking-consents-as-list|) prepares the free questions plus answer in a list and inserts this content into your emails.
Gender of the participant as a placeholder
The placeholder (|participant-gender|) is now also available for use in the email templates.
Collective shipping per camp
It has long been possible to send a template to all participants in a session. This option has been expanded to also send to all participants in a specific camp location and thus increase the number of addressees. The button for this can be found under Administration > Camps.

😎 Teamer-Addon

non-binary in operational planning
The information about people who identify as non-binary was missing in the operational planning and is now included there. Considering the background of the increasing number of registrations from non-binary persons, it is important to keep an eye on this aspect.

Author: Mathias Methner

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EYCA - The European Youth Card 2023/07/21

The European Youth Card (EYCA – European Youth Card), issued in Germany under license by Reisenetz e.V. (German Association for Youth Travel) by EYCard Deutschland GmbH, is an advantage card valid throughout Europe for young people (up to the age of 30) and grants more than 30,000 different advantages when traveling in Europe. From discounts in hostels, airlines, ferries, hotels, museums, amusement parks etc. to restaurants. This includes (for guests living in Germany) travel health insurance from ERGO – for one year, for any number of trips, worldwide (including the USA / Canada!).

The card is available online for €19 at www.jugendkarte.de. Some organizers at Bookacamp provide their travel guests with the youth card free of charge after the end of a camp as a great, valuable extra. This is very easy to do by sending a voucher code to the participants or parents after the end of the camp.

Instead of €19, organizers who use Bookacamp only pay €12 - and of course only for redeemed card codes. For Reisenetz members, the costs are even reduced to just €9 per youth card voucher code redeemed! It still includes the annual travel insurance (foreign travel health insurance) for any number of trips. If you are interested, Ralf Olk / EYCard Deutschland GmbH will be happy to help olk@jugendkarte.de.

Author: Mathias Methner

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52 years child and youth travel experience 2023/05/16

Exciting news again today, adding 14 years to the number of years of experience in our industry. We are very pleased that Loic Kliemann will support us in software development in the future. Loic is currently doing a dual degree at Deutsche Telekom and will support us in all areas of operations and software development since the beginning of May.

Author: Mathias Methner

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New features and updates 2023/05/12

🤩 The Highlights

Daily briefings by email

You're sitting in the subway to work and you can already look at yesterday's booking figures via email - Bookacamp now makes this possible. In the account settings under Automation - Briefings you can activate our daily, weekly or monthly emails and also attach the sales report as an Excel file. This makes especially sense for the monthly briefing. The e-mails provide information about the status of the activated period, whereby the content of the e-mails can be customized. The emails contain statistics about bookings, cancellations, sales, insurance, registration of supervisors or feedback received.
Automatic dispatch of the DATEV export to the tax office

Our automation can conveniently email the DATEV export weekly or monthly. By entering the recipient group, it is even possible to send the file directly to the tax office. The e-mail template can be individually adapted, for example to send the client number directly to the office. Activation is done in the Automation - Accounting section of

✨ Useful information

New statistics for agency bookings per day

We offer a number of evaluations, both statistically and financially. Our evaluation got a new statistic to see the bookings per day per agency. This can be helpful to identify certain days for sending a newsletter.
Adaptive search field

At the top of our menu is one of the main tools to quickly navigate to an entity in the tool. What's new is that the search field now reacts to where you are. In the supervisor addon, it changes to the search for supervisors, if you have the discounts open, you can search for the discount code. What is currently active can be recognized by the small icon in front of the field.

😎 Teamer-Addon

Edit questionnaire for counselors
In the profile login for supervisors there is the possibility to update or fill in your own questions if they are not already available. To do this, the profile user must be given the role of access to the questionnaire when setting up the login and the data can then be maintained in the self-service.
Cancellation policy for teamers
If fee-based training courses are offered, it may be necessary to provide information about the cancellation when registering. There is now an input field in the settings of the supervisor addon where the link to the cancellation policy can be stored.

⭐ Feedback-Addon

Export feedback
If the feedback addon is active, you can look at the incoming data for evaluation, whereby the free text fields for what-was-good-what-was-not-so-good can be very interesting. With a date filter you can limit the evaluation and you will now also find a function there to export the displayed entries as Excel. In general, the feedback addon is a good tool for improving your own quality standards and the evaluation can be integrated directly into your own website with a banner.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Bookacamp switches to gender star 2023/03/28

Directly, as the third gender non-binary was introduced in 2018 and could officially be stated in the German ID card, Bookacamp adjusted its registration forms and processes to support it. Also, the use of a language, that excludes nobody because of their personal characteristics, has been important to us for years.

Previously, we used a notation that represented the gender-non-specific form of the language by a slash. However, it has become apparent that various groups of people - often referred to as LGBTQ+ - is better symbolized by an asterisk - the so-called gender star. Therefore, we have decided to change our language concepts. All texts in our user interfaces are represented by the asterisk * now. The asterisk stands for all persons who cannot be classified in the binary language pattern male & female.

This conversion is not a simple matter, as there is no official set of rules. Manufacturers of screen readers recommend using neutral wording as often as possible. Where it is not possible, the asterisk should be used instead of ":" colon or "_" underscore, as it is currently the most commonly used form of gender-sensitive language.

The changeover process was started today with the change of german texts at our company and is an ongoing process, because - of course - we also adapt our documents and our texts cannot all be read through at once. For quite a lot of wording, there are easy ways to change the language. Others are more difficult. For our english versions it is much easier, because most of all texts are just gender-neutral by language. One example, we look at are texts, which uses pharses like he/she, which now become he*she.

We are aware that the topic is sometimes discussed loudly and very controversially. The fact is that there are people who cannot and do not have to classify themselves as either male or female. We do not want to exclude those persons and are happy if there would be official rules in the future. The last statement of the Council for German Orthography is from 2021/03/16. 2 years old! If one looks at the members of the council (https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/ueber-den-rat/), there is at least a significant proportion of outwardly female persons. A diversity in origin, skin color or age are not to be recognized. In our opinion, this is not a representative picture of society and therefore we are not surprised, that there has been no update on this topic for the last 2 years.

Author: Mathias Methner

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New features and updates 2023/02/21

🤩 The Highlights

Public beta for the voucher store

Every now and then we were asked whether Bookacamp can also sell vouchers. Especially before Christmas or Easter, this is certainly interesting for grandma and grandpa as a gift for the grandchildren. We have always refused to misuse bookable tours and camps for this purpose, because the wording and the functionalities are simply not designed for this. Reason enough to launch a voucher store that integrates seamlessly with the voucher and billing system, so that the vouchers you purchase can be used immediately to book your offers. The voucher store is now going into public beta and can be activated in your own account settings. Of course, the store is especially interesting when using our online payment providers, because the vouchers are then directly paid and active.

The amount of the vouchers is freely selectable. The vouchers created are designed for printing at home designed and layout with nice background images.

✨ Things to know

Updates for the Teamer Addon

Right now is the time of the season, when interviews in preparation for the training courses this year take place. At each interview, notes can be left on the suitability of the person. In order to be well prepared for the interview and also to have everything at hand during the interview, our interviewer page has been updated and now shows more data from the persons profile.

Replace file uploads

Files can be uploaded for email attachments or as a library for camp counselors. A file upload can now be updated, for example because this year's packing list has changed. This saves a lot of time instead of updating the email templates one by one.

🔐 Security

MFA - Multi Factor Authentication

After an internal test phase, we are starting to roll out the extended security check MFA for all logins. In addition to the user name and password, a further short-time factor is used. This factor is generated via an app on the smartphone, so a hacker needs the smartphone in addition to the access data, making it much more difficult to gain unauthorized access to an account. The use of MFA will initially be voluntary and will be supported by an information campaign about data protection and security.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Bookacamp updates the pricing model 2022/11/18

For a long time Bookacamp has offered a pricing model that provides a revenue share depending on the turnover of the booking. The staggered model needed explanation from time to time and did not fit especially for our users with smaller prices, for example for daycamps. For this reason, we are adapting the pricing model and will offer a particularly easy-to-calculate percentage model in the future.

Our existing contracts and agreements are not affected by this change and of course we can still negotiate individual models if it fits better to your business.

Autor: Mathias Methner

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Features and Updates 2022/11/08

The Youth Travel Congress 2022 from Reisenetz will take place in the newly opened BLSV Sportcamp Nordbayern. Starting at 3:50 p.m., we'd love if you tell us if you've ever printed out emails? In this workshop we want to find out, what is already going well with digital transformation and where we still need to find solutions. Mathias Ralf Enderlein and Mathias Methner will guide you through the workshop and are looking forward to many colorful stickys on the whiteboard. Tickets for the congress are available on the website.

🤩 The highlight

Early Bird & Last Minute

The season starts now and it's time to boost business. Vouchers are often used for this purpose. Very up to date Bookacamp has launched coupons that are directly applied, create strike prices and thus draw the attention of customers to the new camps. The coupons can be easily activated for all offers or for selected ones in the coupon configuration and are immediately live. To make sure you don't forget to deactivate a voucher, there is a hint on the dashboard.

✨ Things to know

Data archived to early?

At the end of the season you do the seasonal accounting, calculate the commission with the partners and when everything is done, the data is archived to make room for the new season. It feels good every year to start fresh and watch the booking numbers come in. But what if you archived too early and now you need data again after all? Individual bookings can be reactivated a long time ago, and now you can do the same for sessions and events. To do this, you simply click on the session to edit it and you will find the new function at the top of the page. The corresponding bookings will be reactivated directly.
Forgot travel insurance?

Bookacamp offers travel insurance directly in the booking process through its partner HanseMerkur. HanseMerkur offers a special additional product for the Corona travel insurance, which makes this offer very interesting for parents. Some parents forget to click on the travel insurance or want to book first and check later if an existing insurance is there. In Bookacamp it is now possible to send a link where the travel insurance can be conveniently added afterwards. Are you interested in the integration to HanseMerkur? We are happy to help you..
Print Name Tags

At events and seminars, participants are often given name tags. It is not much fun to fill in the templates for this in Word and then print and cut them out in the right sizes. Based on special sticky labels, Bookacamp exports the names and company names of the participants for you in a predefined format, which can then be printed on the sticky sheets. You can find the explanation for this in your account in the account settings under Integration > Name tags.
Improvements to the invoice overview

You can download all invoices as PDF. This is useful for example for the tax advisor or simply to close the season. Under Overviews > Invoices you can now find date filters as well as the possibility to search only paid or only unpaid invoices. In addition, the name of the participant appears in the overview, in case you are looking for something quickly.
Commission matching with agencies and intermediaries

Data and bookings can be exchanged with other players via our interfaces. Bookacamp processes the booking numbers of third party agents starting this season to simplify list matching for the future.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Meet Bookacamp on the Youth Travel congress 2022 in Bischofsgrün 2022/04/11

On November 17, this year's Youth Travel Congress will take place at the BSLV Sportcamp Nordbayern in Bischofsgrün. The congress is a great opportunity to (re)meet familiar faces from the branch and to make new contacts. Besides the lecture program there is enough opportunity to network and especially the evening events are an important opportunity for us to get into conversation.

This year Bookacamp as one of the representatives of digital solution providers will use the knowledge from 7 years in the youth travel industry to talk to you about where things are really going smoothly and where we still need solutions for our core business - vacations and care for children and young people. The workshop I printed the emails will take place from 15:50 till 16:50. On site will be Mathias Methner - software developer and founder of Bookacamp - and Mathias Ralf Enderlein, who takes care of everything but programming at Bookacamp and has seen many transformations in his 18 years in the scene.

Those who have a tight schedule are welcome to make an appointment with us starting now. We will be on site from 16 November in the afternoon.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Features and Updates 2022/06/09

There has been some interesting features accumulated since the last feature update. The season is almost over and now it is time for a little vacation, catch your breath and find strength for the start of the fall vacation. Surely there is also a quiet minute to get up to date with the following updates.

🤩 The highlight

Instant checkout
Bookacamp can confirm bookings automatically. This is very convenient especially at the beginning of the season - mostly from November to March - because you as the organizer can lean back and the work is done by the software. If you also offer your customers online payment via one of the numerous online payment providers, the customer is now shown the invoice directly after booking and payment can start. This works just like in any online store. The payment method is selected, the payment is confirmed, and the money is in the account in no time at all.

✨ Need to know

Filter by bookable offers
In the back office in the filter panel for the sessions and events there is a new option to search for bookable offers. Especially at the end of the season, this is helpful in advising customers to quickly find the offers where spots are available.
Cancel camps and events
There is an option in the session management via the more function to classify a session as cancelled. When canceling a done, all related bookings are automatically canceled in one step. This takes work off your hands, as the cancellation emails and invoice cancellations are taken care of directly.
Suspend feedback
From now on it is possible to ignore single sessions in the dispatch of the automatic feedback request. This can be useful in relation to agencies or companies that use their own feedback systems. The new setting can be found in the expert mode in the communication section.
Trip interruption & cancellations
The date and background of cancellations and trip interruptions can now be changed. Under Edit booking directly on the respective booking detail page there is the new input field. In addition, bookings with the status cancelled or interrupted will not be considered in the automatic feedback requests.
Why is this needed?
To improve the billing with the hostel and to exclude, that automatic emails are still sent. Season follow-up also benefits from the data.
To improve the capacity query for sibling bookings.
It is possible to register more than one participant per booking. Our algorithms, which calculate the number of free spots, have been adjusted and now check directly when adding more participants, what the occupancy level is. If the camp is full, the booking is prevented.
Self-service waiting list cancellation
Often certain offers are realized via waiting lists, for example because places are allocated via scholarships or companies want to release the registration lists first. Especially when such registrations cost nothing at first, there is quite a high rate of no shows, which means the kids simply don't show up at camp without cancelling. This is annoying, as others would have liked to come along. It makes sense to ask before the camp, if the registration is still up to date. This can be done by using the e-mail bulk function in the system and, brand new, there are also placeholders that customers can use to cancel or deregister their registration themselves. The cancellation pops up in the internal messaging system and the place can be filled with other participants.

💰 Everything that has to do with money

Customer's tax number on the invoice
It sometimes happens that companies want to see their own tax number on the invoice. To do this, the tax number must be entered in the customer record in the backoffice and it will be inserted under the address field on the invoice.
Customers with direct debit without payment reminders
The system is able to send an automatic reminder in case of open payments. The activation is done in the own account settings. For bookings that pay by direct debit, this reminder was previously also sent. To avoid misunderstandings, this is now prevented.
Incoming payments on the cash desk
If you have ever done accounting yourself, you will know what to do with the cash accounts Bank (1200) and Cash (1000). This is used to separate cash flows for accounting purposes. When parents pay an amount in cash in the location, it is often posted to a cash register with a paper receipt and its own accounting rules. The amount still needs to be recorded in the booking details, otherwise payment reminders or dunning letters could be sent. If one enters the payment, the choice between both accounts is now available. The 1200 bank account is always preselected. Postings to the cash account are ignored in the further accounting, for example via our DATEV interface.
Improved dunning
Payment reminder - reminder1 - reminder2 - collection. But in which status is the posting actually at the moment? The dunning system has been internally decoupled from the booking status, so you can see when an invoice is dunned and it allows reminders on cancellation invoices. This is of course accompanied by better filters and better control. Let's hope that these functions are used as rarely as possible.

😎 Teamer-Addon

Do you already know the profile login?
The profile login allows your camp counselors to update their own data, maintain questionnaires and documents, and register requests for the next assignments. A new feature is that the team members can download the participation lists of their camps themselves. This means that the data is always up to date. As a bonus, Bookacamp ensures that counselors must confirm privacy requirements and it logs when which lists were saved. Last but not least, there's less paper, which is good for the environment and your wallet.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Bookacamp becomes Bookacamp GmbH 2022/07/28

Bookacamp Inh. Mathias Methner as sole proprietorship

Since 2015, Mathias Methner has developed the functions on bookacamp.de, acting as a sole proprietorship with personal liability. For the beginning, this has advantages, since accounting and administrative activities require far less time than with other forms of business. The first real live booking was already made oin october 2015. Since then, the system has grown steadily and some activities have been taken over by external personnel.

Bookacamp GmbH

Bookacamp now works with very large tour operators in Germany and Austria, connects partners from the insurance and online payment industry and processes thousands of registrations, payments, questionnaires and emails daily. This growth is great and has ensured that since the middle of the month additional staff has been working at Bookacamp on a permanent basis.

In order to take care of the accompanying responsibility, to secure financial aspects and to mitigate personal liability issues, Bookacamp GmbH was founded in April 2022 and since July all administrative matters have been settled, so that Bookacamp GmbH with Mathias Methner as managing director has fully started its business activities.

Author: Mathias Methner

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38 years of children and youth travel experience 2022/07/27

There is an excellent and exciting news at Bookacamp - since Monday Mathias Ralf Enderlein is part of the Bookacamp team. Matze E worked for many years full-time at a large children and youth tour operator, which has been using Bookacamp for a long time and has significantly contributed to the development of some features. This is great, because Matze E can immediately fall back on several years of user knowledge. He also gained his knowledge and experience in the industry during 18 years of working as a camp counselor with children and teenagers.

Bookacamp is very happy to have Matze E in the team.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Bookacamp releases new questionnaire system 2022/05/16

Feature Overview

When Bookacamp started in 2015, the questionnaire system was already an integral part of the functionality. The system is used to define questions about health, social behavior or the motivation of travel participants. The catalog of questions was constantly being expanded, for example with specific questions about sport or for special needs for people with assistance needs.

With the increasing number of daily users, it became clear that the flexibility of the system no longer met the company's own high requirements. All Bookacamp users have already been automatically migrated to the new version and thus benefit from the improved options without any additional effort.

The system now generally distinguishes between a questionnaire for minors and adults.
The default questionnaire is set centrally in the account settings, but can also be deactivated there. If a special questionnaire is required for a camp, for example because the level of knowledge for the language knowledge is to be queried, this can be done for each camp and thus overwrites the default setting. Another example is the difference between day camp and overnight camp.
A new administration interface allows you to define questions using drag-and-drop. Each question can be defined as a mandatory field. The headings and help texts can be freely changed.

Future development

The current beta phase is used to respond to user feedback and to adjust small things. The system is then expanded further.

Although it is currently possible to change the order of the questions in the questionnaire, the actual questionnaire does not yet react to this setting.
Bookacamp will offer controls to use headings, text and page breakers.
The feature for requesting data during the booking process, currently referred to as consent, is integrated directly into the questionnaire as free questions and thus allows any content to be entered during the booking process or in the questionnaire.

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Author: Mathias Methner

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Features updates 2022/03/09

The hot phase of the Easter camps has begun and Bookacamp accompanies this with many individual adjustments in processes and exports. In addition, Bookacamp supports a special holiday campaign in Austria with the ticketing of 45 camps in Tyrol, Salzburg, Carinthia and Italy.

More automation

Many processes involved in communicating with the customers can be automated. This includes payment reminders, feedback invitations and the latest travel information. Recently, the participant questionnaire can also been sent out automatically by the system.

Performance

As Bookacamp grows, so do the requirements for large accounts (5-10k bookings per year) and the infrastructure behind them. Bookacamp has put an in-memory storage into operation in the last few weeks in order to quickly deliver important data about capacities and bookings, even if thousands of bookings are managed in one account.

Counselor Addon

Since more and more organizers are now using the integrated counselor addon, there are many smaller improvements to the processes. Notes for an assignment to the camp can be written directly with the assignment. It is also possible to create personalized contracts as an e-mail attachment. A Whatsapp chat can be started directly from the back office with the counselor. Of particular note is a new team feature, which lists information about team composition and roles in the team for all of the season's camps. The new feature also offers the possibility of establishing contact between the team for preparation purposes at the touch of a button.

Aesome Layouts

At the request of new tour operators who have been using Bookacamp since 2022, new views for integration on their own website were presented. All views react to the screen size of the end device and are therefore responsive. In addition, Bookacamp now offers integration via country domains bookacamp.at, bookacamp.be, bookacamp.fr, bookacamp.es, bookacamp.it, bookacamp.ch und bookacamp.org und bookacamp.net

Card-Layout

In particular, if all content, texts and product images are managed via Bookacamp, this view is ideal for displaying the entire website of the tour operator from Bookacamp.

Screenshot Card-Layout for bookable camps

Card-Layout grouped

If you don't have enough individual product images or want to summarize the dates for a camp, you can use the more compact view because it's grouped and therefore smaller.

Screenshot grouped Card-Layout for bookable camps

Camps per month

Tables sorted by date or by camp have always existed, because their filter options make them versatile on the website. This view, grouped by month and date, completes the offer.

Screenshot tables for bookable camps, grouped by month

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Bookacamp integrates two new providers for online payment processing 2022/02/02

Stripe & Saferpay

As of today, Bookacamp is expanding its portfolio of online payment providers with two well-known names Stripe and Saferpay. The technical provision of both providers is free of charge at Bookacamp and can be activated in your own settings. The variety of online payment providers is due to the fact that the providers offer different conditions for different payment methods.

Most providers offer their customers the common payment methods in Europe out of the box: credit cards (e.g. Visa, Master, Amex), Paypal, Klarna Sofort, direct debit, iDeal and Giropay.

To use Stripe you can activate the integration yourself in the account settings. All you need is your own Stripe Account. Activating Saferpay is also easy and is done using the Registration at Saferpay started.

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Autor: Mathias Methner

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Create contracts for counselors & Updates until december 2021/02/12

Part of the application and recruiting process for the placement of camp counselors and travel coordinators is the assignment to a camp (operational planning) and the issuing of contracts. Bookacamp offers various tools, that depend on the skills of the counselor and the capacities of the camp, which make the planning process easier. Issuing the contracts extends the range of functions, so that individual contracts are created by the system and can be sent directly to the counselor as email attachment.

Various

Revision of the voucher system
We have just got the time of year when vouchers as a Christmas present or an early bird discount for the new camps for the coming season are attractive for parents and grandparents. Many travel providers lure their customers with further discounts, for siblings and returnees. This creates the challenge of ensuring, that several siblings are registerd, or not. Bookacamp now offers freely configurable input fields for names or customer numbers that make it easier to find siblings and previous bookings.
Corona / measles vaccination
No hygiene concept can avoid checking the vaccination or test backlog for Corona. To make it easier for tour operators to better prepare for the local conditions, the question about the last corona vaccination is now an integral part of the health questionnaire and can be activated with one click in the account settings. In addition to Corona, there are child relevant questions for the year of vaccination for measles, tetanus and ticks (TBE).

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Author: Mathias Methner

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Updates until November 2021/11/03

Jugendreise Kongress 2021

The Youth Travel Congress 2021 will take place in Kyllburg, Germany from November 17th to 19th. The interesting program of the visitor day on November 18, 2021 can be viewed on the website. For an appointment on November 18th or 19th, we look forward to hearing from you.

Revision of Payment Pages & Booking summary

The payment pages should guide the customer to pay for the invoice as comfortable as possible. Bookacamp integrates SEPA direct debit, Adyen, Saferpay, Klarna and Girosolution and this covers the range of the most common online payment methods. The payment pages have been revised whether to put the visual focus on the payment and to move the information around it in the background. The same principle is now also applied to the booking summary page.

screenshot payment page

Various

Customers can be automatically invited for feedback x days after a trip. This feature not only saves a great deal of time but also makes it very easy to evaluate the journey of the customers. What is new is that it can be decided for each agency whether the invitation should be sent.
When sending the hostel summary with the current booking statuses and services, there are two new placeholders for bed linen and towels. So it is easy at the push of a button to communicate the current summary, so that the hostel can prepare everything.
The hide session function makes it possible to send the booking link by e-mail - e.g. for company camps - but not show the camp in the public booking pages.

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Author: Mathias Methner

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Bookacamp for Wordpress 2021/08/25

Many travel companies use the Wordpress software to maintain the content of the website without having to learn a lot of technical know-how. Since Wordpress can be expanded by many functions through plugins, Bookacamp is now offering its own plugin directly in the Wordpress plugin directory. The aim is to make the integration of the booking forms and the overviews of bookable trips as simple as possible and to completely hide the technical background.

The plug-in is installed directly from the plug-in directory and, after activation, shows a menu item to make all settings. Then a Bookacamp element is inserted directly in the editor of the page. The element lists the possible layouts and also offers two combinable filters for the search results. For example, you can only display all trips in which you can surf. Immediately after the selection, the preview is displayed and the integration is completed by clicking on Save and Publish.

Updates until August 2021/08/23

Because of the summer holidays in August, this month is often marked by many small individualizations in exports and Bookacamp reacts very quickly to inquiries, especially if they make sure the camps run smoothly. Still, there is a small list of interesting features that are now ready to use.

Reserviations

Since last year it has already been possible to take reservations and thus block capacity at short notice. This is useful when, for example, parents ask about it because their application for leave at work has not yet been approved. Since the beginning of the month, these reservations can be converted into a booking in self-service, so that customers only receive a link by email and can do everything there. This eliminates the need to type in data from e-mails in the office.

Feedback per Agency

With Bookacamp's feedback addon, customers can be asked about their experience with the registration process as well as their evaluation for the camp. The rating is divided into aspects specific to youth travel, such as supervision, catering and the program, whereby the selection of ratings can be determined in the addon's settings. In addition to the aggregated evaluation of the feedback per appointment and camp, an evaluation per agency is now also possible. This overview enables travel agents to analyze the quality of the trips in discussions with the tour operators and to improve them if necessary.

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Author: Mathias Methner

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Bankexport for credit transfer for overpayment 2021/08/09

The summer season is drawing to a close. Typically this is the time to get ready for the end of the season to provide an overview of the bookings for which payments are still unpaid or which bookings need a repayment. Refunds occur when a tour operator reduced the travel price, the customer has accidentally paid too much or a trip that has already been paid for has been canceled.

Finding all bookings with overpayment has been very easy in Bookacamp for years, as there is a separate menu item for this. With today's release, the entire repayment process has been further simplified so that overpaid bookings can be transferred to the bank with a SEPA export. A collective file is created that contains all repayment instructions for open bookings. Commercial banks can read this file and use it to make a repayment. This feature ends the manual copying of bank data in bank transfer forms.

Customers who have not yet stored any bank details are asked by email with just one click to store their bank details in the system. The bank details are field-encrypted and stored in Bookacamp. This new feature is enabled for all Bookacamp users and can be activated in your own settings.

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78 minutes until travel exclusion 2021/07/20
A report about release frequency and the new travel exclusion feature

Fortunately, it did not take 78 minutes before a participant had to be excluded from a camp, but only 78 minutes before Bookacamp was able to deliver a requested feature.

Why is that special?
Many services on the Internet have delivery times of days to weeks, depending on the development and release process in the company. Bookacamp knows that fast delivery times for bug fixes or urgent features can make life easier for tour operators, especially in the current high season. The software and system landscape behind Bookacamp is able to roll out every change to the source code to the production environment in 30 seconds.

This technological foundation has ensured, that this week an urgently needed excel export for corona situations could be adapted during an 88-second phone call. From Bookacamp's point of view, such short-term, individual changes to specific needs of the tour operator are not a necessary evil, but rather give us pleasure, because they make the life of the users immediately easier.

But what is travel exclusion about?
Fortunately, it rarely happens, but there are participants, who have to be excluded from a camp due to their personal socio-educational situation. Tour operators usually do everything in their power to prepare their participants for a nice trip - if the educational concept and team size are still exhausted, participants my be excluded. Nobody likes to do this, but it is sometimes necessary for the camp to run smoothly. Another reason is outstanding payments or aggressive communication that excludes a specific customer from being a contractual partner. In order to meet this group of customers, tour operators now have the option of marking a booking for future travel exclusion. That doesn't automatically mean, that these bookings will be blocked - people keep evolving. It means that these registrations will go into a queue and will be checked before confirmation by the tour operator.

Find an overview of releases per day of the last couple of weeks. It has been 92 releases on july so far.

screenshot releases per days

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Updates until July 2021/07/09

The summer vacation has started and some of the participants are already back from the camp - sure with a lots of experiences after this long corona break. To find out more about the real life usage of the various functionalities of Bookacamp, we recently visited a camp on site and reviewed the checkin with a QR code scanner. Some of the adaptations below are a direct response to what we learned there.

Demographics

Parents often get in touch to find out about the age structure of the participants in the camp. In addition to the overviews of the number of boys / girls who have already registered, Bookacamp shows the age structure in the backoffice.

Readonly access

Read access for supervisors is used a lot during the season and answers questions about participants directly in the camp, e.g. if the doctor needs emergency contact details. Read access has recently received a few optimizations that make it easier to navigate on small cell phone displays. In addition, a profile page of the participant can be called up directly in read access.

Transfer information

If parents provide individual travel information, for example because they appear earlier at the check-in, this can now be stored directly in booking and the information appears in the exports and read access. Camp leaders immediately have all the information about arrival and departure ready.

Diary

There are often incidents during the camp that the office should know about in case parents call. If noteworthy events are stored as a supervision note, there is now a diary with which you can get an overview in the morning at the beginning of the working day. With this information you will no longer be surprised by a phone call.

External access data - e.g. language test

If you want to store access data for each booking for an external tool, in order to then send them collectively to all bookings of an event, you can now find this in the booking processing view. One area of usage are language tests before the camp starts. This saves the tedious and error-prone creation of individual emails.

Payment provider Saferpay

In addition to Girosolution, Klarna Sofort, Adyen and direct debit by Bookacamp, there is an immediately available integration to the payment service provider Saferpay. Saferpay has all common payment methods in its range.

Synchronization of the booking status between travel agent and tour operator

If the travel agent and tour operator are both part of the Bookacamp network, the status of a forwarded booking can now be synchronized. This eliminates the annoying request for the booking confirmation for the agent.

Classification of supervisors

In order to structure the classification of the suitability of a supervisor, you can now find some input fields in the profile to note information about the subjective impression and suitability as a supervising person.

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Updates until June 2021/06/03

Roundtrip for arrival and departure

Bookacamp now supports the booking of a round trip, which means that the booked transfer combines the arrival and departure with a total price. This completes the offer for different models of transport and you can decide for yourself how individually the arrival and departure options should be booked.

Automation

With the feedback add-on, customers have the opportunity to submit their feedback for a camp. The invitation can be sent automatically in the background. Bookacamp then automatically sends the feedback invitation and informs you about the invitations sent in the internal message system.

The summer holidays will soon begin and it will be time to remind your customers of the possible outstanding balance. Bookacamp is also able to automatically send reminders for this.

Collection process - reminder 1 + 2

There are new templates and processes to take the dunning process to a more official level. As always, the contents of the reminder e-mails can be customized. A booking is moved to the dunning process when you click on the booking detail page under Payment > Paymend reminder 1/2.

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Author: Mathias Methner

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Bookacamp integrates Adyen as a payment service provider 2021/05/11

Many Bookacamp users rely on payment service providers to make online payments as easy as possible for their customers. Bookacamp has added the European provider Adyen with its Pay by Link product to the list of connected services. Thus, all users of Bookacamp benefit automatically and free of charge from the new service provider. Adyen covers a huge list of payment systems. SEPA direct debit, Paypal, GiroPay, Visa, Mastercard and iDEAL in the Netherlands are very popular in German-speaking countries.

The integration with Adyen is done with your own settings. All you need is your own Adyen account.

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Author: Mathias Methner

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Backup strategies 2021/03/22

In mid-March, Europe's largest data center near the river Rhine burned down. Various media reports, that the data of many server and website operators have been irrevocably lost, because backups were missing or in in the same data center. This rises the question, of how Bookacamp can deal with the valuable data of its users?

Data - in the case of Bookacamp, these are databases and files (photos and documents) of both the users of Bookacamp as well as Bookacamp itself. The most important data is in the databases, which are backed up every 10 minutes. Backup means a full copy of the databases is created and written to a file. These backup files are immediately fully encrypted via GPG (Wikipedia) and after that they are - not readably by third parties - copied to a cloud service. This procedure alone is sufficient to guarantee almost 100% data backup. Another protection mechanism is, that with every backup on the data is copied to a failover system at another data center operator. The same procedure is used for files, here the backup takes place twice a day.

Another mainstay of the backup strategy is protection against ransomware (Wikipedia). Often times, the character of this malware is, that all data, backups included, is encrypted by this malware and you must buy the key for decryption . The only effective protection against this is to keep your own backups unreachable for the malware. For this reason, Bookacamp performs Offsite Backups once a quarter

Last but not least, backups are of no use if they are not regularly tested and imported into test systems to check the recovery processes. Bookacamp has automated this process so that every transfer to the failover system tests the recovery process. In addition, completely empty operating systems are started every morning, necessary packages are installed and the current backup data is imported - this ensures that Bookacamp is up and running on the new server in a short period of time.

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Customers book HanseMerkur travel insurance directly in Bookacamp 2021/03/04

Bookacamp celebrates the first insurance policy on March 2nd

After Bookacamp published the payment by direct debit in february, a month later the next big highlight follows: From now on, Bookacamp's users can offer their customers the booking of a travel insurance with HanseMerkur directly during the booking process. Bookacamp is proud to work in partnership with the HanseMerkur. The selection of insurance products is part of the negotiotion between the tour operator and HanseMerkur and they are adapted to the needs of the tour operator. The insurance products protect parents from cancellation costs, as well person and property damage.

How does it work?

After the tour operator has found the perfect products in communication with the HanseMerkur, only the agency number of the tour operator must be stored in Bookacamp. Then the tour operator decides at the push of a button whether the billing happens via direct accounting (billing directly between customer and insurer) or agency accounting (billing between tour operator and customer). Bookacamp individually determines the insurance offers for each booking during the booking process and stores them until the booking is confirmed by the tour operator. The insurance is automatically reconfirmed, so that there is only little effort for the tour operator and customer.

The integration with the HanseMerkur is now available for every tour operator and agent from Bookacamp.
If you want to learn more about the integrations of Bookacamp, please register a free demo account.

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Author: Mathias Methner

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Bookacamp & Berlitz Germany integrate their systems 2021/01/25

Bookacamp serves many tour operators, tour agents and event organizers as a daily tool for organizing your work and is always looking for ways to improve standard workflows. A widespread time waster arise at the interfaces to third-party systems, for example during transmission of bookings between a travel agent and the tour operator. Where in the past bookings were sent by fax, it is now possible to establish seamless integration between different providers.

System integration is now available between Berlitz Germany and Bookacamp, so that bookings can be transferred from Bookacamp to Berlitz at the push of a button and the annoying forwarding of booking data via email can be omitted. This procedure is not only more time-saving than before, but is much less susceptible to errors than copying from emails.

It works that simple:

Bookacamp's agency system offers an option of connecting to Berlitz with a single click to activate.
A Berlitz booking is reviewed and confirmed directly in Bookacamp by the travel agent.
All confirmed bookings are automatically delivered through the interface to Berlitz.
The bookings delivered are processed at Berlitz and (back)confirmed through the interface.
Done.

The interface is immediately available to all Bookacamp users free of charge.

If you want to learn more about Bookacamp's interfaces, please register a free demo account.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Shopping with Bookacamp 2021/01/18

What does Bookacamp have to do with shopping?
Not much, actually. The special thing about today's story is the integration of Bookacamp on the Website from hockeyshop.de and sportshop.com through our partner Sportscampus. Sportscampus has been organizing sports camps for young people for over 20 years. Started with hockey, meanwhile Sportscampus offers golf and tennis camps, even international ones.

Bookacamp offers extensive opportunities for collaboration with external agencies. This includes the access to the agency portal, which each user can set up him/herself. In addition, there is the possibility of assigning bookings via agency links to the agency and thus builds an affiliate and partner program.

At the beginning of the year, Sportscampus is offering an early bird discount for a short time. https://www.sportscampus.com/termine-2021 - It is worth registering now.

Bookacamp Free trial

screenshot hockeyshop

Update December 17, 2023 the links to the shops are no longer valid and have been removed.

Author: Mathias Methner

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Bookacamp Redesign

1303 updates files later 2021/01/08

Bookacamp's birthday was in January 2015 - 6 years ago - and we are proud to have processed tens of thousands bookings for tour operators, travel agents and organizers of online and offline events. One of the success factors of Bookacamp is the constant continuous improvement of every component. We are particularly grateful for the many ideas, tips and messages that we have received from already 147 users and would like to say a big thank you for it.

A lot has happened in the 6 years. Addons and features were added and now it was time to update the entire user interface of Bookacamp. 1303 changed files, 45,213 changed and 134,964 deleted lines of source code. What an amazing number.

The new interface is more modern, looks smoother and uses the latest browser features to give both, the users of the Bookacamp Backoffice, but also the many thousands of parents, children and event participants, a special experience when booking camps and registering for events. In particular, the increasing number of users with mobile devices benefit from larger fonts and controls and better loading times.

Feel free to register your demo account and see our new user interafe in action.

bookacamp logo

Author: Mathias Methner

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Updates in December 2020/12/05

✨ Our Updates

Hygiene regulations
In order to provide customers with binding information about hygiene measures during the booking process, the settings contain a link to the hygiene regulations. Those regulations then must be confirmed on the last step of booking by the customer.
Online events
Corona has increased the number of digital meetings. Part of the registration process often is sending access data and links to Zoom, Skype, Teams or Webex. This information can now be stored directly at the event to make it available as placeholders for emails. In addition, it is now also possible to enter the start and end time.
When creating the voucher code, a field for entering free text now appears. There you can store information about why the voucher was issued.
Directly when configuring the session you can now decide whether the booking confirmation should be sent or not.
A new voucher can be selected - a voucher code as percentage value. This type completes the vouchers, which could previously be issued with a fixed value amount.

😎 Counselor Addon

Document upload
The application from counselors is often supported by official documents, such as the police clearance certificate. In order to simplify the submission process, it is now possible to send an upload link where the counselor adds the documents to their own profile by themselves. New uploads appear on the Counselor dashboard and can be reviewed from there.
Consents
The question of whether photos can be taken or not can also be important for supervisors. Just like for bookings and events, it is possible to activate consents for camp counselors, which then can be confirmed during the initial registration.

⭐ Feedback-Addon

Feedback per Camp
The feedback from customers can now be aggregated by camp on your own site. The integration per session is still possible.

Author: Mathias Methner

YAGNI & KISS 2020/11/12

Bookacamp is a software product for the (youth) travel industry and combines excellent knowledge of software development with professional knowledge of the requirements and processes of the travel industry. But there is always the question of which features and functionalities are required in which form in order to make the communication and administration of bookings / events as easy and quick as possible. Since Bookacamp was founded in 2015, we have been working very closely with product owners and pilot customers. That's nothing special - that's how agile software development works. The special thing is that the product owners are users and partners of Bookacamp themselves, i.e. the tour operators and travel agents whose requirements arise from day-to-day business. Bookacamp is very happy to receive this open input.

In order to keep an overview of all requirements, we use a ticket system. In the last 5 years, 1811 tickets have been created in this way, 94 of which are currently open in different sizes. Bookacamp uses two principles to decide which problem a ticket is going to be developed and for what there may be a different solution.

YAGNI - You Arent't Gonna Need It

Every feature and every problem solution has different characteristics and there are often dozens of ways to expand a feature. The tightrope act is to decide which functionalities will be used later and whether there is someone who needs a solution. Unless a requester exists, we often decide not to implement something at the current time and wait to see how usage develops.

KISS - Keep It Simple & Stupid

Some things are easier to do than others - but the general rule is that a simple and understandable solution is preferable to a complex and complicated one. This applies to decisions in software development as well as in the structure of user interfaces and processes.

Author: Mathias Methner

Updates in October 2020/10/20

✨ Our Updates

Saved filters
Many table can be filtered and sorted directly on the website. Bookacamp's backoffice is now able to save those filters locally. After reload those filters are re-applied on the table.
Filtered booking list in agency login
Some agencies are only allowed to sell specific camps. In the agency settings you can decide to apply a filter for the agency, which makes the bookable camp lists a filtered subset for this agency.
Voucher amount for cancellation
If you cancel a booking and transform the already paid amounts to a voucher, you now have the possibility to change the voucher amount directly in the cancellation process.
Shortened booking form
Diectly when setting up a camp, it it possible to decide, if the selection of non-mandatory services is hidden during the booking process, which makes the booking simplier and faster. Especially when your travels are total package travels it makes sence to have a look at this.

😎 Counselor Addon

Individuel contracts
If you have your contract in Word format (docx), it is possible to replace special placeholders within this document for personalization and send it as pdf via an email. That features makes paper handling much more simplier. Get in contact with us to get more information about that.
Waitinglist
Also counselors now have the possibility to be moved to a waitinglist, if all placements for the travels where already made.
Image Upload in questionnaire
The questionnaire has been extended to support an image upload directly in the questionnaire. You now can decide to place this upload in the registration form or in the questionnaire.
Documents with expiry date
The requirement upload features an expiry date, where you can set the end date of a document and get an reminder for umcomming expiries on your dashboard.
If neccessary the counselor addon has its own setting for a privacy declaration.

Author: Mathias Methner

Updates in July 2020/08/08

June usually is a bit quieter, so major changes to processes and new features do not disturb the ongoing season. A few minor things are still worth mentioning:

Automatic booking confirmation
To save more time for standard processes, bookings can now be automatically confirmed by the system. The invoice is generated and sent as soon as a new registration arrives. The new feature can be (de-)activated in the settings menu as required.
Minimal event registration
For free (information) events it can be useful to keep the hurdle for registration as low as possible. This minimal registration only requires the name and e-mail of the applicant.

Hostel Summary / Accommodation Information 2020/07/08

At the latest shortly before the trip, it is necessary to inform the hostel about the number of people arriving, times, information for the kitchen and bookable extras such as meeting rooms and disco. There are so-called hostel messages, with the help of which you can send all the information to a hostel at the push of a button. A particular strength of this notification is noticeable when the assignments of the counselors to the camps have been made in the system, because then all information is bundled together.

This feature is immediately activated for all users and can be accessed via the administration of the sessions. Is there a lack of easy mailings in your current system? You can start a non-binding demo directly on this page.

Author: Mathias Methner

Updates of June 2020/06/05

43 tickets have been closed and implemented since March. A selection of the most important innovations follows here:

Temporary VAT reduction
From july 1st to december 31, 2020, the federal government of Germany decided to cut 3% on the standard tax rate and 2% on the reduced tax rate. What effects this has on the invoicing of the travel industry, whose service period often does not correspond to the invoicing period, must now be clarified. Bookacamp will make the adjustments to the software available before first of july.
RSS - Don't miss any news
Many mail programs and browsers have a feed reader to subscribe to news. Bookacamp's german blog now delivers the newsfeed readable for feed readers. So you don't miss any more information.
Automatic synchronization between agency and organizer
In order to further minimize the coordination effort between the travel agent (agency) and the organizer, the availability of the free spots can now be automatically synchronized in the background. The current cycle is 1x on the hour.
Yes / No answers with consent
It happens, that information is important when booking. An example is the question of whether a child can swim or can participate in certain sports. Consent has been expanded to request a decisive answer on the last page of the booking process.
Various options per session
Among other things, it is possible to decide per session, whether information about the t-shirt size or class level of the participant should be obtained. All in all, it is worth looking at the entire Expert Mode tab when creating a session to get to know Bookacamp's high degree of customization.

Bookacamp News

Introduction Klassenfahrten Kompass (School Trip Compass) 2024/11/24

Latest & Greatest Updates Summer Edition 2024/10/15

✨ Useful information

Cancel offer with your own email template

Gender-based waiting list

Automated Whatsapp communication with Chatlyn

Bulk mailing to group registrants

Nationality in demographic overview

Display of the camp management on the booking details page

😎 Counselor-Addon

Cusgtom questions in master export

Traffic light system in operational planning

Link profile login to confirmation

Predefined roles in profile login

Received email for note from counselor staff

Bulk actions for the change of season

𖨆𖨆𖨆𖨆 Group Suite

Services per group

Block periods of entire room categories

ReservationOn request

Limitation of the day of the week

Invoice itemstype and suggest

Placeholders for payment information

Validity periods for program offers

Automated creation of offer documents

🏢 Insurance

Valid insurance in case of booking cancellation

Mileston 1/3 Group Suite reached 2024/02/16

Milestone 1 - non-binding reservation request

Milestone 2 - binding booking

Milestone 3 - PMS Property Management

Latest & Greatest Updates December Edition 2023/12/15

✨ Useful information

QR codes on print media

Link to the questionnaire in the booking confirmation

Invoice text with new placeholder

Archive file uploads

Online payment for group bills

🛒 Shop

Merchandise

Test purchase

Archive

Legal

Communication

😎 Counselor-Addon

Handbook for counselors

🧾 Accounting

Cost center per category

Latest & Greatest Updates November Edition 2023/11/18

✨ Useful information

Archive search extension

Attendee lists with guests

Federal state in Master Export

Improvement in entering bank details

Ask for the telephone number of the participant

Renew paid amount on invoice

Account balance better explained

Resize uploaded images

🎫 Ticketing

Checkin-Indicator

Checkin information update

😎 Counselor-Addon

Improved data filtering

Improvements in the questionnaire

🧾 Accounting

Postbank has new export format for our payment importer

Payment importer

Date of dunning status

Sell Christmas vouchers via our shop system 2023/09/24

✨ This is how you use the shop system

1. Activation

2. Add products

3. Integrate shop

4. Payment

Latest & Greatest Updates August Edition 2023/08/25

✨ Useful information

Occupancy status separated by season

Improving filters for pending payments

Sub-seasonal price adjustment