Continuation from the email newsletter
Anytime’s story of this year so far would be untold without mentioning our very smart new booking form (also known as the new checkout).
From design through to delivery this has been a mammoth task, replacing as it does 6 million lines of code that took 8 years to write previously, and represents a serious step up in quality.
There are so many good things to say about the new booking form’s improved look and feel, but most notably it provides a significantly better mobile experience for guests and, with over 70% of bookings coming from mobile devices these days, that really matters.
In addition, the new checkout is much quicker in terms of both loading and use, there are a reduced number of steps, and there is much less visual noise, all of which is intended to lead to a reduction in cart abandonment = more bookings! There are also lots of small guest experience improvements, such as not having to choose a number of nights.
The totally new Booking Confirmation page is also a major improvement for the guest experience, giving guests a much improved summary of their booking, what is to come, and allowing them a quick way to share details of the unit they have their booking with friends and family or on social media.
The entire booking form is totally configurable by you in our Booking Management Software (“BMS”), so you can make changes to it, and envisage those by previewing what it will look like, without our intervention.
Having completed alpha and beta testing now, we are now moving through the final stages of preparing the new checkout for delivery - we will be emailing different groups of our 600 clients over the coming months, with a view to rolling it out to everyone who wants to be in the first wave in the next 6 months or so.
During that time we will also be working on building in the ability for payments to be embedded in the booking form (which will be made available for Opayo, Stripe and Edge+), so that guests are not pushed to another page/tab to complete their payment. This again should reduce cart abandonment.
Finally, support for the old booking form will fall away in January 2027, which gives everyone plenty of time to move over.