PCI Compliance

We just wanted to take a moment to give you a Reservation Nexus update. There will be a new release this upcoming Tuesday, May 16, 2006.

PCI COMPLIANCE

We are proud to announce that Reservation Nexus became PCI Compliant February of this year. What does this mean? Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express and other credit card companies are requiring that all parts of the credit card process follow strict security standards for protecting cardholder information. If your credit card processor asks if your guest reservation system is PCI Compliant, you can say "yes!" Most of the systems on the market are "sort-of" or "working-to-be" compliant, not 100% compliant.

INCORRECT LINKS TO OUR SERVICE

We have noticed that sometimes when we ask your web designer/host to make you go "live", they don't use the link we email them, but the link that it turns into. For example, our sample inn link is: http://convoyant.com/resnexus/reserve/?ID=4. When you click on that link it will turn into something like: http://convoyant.com/resnexus/reserve/book.aspx?ID=4&ResID=4352&Status=913860. This second link is used for unique identification and security purposes.

We will be contacting those that have this issue on their websites to offer help communicating with their host/designer. Please double check your website this weekend. If your site does not use the correct link (the shorter one with just the ID) to our service, after Tuesday release, your guests will still be able to book online but there will be a start page that can otherwise be bypassed.

CHANGES

• We no longer show the full credit card number on the summary page on the management side. We do display it on the "Payments" page. We feel this is more secure.
• On the phone side, guests are only allowed to be inactive for an hour. If they time out, we now tell them that they have timed out. In the past, the system just started them over from today's date, which was a little confusing.
• Room description and retail descriptions now display paragraphs on the guest reservation side. Before all the text was lumped into one paragraph.

IMPROVEMENTS

• We have increased the font size on the guest side so that the selected date, "Your Reservations" and "Return to rooms" stand out more. In addition, when guests are booking multiple nights or adding several retail items, the list is cleaner.
• When we do display the full credit card number, we now have dashes for easy reading.
• Confirmation emails now display payments and deposits.
• The reservation receipt now displays which payments are deposits.
• We believe that housekeeping will be ready for this next release. There are three parts to the housekeeping page: Who is arriving, who is staying over and who is departing. The arriving portion is sorted by the Estimated Arrival time. The staying over part displays what night they are on out of how many as well as if they are moving to a new room. The departure part tells you how long they stayed. There is a print version for distributing the list to your cleaning staff if you have staff.

FIXES

• We resolved an issue where if a room is re-added to a cancelled reservation, the room appeared available in the phone reservation grid but could not be booked. Now when you to you try to book such a room, it indicates which reservation is causing the conflict.
• We fixed an issue where while booking a reservation of a returning guest, if you did not click the "Save" button on the "Guest" tab after looking up the guest, the reservation was still considered as a potential reservation, not a confirmed reservation. Now once you have looked up an existing guest, the reservation is confirmed.
• We recently discovered that sites such as Google, association websites, hotel directories, etc. have been putting our guest reservation system in a frame so that you can return to their site. Unfortunately, this causes our system to not function on most browsers. We have resolved this issue by recognizing and removing any frames. The guest will be redirected to the new starter page, which removes the frame once they click on "Check Availability / Make Reservation".
• Fixed the "Unused Deposits" and "Used Deposits" reports. There was an issue where if the rooms were changed, deposits that should not be displayed were being displayed.

AUTO PILOT EDITION

We are currently ready to roll out the first phase of Auto Pilot starting June 6, 2006. The phases are as follows:

Phase 1: Promotional codes on the guest and phone sides. This allows you to offer special room rates based on the promotional code. You can include these promotional codes on your print and other marketing materials.

Phase 2: Automatic charging of a full or partial deposit on the guest's credit card when they make a reservation, either online or by phone. This reduces the time it takes to make a phone reservation, guarantees that they have the funds available and allows you to be on the road and charge their card. We are currently becoming an authorized reseller of Authorize.net, which will be the first gateway Reservation Nexus will use to communicate with your credit card processor. We have negotiated a special Reservation Nexus rate with Authorize.net. Becoming a reselling will also allow us to continue our Red Carpet Service standard, creating and setting up your Authorize.net account so there is no extra work for you.

Phase 3: Specials and packages including up-sell abilities. If you would like a demo of this, please contact your Red Carpet Service professional to schedule a time. We'd love to get your feedback. This is in beta and will be in beta a little longer due to how involved this phase is.

Phase 4: Automatic birthday and anniversary emails. Simply fantastic!

Phase 5: Customizable marketing emails for offering specials, discounts, promotions to those guests who have indicated they would like to receive them. Multiple confirmation and service emails.

All current subscribers are welcome to become Auto Pilot volunteers. Starting in June, you can offer promotional codes in your marketing efforts as well as for AAA rates, etc. Give your Red Carpet Service rep a call to get prepared for June. There is no cost for Auto Pilot until phase 2 or phase 4, depending on whether you will be charging credit cards or not. As a volunteer, you will receive a special volunteer rate, guaranteed for three years. We hope to have Phase 2 & 3 end of June beginning of July, phase 4 & 5 in the fall.

We have met with Intuit, the makers of QuickBooks, and are considering including QuickBooks integration with phase 2. Past reservations will not be imported, but new reservations would automatically go into QuickBooks. There are special advantages if they become your credit card processor and we are trying to negotiate a special Reservation Nexus rate. There will be an additional charge, yet to be determined, for QuickBooks integration.

UPCOMING CLASSIC EDITION FEATURES (JUNE - JULY)

• "Checking In" and "Checking Out" will be significantly improved. In addition, we will have an all-in-one replacement for these two pages that combines them into one page that shows arrivals, who is staying over, and departures. This page will be called "Front Desk" and will be under Reservations in your management system.
• Group Reservations for handling all types of parties such as weddings, corporate retreats, family stays, etc. You will able to add guests to the reservation and assign them to rooms, retail items and packages (Auto Pilot).
• You will be able to do reservation source tracking. We are making it so that you can define your own sources as well as embed sources such as Google and Yahoo. There will be a suite of reports, include one that tracks which website they came from to get to the guest reservation system.
• An option for if there are any holes in a minimum night stay, the guest side could say "Call Us" instead of "Occupied".
• You will be able to print out all reservation receipts for a given date all at one time.
• Guest lookup and guest history.

There are many more upcoming Classic Edition features that we will announce in the next newsletter.

We value and appreciate your business and friendship. As always, if you have questions, please contact your Red Carpet Service professional during business hours.

Cheers,

The Reservation Nexus Team