Blog - Online Booking Software

Google Chrome to Block Mixed Content

Google has announced that it will eventually drop support for mixed content in the coming months. Mixed content is when a website is served over HTTPS but includes resources (such as images) over HTTP.

In it’s current state this is allowed but typically a warning is shown to the user that not all content is secure. Going forward this will no longer be the case for Google Chrome.

Starting in December of 2019 (Chrome 79) Google Chrome will introduce a feature flag (defaulted to off) to disallow all mixed content. It will attempt to upgrade resources to HTTPS if they happen to also exist. In future releases by Google Chrome the mixed content will simply not be loaded.

It’s a poor user experience to have mixed content as well as it not being as safe or secure to the user. Mixed content should be addressed as soon as possible to avoid potential disruptions, should any exist.

More information about this change can be found at: https://blog.chromium.org/2019/10/no-more-mixed-messages-about-https.html

Brandon Parker

Brandon is the Manager, Front-End Development and Analytics at TRYTN. He has over 10 years experience in the web development field from family-owned to Fortune 200 companies.

Party Tours Goes All-In with TRYTN

TRYTN expands into the Las Vegas market with Party Tours and increases its presence as an industry leader in helping city tour and transportation operators.

CHICAGO – TRYTN has partnered with Party Tours to provide online booking and connectivity solutions to it’s customers. For Party Tours, they needed a quick and easy way to not just allow customers to reserve their transportation for various night clubs around the Las Vegas area but as well as reserving transportation for bachelor and bachelorette parties, but also a way to manage inventory in one system for online travel agents (OTAs) quickly and easily. With TRYTN Party Tours is now able to create activities and manage reservations in one place while receiving reservations from multiple channels.

About Party Tours

Party Tours provides city tours and transportation to night clubs and bachelor and bachelorette parties in Las Vegas, Nevada. Having served over 750,000 customers with over 25,000 tours, Party Tours is one of the largest in the Las Vegas area. Party Tours has been featured on TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Real Housewives.

About TRYTN

TRYTN is an online booking and centralized reservation management system for tour and activity businesses. The simple, intuitive interface means setup can be completed in minutes. Businesses increase their direct sales while reducing costs by gaining access to TRYTN’s subsidized web development and marketing services. A streamlined web presence combined with reliable software gives TRYTN partners the tools they need to succeed in the increasingly competitive activities industry. For more information visit https://www.trytn.com

September 2019 Release Notes

Welcome to the end of another September and the beginnings of Fall (for the northern hemisphere crowd!) We’ve had several significant features, functionality, bug fixes, security improvements, and performance enhancements released this month that we’ll recap for you here. As always please reach out to your account manager if you have any questions about what was released this past month.

Account Updates

Ability to register a mobile number and receive SMS text notifications for new purchases
Caching support for images uploaded into the system to improve load times to customers
Ability for a user to set how many results to see in data tables within the system
Ability to manage free ($0) transactions
Additional enhancements to affiliate functionality to support commission rules and automatic calculation of commissions
Ability to see affiliate on transaction details page, generate custom reports for affiliates
Better ability to manage reservations and capacity for activities with large number of time slots
Ability to generate referral links to refer business to TRYTN
Fixed an issue with the dashboard calendar cutting off last activity of the day in day or week view
Fixed an issue in the report generator where add on or question fields were removing headings and shifting data
Fixed an issue where users were unable to remove a saved sub-description from product details
General performance, resiliency, and security enhancements

Booking and Embedding Updates

If a user navigates directly to the unscheduled activities page and no unscheduled activities exist the user will automatically be redirected to the merchandise view
Customers can complete transactions for transactions that total $0
Updated copy of invoice emails sent to consumers
Support for “back to products” on embedded experience for businesses that only have unscheduled or merchandise items
Support for MM/YY date format for businesses that utilize Authorize.Net payment processor
Additional form validation checks for Authorize.Net credit card fields
Better customer experience when booking an activity that contains a large number of time slots
General performance and security enhancements

General Platform Updates

Performance enhancements and optimizations so system performs faster
Fixed an issue where incorrect city data was being sent to Viator
Resiliency and security enhancements

Dependable SMS Text Notifications

SMS text messaging. You might not think much about it but this is a really significant and important piece of technology. Invented in the 1980s the first SMS text message was sent in 1992. Since then it’s ballooned in usage and popularity. In 2010 SMS texts were estimated to be used by 3.2 billion people which accounted for nearly 80% of all mobile users. Wow!

Many tour and activity operators are hands-on. They’re out in the field or sailing the boat. They don’t have reliable internet service. What most do have, however, are a strong enough cell signal to receive an SMS text message.

Operators can now opt-in to receiving an SMS text in addition to the standard order confirmation email. This text lists how many participants or quantity of an item were added, the name of the activity or item, and in the case of a scheduled activity, the date and start time of the activity that was booked. All product purchases include the transaction identifier and link to the transaction details page.

This feature is rolling out to select businesses starting today. Do you think your business would benefit from this feature? If so please reach out to your account manager to discuss.

Package Spotlight: Mocha

Mocha is a lightweight and powerful testing framework for JavaScript code. Using a simple coding syntax allows for quick writing of unit and integration tests. Once time to run the tests are performed serially and makes for quick and easy reporting and debugging of failed tests.

At TRYTN we move fast and in order to release features and fixes as fast as possible we need to be able to automate whatever we can. Therefore we have nearly 3,000 JavaScript unit and integration tests to help ensure bugs aren’t released into production. Mocha is an integral part of our deployment pipeline and helps us release quality builds every time.

Mocha is just one package of several that integrate with each other to build out our entire code quality and testing suite which will be detailed in a later post.

Package Name: Mocha
Website: https://mochajs.org/

Brandon Parker

Brandon is the Manager, Front-End Development and Analytics at TRYTN. He has over 10 years experience in the web development field from family-owned to Fortune 200 companies.

Tracking Affiliate Purchases and Commissions

Affiliate partnerships are an important way to drive additional revenue to your business. But how do you know which bookings came from an affiliate? Trying to manually calculate affiliate commissions is tedious and time-consuming. That’s why we released a new way for affiliates to work with you.

The process is simple. Create however many affiliates you wish within the system. Set each affiliate to a set of commission rules (or no commission at all). When a purchase is made within the account and an affiliate is selected they will be attached to the purchase.

You are able to run reports and see which affiliate resulted in which purchase on each transaction details page. The system will also automatically calculate the commission for the affiliate so that you can easily see who is performing and who is not. Paying affiliates now will take minutes instead of days of manual calculations.

« Previous