I built the InnFirst.com application because I really disliked the Webervations product.  Their customer support was non existent, their interface was (and still is) dated and not functional, and the product itself barely met the minimum standards for an availability calendar -  and online booking was out of the question.

I tried a couple of other products (all of which were very expensive), and in the end I gave up and decided to code it myself.  The result was InnFirst.com and my vacation rental business has been going gang busters ever since.

Initially, I thought that maybe 5-7% of my business would use the online booking functionality.   In my mind, it was the innovative availability calendar and its ability to show real time availability for years in advance, that would reduce phone calls and increase reservations.

However, I’ve been shocked at the response of the online booking component.   I would estimate that roughly 40% of my bookings are now originating online.  Additionally,  I am amazed at the number of guests who book online who have never called or emailed me.  Granted, my website is very thorough and full of information, but in many instances these are $4000+ reservations, and I just never would have guessed that someone would book that sort of reservation online without wanting to talk or email with me first.

Here is a screenshot of the email reservation notifications I’ve received from InnFirst.com in the last 4 months:

Take tonight for example, I woke up at 2am and couldn’t get back to sleep. I went downstairs, made myself a sandwich and decided to get an early start on clearing out my emails before heading into the office on Monday. Lo and behold, I had two InnFirst.com pending reservation notifications in my inbox that came in while I was sleeping. One of those reservations had emailed me once a few days ago with some more questions. The other reservation had no previous history and just came in out of the blue.

Would I have gotten both of those reservations without InnFirst.com? Possibly yes and possibly no. Why? This weekend was Father’s Day weekend. I spent the weekend with my family and not tied to my email or phone. Thus, my response times for any vacation rental inquiries were slower, if not delayed completely. In the past during times when my response times were delayed, even if just by a few hours, many times by the time I returned the guests email or phone call I either never heard back from them or they would tell me that they had already booked a place somewhere else. That doesn’t happen any longer. Today I get those reservations thanks to the online booking calendar from InnFirst.com.

The net result is that my local vacation rental competitors are hurting. This recession has really affected them this summer. Not me. I am having the best summer season ever. It’s a testament to the power of online booking, and the power of empowering your guests to make their reservation immediately, easily and quickly.

If you are a vacation rental property owner, don’t underestimate the power of providing an online booking and availability calendar component for your guests. Not only will you generate high occupancy rates and realize increased revenues, but you’ll also be amazed at how much time a web-based vacation rental property management solution can save you.

Call me at 877-593-2083 x3 or email sales@innfirst.com, I’ll be glad to answer any questions you might have or give you a hand in setting up your properties if you decide to try the free 30 day trial.

Initially,  InnFirst.com was built to be a low cost, web based hospitality management platform for vacation rental and B&Bs with up to 20 properties or 20 rooms.    However, over the course of the last six months I’ve been working with several property managers and CondoTel owners who have buildings with hundreds of  condos that they manage.  Like a hotel, each of these “condos” operates very similar to a hotel room, in the sense that when guests book they don’t know which condo they are renting,the actual condo is assigned to the guest after the reservation is made, many times not until the guest actually checks in at the property management office.

The property manager or CondoTel owner is most concerned with maximizing occupancy.  To maximize occupancy there are several requirements:

1)  Robust and flexible booking logic which assign guests to rooms / condos.  At the property manager’s request, the booking logic must be able to shuffle reservations to assure maximum occupancy.    Likewise, some repeat guests will probably request specific rooms or units, so those reservations need to have the flexibility to be “fixed” and left out of the shuffle.

Likewise, the application must be smart enough to look at a block of rooms / units and then assign a new reservation to the best unit which results in maximum occupancy.

2) Booking calendar which shows all available dates and units.  Most online booking systems ask the guest to enter an arrival date and then the system returns which units are available (if any) for that date.   This has always frustrated me, because in most instances I have found the room or property that I want and I am flexible on my arrival date.  I simply want to know when it’s available and at what price.

Using traditional multi-unit / multi-room calendars this is not possible.  I have to literally go through day by day to see if the property or room I want is available.  InnFirst solves all that, by providing a booking calendar that displays all the rooms / units on the left and the calendar on the right.

Take a look:
Utilizing our booking calendar, a property owner or manager won’t lose those guests who are flexible in their dates.  In fact,  initial results are showing property owners are increasing their booking y 15-25% just by adding an online booking component to their website.  I’ll be writing more on these results in a later post.

In summary, if you are a CondoTel  property owner or manager, or a property manager managing up to 100 properties in multiple locations,  please try out InnFirst.com for the free 30 day trial period.  We’ll gladly walk you through the property setup and setup several of your properties for you to get you started.

In the last few days we quietly launched our employee payroll and alerting module.  At the moment, this module is included in the $19.99 monthly price.  This module contains several great features:

• Configurable Access Rights & Groups for Employees
• Automated Check in / Check out Alerts
• Automated Emails of Availability Calendars
• Customized Alerting Intervals
• Cancellation Notices Via Email
• Last Minute Reservation Notices Via Email
• Payroll Calendars
• Payroll Data Entry
• Payroll Submission
• Employee Communication Logging

I created this module to reduce or eliminate the amount of communication errors that were occurring between my staff and myself.   Many times a guest would call and request towel service or a late check out and I would forget to communicate this to the staff.   Mailing availability calendars to everybody was also a pain, and many times I simply forgot about it.   Inevitably,  I ‘d get a call later that week  from a guest locked out of their unit and wondering why it hadn’t been cleaned.  I’d be furious with my staff, when in reality it was my own fault because I hadn’t emailed them the latest and greatest availability calendar.

Or perhaps a guest ordered towel service.  Previously, I would email my head of housekeeping and she would note it on her schedule.   Ultimately though I would forget to that as well, and then I would get a call from a guest wondering why there are no towels in the unit.

All of that is now in the past.  The new employee alerting module now automatically communicates with employees. The frequency of those communications and the communications themselves are all customizable in the application by the property owner.

The payroll feature is a simple feature that allows property owners to setup and define a payroll calendar.  Then when an employee logs into to the application, they can print out the payroll calendar as well as enter their time for each day in the current billing period.

The screenshot below shows the tabbed employee payroll interface with three tabs for Payroll Calendar, Payroll Data Entry and Payroll History.

This screenshot shows the PDF calendar that the application generates for the employee to print out.

The property owner can set up four columns,  when the payroll period begins, when it ends, the date hours must be submitted and the date the check is issued.

This is a nice feature if your property utilizes a thrid party payroll service.    I use a company called Flex Pay out of Winston Salem.   They charge a small fee each pay period, but all I have to do is submit the hours for my employees each pay period and in return, they handle all the taxes, cutting the checks (or ACH direct deposit), all reporting, all tax filings, etc.     Currently all employees must email their hours to me, and then I email them to the payroll service.  With the new employee payroll module, the employee can enter their hours each day, as well as a small description of the tasks they accompished, and then at the end of the payroll period, they “submit” the payroll for review.

The property owner then is alerted that all payroll submissions have been received (or vice versa, not received) and can login, review each employees hours / use of time, and then approve the payroll and it’s automatically send to the email address of your payroll processor contact for processing.  The best part of this, it can be done from anywhere in the world and all the alerts are automated.  Thus, the property owner is freed from having to remind each employee to submit their payroll, remind them to send a detailed itemization of the work accomplished, etc.  The sytem automates all of this, and stores it for review in the future!

The whole concept of an online booking and vacation rental management platform arose of out of my frustrations managing my own vacation rentals.  Every feature that I put into this web based software platform has its origins in some sort of pain that I’ve experienced while managing my properties.

The employee time tracking and payroll module is no different.  This is the first year that my former contract workers really no longer qualify as contract workers, they are now bonafide employees.    My accountant kindly hooked me up with a local payroll processor, but I was stunned to learn that their online systems didn’t allow for some very simple payroll automation.

Specifically,  I don’t want the hassle of reminding my employees twice a month to email me their hours by a certain date, so I can review the hours, approve the hours and then forward the hours to my contact at the payroll processor.

There has to be an easier way!  My solution is to add a module to InnFirst.com which allows property owners the ability to add employees to their account.   The property owner can assign reduced access rights to the application for the employee and also enable the payroll module.

The payroll module will be very simple in it’s first iteration.   The property owner will set up the payroll calendar using our advanced calendar GUI.   When the employee logs in, they will have access to the payroll calendar for reference.  They will be able to enter their daily timesheets and at the end of the pay period, the property owner will be notified that all employees have submitted their timesheets and it’s time to login, review and approve their hours.

Once the employee’s timesheets have been approved, the system will automatically email the contact at the payroll processor with the employee’s hours for processing.

It’s not a complex payroll solution, but it should suffice the needs of most vacation rental owners and small property managers.

At the request of several beta testers,  employees (cleaning and maintenace crews) will also be able to receive alerts for guests who are checking in and checking out, as well as print PDFs of the availability calendars and also view their payroll history.

All-in-all, it should be a nice enhancement.  I’ve almost finished with the requirements and hope to send it off the developers for implementation in the next day or two.

Projected completion date: February 20, 2009.

Thanks to all who helped with their feedback and patience during Phase I of the soft launch of InnFirst.com.  We are now actively accepting new vacation rental and B&B owners   However,  all new customers need to be patient and understand that there is still a great deal of bug fixing and tweaking going on with the application.

We are a small company with a limited budget and a talented development team.   We look at ever suggestion, every piece of feedback, every bug report and make some tough decisions on what is most important in the short term to make the product the most useful for the great number of people.

The primary faults of the current application are:

1. Help files and help resources remain limited
2. Small interface glitches remain
3. Occasional bug pops up after code updates
4. Lack of decent reporting

I try and counter that with very fast, very personalized customer service.   In many instances if you encounter a bug, I’ll have it fixed within hours.  If you suggest a feature or enhancement that to me is a “must have” for the majority of folks, I’ll prioritize it and make it happen within 7-14 days.

One of the current customers has made four great suggestions in the past few weeks and all of those suggestions have been implemented and the application is better becaue of it.

A couple of recent feature requests that were great, but which I cannot support for another couple of months are enhanced support for property managers and multi-lingual support.    Both are relatively simple items, but require 4 weeks or so total development time.  So those will be put on the back burner until 2009.

Please feel free to fill out the Contact Us form and drop me an email with any questions you may have.  That email will go directly into my help desk software and I’ll get back to you with an answer ASAP!

Thanks again for your patronage and support!

Brent M. Kleinheksel
Owner, InnFirst.com