Adventure Central

What's New - Office Service Release 10/24/07

Activity Wizard
We designed the Activity Wizard to provide you with an easy way to create, edit, and distribute activities. All required and optional activity information (including descriptions, dates, capacities, rates and taxes) can be entered via an easy and intuitive 4-step process.  To help you get the most out of the Activity Wizard, be sure to read the attached user documentation.  We think that you will truly enjoy this feature.  It should definitely make it faster to create, edit, and distribute your activities!

Passenger Count by Departure Report
This report can be filtered by date range as well as division (you can select one or multiple divisions).  You will find the report under the Administration section of the Reports tab.

This report has two views – the Summary view and the Detail view. 

Summary view provides:

• Total number of reservations and clients that participated in each completed departure

Detail view provides:

• Financial and trip duration information about the reservations included in each departure
• Hyperlinked reservation numbers for quick/easy access to reservations that you may want to review

Utilization by Departure Report
This report can be filtered by date range as well as division (you can select one or multiple divisions).  You will find the report under the Administration section of the Reports tab.

This report has two views – the Summary view and the Detail view.

Summary view provides:

• Total number of customers that participated in each completed departure
• Discounts that were applied to any of the reservations for each completed departure

Detail view provides:

• Detailed information about the reservations included in each completed departure
• Hyperlinked reservation numbers for quick/easy access to reservations that you may want to review

Additional Reporting Tips for Utilization by Departure Report
Please note that you can add the “Activity Sub-total” column in the Detail report to accurately report the gross dollars that were generated by your activities.  However, since each reservation may contain more than one activity, the “Rez Total” column in the Detail report cannot be added to give an accurate reporting of dollars collected for all of your reservations.  Additional financial reporting by division may be found in the “Bookings By Division” report under the Accounting section of the Reports page. 

Blog Headlines
The next time you login to the service, you may notice that blog headlines are now available from the login screen. The Adventure Central Blog provides you with quick access to information about:

• new features available within Adventure Central’s services
• company updates including new tour operators and distribution partners that have joined the Adventure Central family
• industry news that may be of interest to our clients and partners.

If you’re interested in any headline, all you have to do is click on it to read the full post. You can also click on the Adventure Central Blog link to browse all posts available.

"Connect" the dots - Introducing AC Connect

What better way to end the summer and start fall than by launching a new product. Our adventure elves have been busy in the workshop and they've come out with a great new service  - just in time as I'm sure they'll all be hitting the slopes as soon as the mountains open.

Read more about our new distribution service - Adventure Central Connect

What's New – Service Release 8/23/07

Minimum Capacities

Many of our clients want to hold-off confirming seats for travelers until a minimum-to-run capacity is met for a particular departure date. We have been preparing for this feature for some time now (you may have noticed the "Will Advise" status in the status lists) and now we are happy to bring it to you in this release!

The steps to get started using this new feature can be found in the updated FAQs in the Help section of Adventure Central Office(TM) but here's a quick overview of how it could benefit you:

·      Be warned during Office reservations that the minimum capacity has not yet been met.

·      Sell your trips that have minimums online, without fear of confirming seats where minimums have not yet been met.

·      Maintain control over whether to confirm the seats or not - without losing potential business.

·      Gather all info about potential customers for a departure so that when the departure becomes confirmed you can easily close the sale.

If this feature is for you, login to Adventure Central Office and visit the Help section to get started.

Not interested? No problem. Don't enter any "Min Capacity" data (Inventory edit screens) and you will not be affected in any way by this new feature.

Enhanced 'Username' Security

As you know, our system has been compliant with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) data security standards for a year now, but we are ever-vigilant in our pursuit of your security. In this release you will see some changes to your choice of User login names to absolutely assure uniqueness.

From here forward, any changes made to your User account will require that your Username adheres to the format of an email address (e.g., 'joe@adventure.com'). Ideally, each User would just use their actual email address as their login name but anything in the form of an email address will actually work as long as no other User already has that Username.

We encourage each of you who administer your Users to be proactive and make all of your Usernames compliant as quickly as possible. This is important so that your users don’t experience any interruptions in their ability to access the system. Any access to the Manage User page (by anyone) will cause a check for compliance in the Username and the visitor will be asked to change it before leaving the page.

Prevent issues by updating your Usernames today.

In Adventure Central Office, visit Settings/ Business Settings/ System Users and click on the 'edit' icon for any Users whose name needs to be changed. Tip: you can also use this page to reset passwords for your users!

What's New – Service Release 7/26/07

As you know, we have extended your reach into the market by now offering your trips through our distribution partners. In order to help them bring you new customers, we have added a few features that make your offerings easier to search for, read about and purchase.

New Marketing Data

Activity "Marketing" (Brief) Description - this is the spot to make your offering stand-out within Search Results, which will now be more consistent between suppliers. This data has been populated for you from your existing Activity Description. You'll want to review the results of this automated effort and make sure you are putting your best foot forward. This data field is limited to 300 characters and can be seen/edited in Adventure Central Office by visiting the "Inventory" section, opening an Activity on the "Activities" tab, and clicking on the "Edit Activity" button.

Activity "Marketing" Duration - this is the spot to use your own words to explain the duration of your activities. The system continues to capture all "actual" durations ("Activity Length" field) precisely (in hours) so it can do calculations. But, you may prefer to call your 6-day adventure a "Week of Adventure" and now you can market this activity as "1 week" if you wish. As with the Marketing Description, this data has been populated for you and can be reviewed/edited in the same place.

P.S. - As posted elsewhere - don't forget to make sure you have entered a company logo and description into your Settings.

New tools for your Travelers

We've added even more reasons for your travelers to create a login for themselves and to keep coming back:

• Travelers can now create a login account right from the main "landing" page in Adventure Web, without waiting to have first created a reservation.
• The "Create Login" process has been simplified
• "My Adventures" page now has more content:
• "Quoted" reservations are shown - and can be completed
• "Saved" adventures can be bookmarked while looking at your Activities. The list includes your new Marketing Description and a purchase can begin right from the list of Saved adventures
• "Completed" reservations are shown
• "Booked" adventures that are upcoming are shown (as before) and the confirmation can be viewed for each one
• Friends can be invited to join either a Booked or Quoted reservation

If you haven't yet turned on this valuable marketing feature for your Adventure Web, now's the time.

To enable: in Adventure Central Office, visit Settings/Business Settings/Current System Settings and under "Client Attributes/Preferences" check the boxes labeled "AdventureWebLogin - Adventure Web Logins" and "InviteAFriend - Invite a friend enabled on A'web". Or call Customer Service for help!

Report Change

"Availability at-a-Glance" report now has the ability to filter results by an Operating Location.

Other Changes

Your customers have always been able to choose to subscribe to your newsletter when creating a web inquiry or when input by your people using Office. Now there's a 'Receive a Newsletter' checkbox on the customer record edit page in Office so you can control this setting easily at anytime and see it's current status when viewing the customer's information.

The Dashboard module "Daily Activities" now shows availability numbers in more user friendly color schemes. Rather than colored text, the numbers are white on a colored background.

A specific Sales Rep can now be assigned to a new Customer while entering the new customer information (either during a reservation or during a new customer inquiry). As before, the default value for the Sales Rep is the current user.

Source of Business settings can now be controlled more precisely. Before you could make it mandatory data on Adventure Web bookings but it remained optional in Office so you could use it as you desired. Now you can control whether it is required on web bookings, office bookings, or both!

What's New in Release 2.5 – May 1, 2007

This release, available May 1st 2007, focuses on functionality in these areas:

·      Resource Management

·      New Reservation Process

·      AdvWeb Inquiry Form Configurability

·      Reservation Groups

·      Traveler Logins

·      "Invite Friends" Marketing Tool

Resource Management

This is  now available to those who signed-up to participate in the User Experience Feedback (Beta) Program. It is documented elsewhere, until generally available. It delivers Resource Loading (assignments of guides and transportaton resources) and Capacity Management across Shared Resources.

New Reservation Process

This is a Beta release of a new, more flexible, more responsive path through the process of making a reservation in Adventure Office. It is available for review to participants in the User Experience Feedback program.

AdvWeb Inquiry Form Configurability

We made this form that your web visitors fill out more configurable, for those clients who prefer not to ask for quite so much information from a traveler submiting an inquiry from Adventure Web. The default form remains the one that has always existed, but now you can work with your AC Customer Service personnel to hide certain inquiry form fields or mark them as optional or required.

Reservation Groups (Optional - 'off' by default)

Parties with separate reservations, but traveling as a group, can now be 'grouped' together using Reservation Groups. These groups can be created by the AdvWeb purchaser who wants to invite others to join his/her group (see more about this below)*. When a group has been formed, you'll now see reference to the Group Name in the reservation management pages and in the Trip Manifest.

In AdvOffice, you'll see the new sub-menu "Reservation Groups" under the Reservation menu. This has some preliminary tools for viewing groups that have been formed. You'll see more here (and in the rez process) soon to help you form and manage groups within AdvOffice.

* You must enable "Adventure Web (Traveler) Logins" feature for your customers to do this

Traveler Logins (Optional - 'off' by default)

You now have the option of letting your site's visitors create and use an Adventure Central login. If you enable these feature and they choose to use it (they can always say 'no thanks'), they'll get some great benefits:

·      See what reservations they've made and what payments are due

·      Have name/address info pre-filled for them when making an inquiry or a booking

·      Create groups ("Invite Friends")**

·      View the status of their invited friends ("Who have I invited?"; "Who has booked?")**

* You must enable "Reservation Groups" (aka "AdventureWebGroups") feature for your customers to do this

"Invite Friends" Marketing Tool

Now you can encourage your customers to 'tell a friend' about the great trip they've planned and make it easy for those friends to book, too! Just turn 'on' AdvWeb Groups and Logins (How? View this photo ) and your bookers will start seeing the "Invite Friends" link on their confirmation page.

Adventure Central Certified Hacker Safe®

Industry leader offers first in online adventure transaction security

Adventure Central, the emerging leader in providing online booking and travel inventory management services for adventure tour operators, announced that its solution is now certified by ScanAlert to meet the HACKER SAFE® data security standard. Adventure Central joins over 75,000 leading service providers and retailers in 40 countries whose web sites undergo daily security auditing by the world’s largest web site security certification authority in order to display the HACKER SAFE certification mark to their customers.

“As the leader in offering critical business solutions to adventure travel operators, it is absolutely vital that we provide a highly secure infrastructure for credit card transactions, said Dick Schulte, CEO of Adventure Central. “HACKER SAFE certification enables us to offer our customers the most trusted and advanced methods available today so that their customers, adventure travelers, feel confident booking trips online. We’re the first company in our space to achieve the HACKER SAFE certification mark, a distinction that has made our customers very happy. ”

The appearance of the HACKER SAFE certification mark on AdventureCentral’s  customer sites now enables it to effectively address consumers’ well documented concerns about online shopping security. As long as a site continues to pass these daily security audits, Scan Alert will certify it in real-time with a date-stamped certification mark, advising online shoppers that their credit card information is continually protected.

“A January 2006 report from IBM showed that 70 percent of consumers would only shop at web sites with a recognized security protection seal,” said ScanAlert’s Director of Marketing Nigel Ravenhill. ”HACKER SAFE certification provides peace of mind for the tour operators who are Adventure Central’s customers and also provides them with an important competitive advantage with their customers, the adventure travelers.”

About HACKER SAFE Certification
HACKER SAFE is the world’s ecommerce security standard. ScanAlert only allows the certification mark to appear on sites that pass comprehensive daily security audits of ecommerce infrastructure. As long as a site remains secure, ScanAlert continually serves a HACKER SAFE certification mark directly to the retailer’s web site from ScanAlert’s network. In scientific testing by more than 500 retailers, including PETCO, Yankee Candle and Warner Brothers, HACKER SAFE certification increased sales conversion an average of 14%.

About ScanAlert, Inc.
Headquartered in Napa, CA, ScanAlert is the world’s largest web site security certification company, protecting over 75,000 web sites in 40 countries through the HACKER SAFE certification program. The certification mark indicates that these sites protect the personal data of millions of shoppers every day by meeting the highest federal and industry web site security standards. Brands that use HACKER SAFE to build the trust that builds their business include over half of the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide to Retail Web Sites. For more information, please visit www.scanalert.com.

About Adventure Central
Based in Denver, Colorado, Adventure Central provides critical business solutions and distribution connectivity to adventure tour operators. The company delivers the leading online booking, travel inventory management and channel distribution solution to the adventure travel industry, offering operators the opportunity to grow revenues, attract and retaining customers and reduce operational costs. For more information, please visit www.AdventureCentral.com.

Adventure Central Contact
Dick Schulte
CEO
Tel: 303-292-5522

ScanAlert Contact
Nigel Ravenhill
Dir. of Marketing
Tel: 707-224-7656 x111