July 5, 2022 K2 Release

Dynamic Optimization

Mark your calendar for the RELEASE DATE:

We will be opening up Dynamic Optimization to the system on Tuesday, July 12th.

Dynamic Optimization

After a year of beta testing, we are proud to rollout Dynamic Optimization to the entire system.

Optimizing your Booking Chart to find openings big enough to accommodate guests’ requests during your busy season is a challenge for most everyone.

If you’re lucky, you have staff that can take some dedicated time each day to make a few openings by moving reservations around. If you’re unlucky, you’ve got an impatient potential guest on the phone who just HAS to be there at the same time as their friends and you HAVE to find them a spot. When a human is involved, there is a lot of analysis and review involved to move things around to make the best of your inventory. It takes time.

Dynamic Optimization is a scheduling improvement function. Using algorithms, it looks at hundreds of different moves for the affected time period and scores them. In the end, the best scores win and the sites are moved to make availability.

The Goals of Optimization:

• Create inventory openings on the Booking Chart
• Minimize ‘dead space’
• Save campgrounds time

Easy to Setup – You have control:

• to turn the functionality on or off at any time
• to select which Pricing Group(s) are optimized
• to see exactly what was moved by reviewing the Optimization report. Every move is also noted in the individual reservation’s log
• to control if you don’t wat a reservation to move …. By simply assigning a lock code to that reservation
  

Watch for additional communications as we get closer to the release date!

Accessibility Features

We’ve added some new attributes set at the Pricing Group level to help you better define your accessible accommodation. These attributes will show on KOA.com and allow the guest needing accessibility features to quickly determine for themselves if the sites described meet their needs.

THE NEW ATTRIBUTES INCLUDE:

• Accessible Bath
• Accessible Kitchen
• Accessible Parking
• Enlarged Door Openings
• Enlarged Hallways
• Fold Down Shower Bench
• Hand-held Shower Head
• Lever Door Handles
• Mobility Accessible
• Ramp
• Reduced Height Bathroom Sink
• Reduced Height Room Fixtures
• Roll in Showers
• Shower Chair Available on Request
• Shower Safety Grab Bars
• Toilet Safety Grab Bars
• Visual Alarms
• Visual Notification for Door

These attributes will play an important role in new functionality for our Accommodation site class.

1. Any Accommodation that has at least one of these attributes set to yes will be marked as ‘accessible’.
2. On the KOA.com listing, there will be a new link in the bulleted feature list called “Accessibility Features”.
   
3. Clicking on the link will take the guest to the details screen which has been updated to include a 5th column of information about Accessibility Features.
   
4. On step three of the reservation process, the guest will be presented with an additional notice in the Terms & Conditions to acknowledge they’ve chosen to stay on a site that includes accessibility features.
   
5. From an accessibility requirement standpoint, the guest will choose a Pricing Group that they have determined will meet their needs based on the attributes and description in the listing. They will also have acknowledged that they chose a site that includes accessibility features. Because of this, the reservation will be locked to the site that was assigned with a special new lock code called “Accessible”. There are no built-in charges for an Accessible lock. However, it is important to note that if a guest used Select My Site and there was a fee associated with that, the fee will still apply.
6. Note: the new attributes can be used on other site classes where they may be appropriate. However, these new features on KOA.com will only be present for the Accommodation site class.

Reports

(NEW!) Booking Window Report

As a Revenue Management tool, the Booking Window report shows the user the booking window for reservations and allows comparison between two time periods. This new report can be found in the Analysis report menu.

Update for Notes on Reports

An important update was made for reports that contain Reservation, Guest, and Site notes. In the cases where the number of characters in the note was high, the report was getting hung up. We’ve corrected this issue by limiting the number of characters that print on the report to 200 characters. For notes that exceed 200 characters, the user will see (….) at the end of the note to indicate that there is more text for them to see. The reports affected include: Arrivals, Census, Departure, and Long Term Charges Due.

KOA Rewards

Work continues on the KOA Rewards project as we prepare to move the programming off of the old KampSight system onto the new platform. Our work has been laid out into seven different milestones which allow the development team to focus on individual parts of the whole picture. From now until it’s released, KOA Rewards will take up most of our development bandwidth.