May 16, 2023 K2 Release

General Development

VIP KOA Rewards Cancellation

An issue was reported through KITS support that when cancelling a reservation, the cancellation fee was being waived even though the guest had an expired VIP Rewards account. According to the business rules, the cancellation fee should only be waived if the guest cancelled before the expiration date for their enrollment period.

Big Weekend Care Camps (2024)

While the 2023 Care Camps weekend is still fresh in the minds of our campers, we know that many guests like to book next year’s weekend now. A new global discount code called “BWCC” (Big Weekend Care Camps) has been created for 2024 and is now available on KOA.com and at the front desk.

There were changes requested by franchisees and the Care Camp board for the discount so check out eKamp for more information.

KOA Rewards Standalone menu screen error

An issue was discovered in the KOA Rewards standalone menu where the “Edit Guest” button was not showing if the user was on the “Refund” tab. This has been corrected.

Referral Field settings not enforced in reservation forms bug

When the ‘Require Referral Code for Reservation’ flag in setup is set to ‘Yes’ or ‘Registration Only’, the user was NOT being prompted to select a referral in the Reservations Guest Widget of the reservation form. This has been corrected.

Operations Setup: Site Priority bug

An uncommon bug was reported involving the priority setting for a site. A campground used a negative number for a priority, and this caused Dynamic Optimization to fail for them. This has been corrected; site priority will only be allowed to be a positive whole number.

Report Performance Improvements

As the summer camping season approaches, we have noticed increased volume with reporting. Over this past sprint, we’ve been monitoring and working on improving the time that reports sit in the queue. One report in particular – the Pickup Report – was worked on to improve the time it takes to pull data for the report. Additionally, we’ve approached the queuing system more strategically to allow us to isolate problem reports in order to work on those as well. While these improvements may be subtle, our desire is to decrease wait times.

Coming Soon – Guest Notification

With the work completed on the guest database in 2021, the foundation for the guest to be involved in their own guest information was laid. Having the guest involved will increase overall accuracy of their information and provide a better view into the camping habits of our guests.

Within the next couple of months, we will be taking a couple of small but crucial next steps for our guest database. First, we will require a guest to have a unique email address. A recent analysis of our reservations at the system level shows that 70% of our reservations are made on KOA.com. A unique email address is already required there. By adding this requirement to the remaining 30% of incoming reservations, we bring consistency between KOA.com and the front desk. Among other things, this small step sets the stage for us to be able to provide the guest the ability to manage their own reservations online in the future.

Additionally, we will be adding Guest Notification to K2. Like many other companies in the business world today, KOA will notify a guest when their information has changed and allow them the opportunity through their KOA.com account to manage that information. Below is a real-world example to illustrate this kind of notification.