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October 2018

Release Notes • November 10, 2018 •

Navigation redesigned for backoffice

Back in 2013, more than 50% of our users were on screens that were only 1024 pixels wide. This forced us to put the navigation-menu on top of the screen. Fast forward to 2018, where 99% of our users are on screens that are wider than 1024 pixels (with approx 50% of being on 1366 x 768 screens). This “evolution in resolution” has allowed us to move our navigation into a collapsible “side menu”, and has also made space for more modules that we will be launching shortly!

Configuration panel for site search

In January this year, we had launched a powerful site search feature, to help end-customers quickly find tours on your website. While this feature was built to be configurable from ground-up, we had consciously decided to save development time by not building a configuration panel for it. Instead, we were relying on manual support tickets to configure it on your behalf.

Over the past few months, our team has been inundated with support tickets requesting various configuration tweaks. This month, we’re happy to have solved this problem.

Head over to “Website > Search settings” to take complete control of site-search on your tour website. Using this screen you can:

“Quality of life” improvements

The backoffice screens for collections received some love this month. We’ve added the ability to delete collections ; search collections by name / description ; and to filter them by status (active, inactive, or unlisted).


One had to delete and recreate menu items to edit them. We’ve not gotten rid of this irritant and you can now edit a menu item by clicking the “pencil” icon next to it.


Some customers have requested for better audit logs to understand who changed what, in their Vacation Labs account, and we’re already working on a full-fledged audit-log module. In the meantime, as a quick-fix, we’ve added a “booking_created_by” column in booking & sales report to identify which user had recorded a booking from the backoffice.
We’ve now given the ability to change the title/name of the “Pay at venue” and “Pay via cash / cheque” payment options. What’s more, you can add them multiple times, with a different title/name each time. For example, you can now have the following payment options in your checkout flows:

  • Book now. Pay later.
  • Cash pickup from home.
  • Online transfer.
  • Invoice to Company.

First Atlantic Commerce added as a payment processor

Vacation Labs Booking Engine is now integrated with First Atlantic Commerce, which is a popular payment processor in the Caribbean region.

Read more about First Atlantic Commerce payment gateway here

Add custom HTML snippets to tour pages

Our tour pages always had the ability to add more sections of content over and above the standard sections (overview, highlights,inclusions / exclusions, etc.). This was achieved by adding custom-fields to tours, for things like, “best months for travel”, “difficulty level”, or “travel theme”.

However, there were cases where one needed complete control over the formatting & display of content on the tour page. To support such cases, we’ve added a new type of field, called “Custom HTML”. It’s an advanced feature, and you need to know some HTML to use it, but it can allow you to do things like:





Bug-fixes and minor improvements

As part of our ongoing effort towards better internalisation the following have been fixed:

  • Translations for an error message related to coupons weren’t showing up properly. This has been fixed.
  • Text accompanying the booking amount (converted to another currency) wasn’t being translated. This has been fixed.
An unexpected bug cropped up as a side-effect of upgrading our lightbox Javascript library. Due to this bug, YouTube’s related videos were showing up on banner slides with videos. This has now been fixed.
In one of the header styles, the navigation menu was going behind the website footer. This has now been fixed.


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