Adormo is growing fast and we decided to upgrade the server to keep up with the traffic, increase speed, security and general reliability.

Tonight at midnight in Europe we’ll do the switch.
What does this mean to you:

- From midnight in Europe Adormo and all Adormo websites will not be available for at least 2 hours.
- Each website will have new DNS and this may be very fast or it may take up to 48 hours (this is quite rare). So, some websites will be up and running at 2 am and some will have to wait until DNS propagation (which depends on the Gods of Internet, not us) is completed.

Tomorrow morning you’ll wake up and we hope you won’t even notice.

In case something goes wrong (and with these things something always does), we’ll be up fixing them as they come.
There’s two of us in Tulum (Mexico), one in Poland and one in Italy monitoring that all goes well.

Plus all the Managers who, as soon as something looks suspicious, alert us.

The New Server

Until now we run on one dedicated server in the United States. If that went down, all went down.
From tomorrow we’ll be on a Distributed System with several nodes.
This basically means that Adormo will be on several servers and not one.
One server will do email, one database, one stores images and so on (I am being very basic and not precise, to be simple), so if one goes down the rest works.
Also, we have nodes which replicate each others. Master and Slaves. If one goes down, the other one kicks in and nobody notices anything.
Backups and Restore will be much more solid too, so your data is even safer.
We’ll be much more protected against attacks and malicious software as we’ll have a firewall which denies access to critical elements.
In other words: the bad guys will be kicking at the door but nobody will open.

Plus, we moved to London, closer to our customer base, so European users will be served faster.

Another advantage: if Adormo keeps growing like this, we simply add nodes, storage and RAM, and we’ll be ok.
So, this configuration will be able to bring us very far.

Wish us luck!

Update!

We have completed the transfer to the new server and all works fine.
It’s much faster now too!

Email Servers Updat

Emails have been migrated successfully.
This is important for you only if you have an email address with us (xx@adormo.com, xx@OWNERSITE, xx@MANAGER SITE).

If you have issues please contact us at info@adormo.com

Adormo is (not) written in the sand

If you are an Owner you probably receive many emails from online reservation portals offering you to join.
The question you ask yourself probably goes along these lines:
“Will it be worth? Are they not going to disappear soon as many others did?”.
It’s a good question and you are right to ask it.

So let me tell you about us: we’re here to stay.
Why? Because we are cool? We have a great idea? We are well funded? Believe in what we do?
Nope. The reason is simpler: we’ve been online for eleven years (and have always been profitable).

I started this business in 2001 and never stopped.
You can see our old website (still working actually) here: apartmentoski.com

Then in 2009 we started Adormo.
It’s a much bigger project but at its core it’s the same old online reservations.

We are (maybe?) a start-up because we have a new project, but we are an eleven years old start-up because we have been around for long.

(often at this point people ask why in eleven years we did not become a multi million dollar company. The answer is simple: for the first eight years it was a small personal project which allowed me to travel the world 11 months a year).

We’ll be here tomorrow, next year and probably ten years from now.

So, it’s safe to spend half an hour uploading you apartment, house or villa. Go ahead!

Adormo Playa del Carmen Upgrade. That's us after the hard work.

From today we’ll name our upgrades.
Today’s is called “Playa del Carmen” because I am here, in Mexico with our lead developer and we launched it from a little house not far from the beach.

Ok, that was just to give some color to an otherwise boring article.

In the 45 days since the Tickets launch we have added many improvements and adjustments, while today we added a couple of new nice things.

1) Ready Messages

With this feature we will try to kill the “copy and paste” boredom.
Instead of looking for the right text in your notepad, you’ll find it right there in the Ticket.

Just select it, insert it…

… adjust it and you’re basically done.

If some variables such as dates and names are present in the reservations, we will add them automatically so you don’t have to.
For instance when you want to make an offer you get this text with pre-filled variables:

===================

Dear Angela Coleman,
Thank you for your request!
My name is Stefano G. (Owner) and I’m happy to inform you that GREEN is available for the requested period.
Here you can find the details of my offer:

Accommodation: GREEN
http://www.budapestcheapflats.com/en/cheap-flats/Hungary/Budapest/Studio/GREEEN/1663
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Adults: 2
Children: [ ] ([ ] years old, [ ] years old)
Check-in: 27/04/12
Check-out: 30/04/12
Nights: 3

===================

For now Owners only have just two Ready Messages: Confirm and Offer, but we plan to add more with the time.
Please suggest some some Ready Messages if you need them.
If you are a Manager, you already have more of them and you will be able to interact with Owners and Guests more smoothly, especially from a smartphone where typing is uncomfortable.

Owners and Managers cannot have their own private Ready Messages and have to use the available ones.
That would be another nice feature, but let’s see first how much you use them and how, ok?
Receiving your feedback will be nice as usual.

2) Insert Links

In Adormo you may get requests from different websites and deal with them from the same page.
That’s great as you manage one apartment in many websites at the same time but sometimes it’s difficult to give the right link to the guest.

For instance your apartment is at the same time in Adormo.com, RigaAccommodation.com and TopFamilyHomes.com and you get a request from RigaAccommodation.com.
Before you had to search for the apartment in the website, copy the link and paste it.

Now the system does this for you.

• Was the  request from RigaAccommodation.com? Fine, just click the link on the right sidebar and it will be in the form http://www.rigaaccommodation.com/en/apartments/Latvia/Riga/4-bedrooms/5-Laipu-street/1762
• Is the apartment you want to offer NOT in RigaAccommodation.com? No problem, it will be displayed in Adormo anyway. It will display an alert “this object is not available in Adormo at the moment”  but it can be seen by the Guest you are offering it to.
• It’s also easy to add a new apartment and offer it right away. No need to ask the Managers to add it in the website.

and what about languages? We’ll show it to the Guest in his/her preferred language or, if not available, in English.
So, don’t worry: if you are seeing the page in Russian, your Guest will not.

Conclusions

Tickets are really new but are already working very well and we are seeing many reservations done.
Communication is important and we think we made it easier for Guest and Owners to talk to each other before closing the deal.

I knew that of course, I have used them since 2005 in my old system Apartmentoski.com and now more and more online reservation system use them. I am not sure whether I was the first but I have never heard of such a system before. Have you? I’m curious.

Anyway, we plan to keep improving them and need your constant feedback to do so.
Don’t be shy, we do listen!

But we’ve done a few new things too. Here they are:

Tickets

Tickets are very important because now all the communication can happen inside the system and we have an environment where the Guest gets the best both worlds:

- The Owner’s knowledge about his/her apartment and neighbourhood
- The Manager’s knowledge of the whole area and the apartment (if visited)

This is new for all of us.

We have to find out the best way to use this new tool to make our Guests feel they’ve found a new way to reserve.

Planning

See all your Calendars in one page.

So, this Customer calls you and you need to find a place in one of your 10 apartments.
Before all you could do, was to perform a Search and see what was free.
Now you can simply open Planning and that’s what you see:

so, this is a small step forward making the Adormo platform as you Reservation Planner!

Plus, if you add a reservation manually here, you can use the Tickets to talk to your guest.

Improved Search Results Page

That’s what a visitors gets now after searching:

If no dates/people have been inserted (or if “All 100 apartments” link has been inserted:

If a proper search has been done we can display the price and we remove some other things, to keep it clean.

and note how it becomes so much easier to browse, as we don’t need to click the apartment link to see the pictures:

Various

We have done several other improvements in Control Panel: Extras are more flexible now (have a look, you’ll see some changes), you can define if each accommodation is an apartment, house, villa etc… and a few others things you’ll notice sooner or later.

Then we improved Admin and internal workings of the system but I won’t bother you with them.

What are the Tickets?

You are an Owner and have one apartment in one of our websites.
A Customer sends a request.
You get a notification via email, click on the link and see the Customer’s message.
You reply.
The Customer gets a notification via email, clicks on the link and sees your message.
The Customer replies…and so on.

Oh good! I can talk to the customer directly!

Yes you can! But you can’t leave an email, phone number etc..we need the communication to stay in the system, so please don’t try to get out.
We’ll catch you :)

Who’s the Manager?

A Ticket is like a room and there’s at least 3 people:

- The Customer
- The Owner (you)
- The Manager

What does the Manager do?

- Helps you with the Reservation
- Helps the Customer: what part of town is the best? Which apartment do you suggest? How can I pay? And so on…
- Monitors: you don’t need to ask for help, the Manager will get into the conversation and help when needed.

What are the Private messages?

You can write a Private message to the Manager, the Customer will not see it.
The Customer can write a Private message to the Manager, you will not see it.
This allows you to talk to us there, in the same place, and you avoid sending an email like “regarding the request of Mr. Red, how can I ask him to pay?”. You can do this directly in the Ticket.

So, everything related to a specific reservation is in one place.

How does the reservation system work?

A Manager will teach you what to do case by case or will do it for you, don’t worry.
The more you learn, the faster you can work, but there’s no manuals to study, just do what you can.
We will automatize that too in the future.

Drafts

Did you start to write something and a phone call interrupted you? No problem, your text is saved.
Even if you turn off the computer and come back tomorrow, it’s going to be there.
And, by the way, you can answer from home, all you need is in the cloud (there, I’ve said it, we’re in the cloud).

Mobile

Yep, you can read and write from your smartphone, iPad or whatever you use on the go.
Is it as easy and comfortable as with a computer? No, but it’s good enough to keep you going.
A fast answer is critical to get a reservation.