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[ignatius]

Hi
Has anyone applied Jomres for online tourism bookings. If so please let me have a link to the site. I have to set up an online booking system for a tourism website and do not want to waste my time if Jomres is not going to work for this purpose.

See http://www.southerncircletours.com

Regards
Ignatius Ackermann

[Vince]

It's funny, I get a lot of people asking if Jomres does tours, but nobody says how tours should work.

Should they just be a type of property and instead of rooms there are tours, or should it be more complicated?

Should a tour be created by linking different propertys and dates? If we did that, should we then say that the tour has N people in it? If so, do we then add hotels for certain dates. If we did that, then should we book out certain rooms from those hotels from those dates?

[extension]

I guess it's the same as i asked for some time ago.

It sounds like tickets for seats or the like.
Jomres can theoretically do it, but as Jomres is now one have to book in/out for every single booking.
We can not just delete all bookings right after the "event".

Jomres could be an excellent event/ticked/seat booking system if that was possible. Later maybe add a kind of timeline so customers can book on both date and time (several times on a day).

Regards
Boris

[stbrides]

This will not work with Jomres without a lot of alterations.

A tour is a holiday.
Jomres is not selling holidays it is selling time in specific properties.

A holiday is accommodation plus other things.
People are actually focussing in on the other things.
10 days in the Austrian Alps.
3 trips to the ski runs, a day in Vienna, 4 evening meals at 5 star hotel, a day at the spa.
Excellent accommodation and flights included.

People are buying into the idea of the first line not the accom plus flights.

You need a mix and match system - you are selling so many combinations and variations it overloads the RAM as it stands - as I found out.

Forgive me for saying this but a tour works better with something like Virtuemart.

Except Virtuemart doesn't have a calendar you can buy off
It doesn't have the booking engine Jomres has
It doesn't have Vince helping people make it happen.
It is full of bugs - and they even admit themselves they are disappointed with the present addition.
But this addition has been out for a long time and the next one will likely be longer.
Take a look at the number of updates of Jomres.
OK you might try the nightly build but the component and extras is massive and there are just not enough people working on it for its size. This is the difference between a commercial piece of kit and free software.
People can only afford so much time for free - they have to live!

Jomres + features of Jombok could be a goer for this.
JEvents is shortly to release a paypal integration extension.
This would I presume enable you to buy off a calendar.
It cannot be as good a Jomres - because it ultimately is a calendar and lacks the booking engine.
Look at how many files are in the mini components of Jomres - then you know how many cogs are in the machine.


I think Jomres could also be tours/events selling software.
The fundamental clockwork is there - but I also think it would be months of work to make it happen.
I think is could be bigger than Jomres as it is.

You then take Jomres into direct conflict with Virtuemart and the online stores.
You are selling time with a product - so that could be a property between certain dates, hire of any item between dates - a holiday between dates.
But to sell the tours you also have to sell the pretty much as a stack of items with the attribute of the tour that distinguishes the tours being the date attribute - so by the same token you could make the attribute that is different colour, size or anything - then this is a store selling anything you can imagine.

The software should be gear up to make selling time easier than VM - because I'll tell you from experience loading packages into VM is so long winded it is too much.

[Vince]

I was thinking of something reasonably simple, just as a mental plaything at this moment in time.

What does a tour entail?

Dates. Check, we can do this.
Guest numbers. Ditto.
Taking wonga. I think we know how to do this.

Next, you've got an itinery.

2 Nights in Rome
3 Nights in Napels
1 Night in Huddersfield.

So....to configure a tour:

You could start off with taking the dates and the total number of nights for the tour, and the maximum number of people. Oh, and the price per person.
Then you ask for the number of towns/cities/whatever.
Then you can associate a night with a town.
Finally, as Jomres knows it's the authority for availability (I know it's not, but it would have to assume that it was) it will then be able to query each property in the requested towns to see what's available. If the propertys have enough beds available (note, beds not rooms) then they can be added to a proposal list.
The property managers are somehow invited to participate in the tour at an arbitrary agreed price (one that could be configure in step one or thereabouts) and if they choose to take part then the system can automatically black book the appropriate number of rooms of type N (one would assume that we'd choose the default room type again up there somewhere).
Once all of the propertys have agreed to take part at N price per night then you can go ahead. The simplest way of managing payments is for the tour arranger to actually pay the hotels over the phone or something.

None of that's particularly difficult (although, time consuming) and it could quite happily sit on top of Jomres as an extra, paid plugin.

[Vince]

Oh, and it would be up to the tour arranger to actually organise transport etc too.

[stbrides]

Come on Vince!
You must know that tours involving the likes of Huddersfield and Barnsley are way out of the price bracket of all but people like Simon Cowell with his potential  $100 million contract to appear on American Idol.

[Vince]

Cue disparaging remarks about idle Americans and Ilkley Moor bar'tat.

On a more serious note, it seems that there are different interpretations of what a tour should equate to, so it's a discussion that should run for a lot longer before I start  putting fingers to keyboard.

(Folks, if you didn't get it, that's an invitation to get involved in the discussion).

[extension]

My idea was in an other direction...
As well as you now can search and find Hotels, Yacts, Campsites etc. within a giver period it would then also be possible to get different type of attractions (based upon data/time) to show up. And for me it's doesn't matter you have to order to or more places. Not necessarily as a package from one company.

Regards
Boris

[Piranha]

I see a tour like a package with a price per person.

We create a MRP "Europe tour 7 days by bus", add it`s description "1 night paris, 1 night rome, 1 night london..., hotel details in each city,...etc" and rooms will be places available. How many? Let`s say 30 in each bus or airplane. We don`t define any guest type (so the box won`t show up on booking form) and threat rooms as seats. If a user books for 10 guests, he will have to select 10 rooms/seats (a dropdown box customization would be nice here to select number of rooms rooms). We can even define extras like tickets to local attractions or something.
We can also enable fixed period bookings.
The price will be per room(seat) in this case.

Anyway, this is how I would do it. But maybe I`m getting wrong the "tours" stuff.

[stbrides]

No need to reinvent the wheel - there are lots of companies selling packages.
Go to the Co-op in Ammandford and look.

At the moment Jomres sells time in a house/villa/room

There is the possibility of offering the customer extras.

If the person renting the house wants to offer other add ons, I'll not say it is difficult as an extra with a property rental - but where the component cannot deliver is you can't buy the extras unless you are renting the property - nor can you come back after the contract to add items in.

Lets say you offer apartments in Italy.

People come to the site - they rent an apartment.

You also offer free standing - trips to the vineyard, trip to the theatre, diving lessons, trip to the moon on a rocket ship every third Friday.

The punter is interested in this after the booking.
Or they decide on another apartment with someone else - but really like the idea of a trip to the moon on a rocket ship.

To have a system where product can be sold independent of the property - off a calendar, which is easy to configure - lots of automation, like many of the calendar systems do - you sent it so there is a trip to the moon on the third Friday of the month until 2050 - it is done in a click.
You try that with VM and you will be loading the trips into the software until 2050, - well it will be hours and hours of work.

Now you might say - but there must be stuff like that on the market - well yes and no.

There is Freeway - a lovely shopping system with a cart and checkout and lots of gateways.....
But it is bugged and it does not work with Joomla nicely at all.
It sells lessons and events and all this timed products a treat - but I can't get it to work easily and a chap warned me off saying he had spent months at it.

Vince from your point of view - it might be a separate component - but there is nothing out there that does this.
There is nothing that brings together - the display - the calendar - the gateways - the cart

If you have those the user can come to the site - pick the property, the trips, the extras -----> into the cart ----> checkout ----> happy customer.

The packages are just other items - only the combination of items has been pre-selected.

A skiing package is just sold like any other item where the attribute distinquishing items is time.
Ski packages for first week Feb in Bravo lodge, ski packages second week Feb in Bravo lodge and so on. The package includes.....
The number of guests in the package - well that depends on your accommodation usually - so if Bravo lodge has 11 place free for first week Feb - then you can book up to 11 places.

You then are talking about a countdown system like good old VM.
It is VM - but it is better.

For whatever reason there is this hole in the market in Joomla - sooner or later someone will fill it with a product that will sell like VM - has the countdown, cart, checkout, gateways - BUT also includes the calendar and easy input of product into the database by the webmaster.
It is just possible with VM - but it is mind numbingly repetative to create the hundreds of child products and configure them. And there is no ruddy calendar display - well there is the world famous hack that I have never seen pulled off on a working website.

[navajofra]

I don´t know why you are making so many words about tour booking possibilitis.
In deed jomres has the functionality to book tours. Tours for 1 to 2 persons, 3 to 5, etc, 2 days, for different days or packages.
I use jomres as a tour booking engine already for half a year.
The only thing which I don´t like and which has to be updated is that in case of booking a tour the system confirms one day more than originally booked. This is because accommodation are counted on nights, but tours schould be counted on days.
If someone books a 1 day tour starting on the first and ending on the first, he gets the confirmation that the tours ends on the second which is obviously wrong.

 

[stbrides]

We make so many words as the software isn't able to do what we would like.

I know what you are saying - I looked and looked for an event selling software for Joomla.#
I most definitely looked at Jomres - for me it kept blowing up the site and exceeded RAM memory.
 
Yes you can have "hotel" Tour of Almeria but lets say you have 50 places to sell on it.
You will need "50 rooms".
Throw in some variations and combinations and from my experience it will crash.

Or not even a big trip - you might like the software to sell events/trips - Vince has introduced a plugin for events in the area. Great now try to sell them.

What if there is a trip to the moon every third Friday, second Wednesday and every Monday. There are 25 places for sale on Wednesday and Fridays but 100 places on a Monday.
You can have "hotel" trip to the moon and change the language files to suit but the software struggles when you pump up the volume on numbers - which is quite likely if you sell them as free standing product.

A system whereby you stack them up, count them down and have a cart/checkout can work for a billion trips to the moon. Harness the booking engine in Jomres and you have something different to the way it is now. A variation that will sell tours.

So you might say get Virtuemart - but no-one who says that has ever loaded in a years worth of golf packages in 5 variations. And still there is no proper display calendar - so you try to add in a calendar, but you want to be able to book off it. In the end there isn't the kit out there without serious hacking of multiple bits of software.

[Vince]

the software struggles when you pump up the volume on numbers

Ahem, your server struggles, not the software. The software can run happily if it's got the hardware to support it, but if you're pushing the hardware to it's limits then something's going to give.



What this thread serves to demonstrate is the different ways people think that tours should work, hence why I've never seriously sat down to make changes to fit that into the way the system works to facillitate this because nobody's ever adequately described what the changes should be.

[stbrides]

Yes Vince it is my server - every time I have opened up the throttle on Jomres it has run out of fuel.
I have wasted days trying to get round it.
I know if I had 4Gb on RAM I could laugh at anything but I don't.
Maybe whatever the combo I would have to move onto a dedicated server.

I have sh404SEF and Joomfish to satisfy - expand the remit of Jomres and my server tells Joomla the fuel line has been cut off.

A cart (like VM)
A stack em up, count em down system (like VM)
A way to display on the page (like VM)
A load up of events/trips (like JEvents
A strong calendar system of display (like JEvents)

A melding together of JEvents - VM - Jomres

Because everything is there but no-one has joined the pieces together.