Products and Services

Revolution™ was released today, with some notable new features.

Revolution™ and Email Marketing from Constant Contact

Constant Contact is the web’s leading email marketing solution, enabling you to send high-impact e-newsletters to you customer list. Revolution™ now integrates with Constant Contact, making your mailing list maintenance completely automatic:

• Export your Revolution™ customer list, for easy import into Constant Contact
• New emails addresses from Revolution™ customers are imported nightly to your Constant Contact account
• Send e-newsletters to your customer list through Constant Contact’s secure and powerful admin panel

If you use Revolution™ on your website, and are interested in activating the Constant Contact Module, contact our support department.

Have Your Customers Read Your Rental Policies?

Misunderstandings at the rental counter are frustrating for everyone. Now you can ask your customers to read your rental policies before they submit their reservation. If you enable this option, on the customer information form, the following message will appear

“I have read, understand and agree to the Rental Policies”

with a checkbox, and a direct link to your rental policies page (in a popup, so they don’t navigate away from the reservation). The customer is required to check-off this field in order to submit their reservation.

Find it: Manager » Rental Center » Rental Center Options » Messages

Kayak Program: Free Clicks for your Clickbank

If you are part of our Kayak Program, you will now receive 3 free clicks for every 100 purchased. This allows you to periodically test your Kayak listings, and click-thru to your landing pages without incurring the click cost.

Find it: Manager » Network » Kayak Program

Updates for WebLink Clients

There are a couple of notable enhancements available for WebLink clients.

Rental Length Restrictions and Pickup Time Margin

Create minimum and maximum rental length restrictions for selected vehicles. Renters will be informed of the restriction when they submit their itinerary, so they understand why a rate quote is not being returned.

Find it: Manager » Rental Center » Rental Length Restrictions

You can also now set a minimum pickup time margin; the length of time the customer must book in advance. If the customer’s pickup time is under this cut-off, they will be prompted to call your rental location for rates and availability.

Find it: Manager » Rental Center » Rental Center Options » Itinerary Options

Policy Conditions

Rental policies can now be given location and vehicle conditions. When after the customer has chosen a their rate quote, only the policies matching these conditions will display.

Find it: Manager » Rental Policies

Revolution 1.5 brings a heap of new features and enhancements to your online reservation system, providing that you’re using the best system available on the web… Revolution. Here’s a summary of the heavy hitters:

Seasonal Hours of Operation

Do your locations’ hours of operation fluctuate from winter to summer? In Revolution Manager, you can create multiple hours of operation for each location, and specify date ranges for each. When a customer has submitted their itinerary, Revolution will first try to find a set of hours that matches their pickup date. If there are no special seasonal hours, it will use your “Base Hours”.

Drop-off hours can also be made date specific.

The Locations Module will show your current hours of operation (based on today’s date) and will also look forward to the next set of hours in the future, and display those to the customer.

Find it here in Manager: Revolution > Hours of Operation

Manager Site Map

If you find yourself lost in Manager’s extensive configuration menu, you can now turn to the “Site Map”, found in the top-right of the navigation menu. The Site Map will show you your current page, as well as previous pages that you have visited recently.

Rate Code Date Range Spans

Need to know what rate codes will apply on a particular pickup date? See you seasonal rate codes at a glance in Manager’s Rate Code editor. A colored graph is displayed showing each date range and the rate code it relates to.

Find it here in Manager: Revolution > Rental Center > Rates Admin > Rate Codes

View Modified Reservation History

Now in Manager, while viewing a reservation, you can see if the reservation was modified from a previous reservation, or whether it has since been modified. The reservation view panel now contains a “View Modification” link that will click through to the modification details.

Find it here in Manager: Reports > Reservations

Customer Vehicle Preference

In previous versions of Revolution, when the customer choose a vehicle preference, they were shown a detailed quote for that vehicle only. In Manager, you can now choose to show the customer other vehicle options, but “highlight” their preferred vehicle at the top of the search results.

Find it here in Manager: Revolution > Rental Center > Rental Center Options > Rate Quotes

Location Module Enhancements

Now customers can see all hour locations at a glance on a dynamic Google map, and search for the location nearest to them. Click here to see an example.

When a Week is not a Week

Instead of the default time unit for each rental period (per week = 7 days) you can now override this setting, and set the number of days and hours for each rental period’s time unit. Recommended for advanced users only…!

Find it here in Manager: Revolution > Rental Center > Rates Admin > Rental Periods

Not using Manager yet? It’s time to switch. You can easily set up your Manager account through the CRX Administrative Workstation.

Revolution 1.4.3 includes some important features for our clients. Here’s a brief overview of some of the changes and enhancements:

Combined Rates Administration: Seasonal and Rates Matrix

Does your company need the flexibility of tailoring some rates for a competitive market, while other rates can remain constant over longer periods of time? It’s now possible to administer speciifc rate codes under the Rates Matrix, which varies by calendar day, yet have the other rate codes as Seasonal Rates.

You must be using Revolution Manager to take advantage of this new feature. On the rate code administration page, choose which rate codes you want to administer under each management tool. If you are not using Manager yet, contact us and we will setup up your account.

Maps and Directions in the Locations Module

The Locations module now includes a location overview map, and interacting driving directions to each location (provided by Google™ maps). All Revolution Core and Pro clients that use the locations module will see this addition to their websites in the upcoming weeks.

Reserve a Vehicle or Request More Information

In Manager and the Workstation, you have had the option to allow vehicles to be reserved, or for the customer to request for information, or both.

Now on the detailed rate quote page, the customer will see either/or/both buttons, and continue to submit their reservation or inquiry.

ExpressITech is pleased to announce a joint venture partnership with Kayak, the web’s premier travel search engine.

Participating car rental agencies will be listed on Kayak.com and Sidestep.com’s search results.

Read about our Kayak Program and it’s advantages.

According to Kayak, the conversion rate from clickthru to reservation is between 10% - 12%. The cost of the program starts at $2.25 per clickthru, and there are no further charges. You pay only for the clicks to your website, or standard reservation page (if you do not use Revolution on your website). You receive 100% of the revenue from all Kayak sourced reservations.

If you sign up before Monday July 14th, we will credit your click bank with 25 free clickthrus with a minimum purchase of 25 clicks.

Click here to get started.

Revolution 1.4.1 is a minor release. Here are a couple highlights:

Support Tickets

Manager users can now create support tickets directly from any page in Manager. Click on “Submit Support Ticket” in the sidebar, and enter your ticket. The current Manager admin page, and your user information are automatically submitted with the ticket.

Tickets can be viewed and administered in the Support section of Manager.

Classic Menu

Clients who were more familiar with the CRX Adminstrative Workstation can now click on “Classic Menu” to view Manager’s pages in the style of the previous menu. We hope this helps our clients navigate Manager more smoothly!

Revolution Trial

Now prospective clients can sign up for a Revolution Trial, where they can test drive Revolution and Manager for 14 days.

We are happy to announce that Revolution Version 1.4 has been released. Here’s a brief description of the new features available to Revolution Core and Pro users.

Multiple Product Reservations

Enable your customers to book multiple vehicles in one streamlined booking process! This Revolution Extension allows the customer to choose the number of vehicles they would like to reserve from your vehicles and rates page. The rate quote summary shows a sum-total price of all the vehicle quantities that the customer has booked.

Revolution Manager’s availability matrix allows you to control the maximum number of vehicles the customer can rent (by calendar date, or a fixed number for any day of the year). If you are a TSD WebLink client, you can use RezCentral’s utilization calendar to dynamically control availability for each car class.

Each vehicle is booked as a unique reservation, with a separate confirmation number. All the regular reporting features apply, as if the reservations were booked independently.

For more information on enabling this extension, contact ExpressITech Support.

More Enhancements and Updates

View Reservation Emails. From Manager’s Reservation Report, view all past email correspondence associated with any reservation, including new confirmation emails, replies from your company, modification requests and cancellation emails.

Availability Matrix. The availability matrix has been upgraded to include filters for pickup date or over the whole span of the rental length.

Blackout Dropdown. In Manager, toggle between blackout periods using the drop down navigation.

Dependent Rates Unit. A default unit ($ or %age) can now be set for dependent rates. When you create a new dependent rate code, it will automatically set the values to vary from their parent by this default. It can be changed from the default setting for any vehicle or rental period.