Rentalot Plus
Rentalot Plus is a rental management system for holiday properties with a lot of features and options so that you can run your business the way you want to. This page gives a brief overview of most of the features. For more detailed information you can download the PDF user guide.
The Front End
The front end of your site is your marketing engine and it's important that you are happy with the way information is presented. Rentalot Plus has many ways to display information about your accommodation, availability, and prices. Our demo site has lots of examples of different ways to configure the front end.The "Classic Availability" table is a simple table of dates, prices, and availability, which works very well for seasonal weekly lettings. It has many configuration and styling options, including links to the enquiry and on-line booking views. There's also the Classic Availability plugin that lets you include availability tables in articles.
The "Daily Calendar" view is better if you offer daily bookings. It can display any number of months in any number of columns, with prices shown in the day cells or as tool-tips. Again there are lots of options so you can configure it to suit your business. There's also the Daily Availability plugin.
The "Check" view lets people enter their preferred dates and receive a fully calculated price.
The "Search" view is ideal if you have a large number of properties, as it allows users to search by date, capacity, and features.
All the views have numerous parameters to fine tune their behaviour to suit your business. Accommodation descriptions can include any kind of content by including any number of Joomla plugins - so it's easy to include picture galleries, interactive maps, or videos.
Visitors can check availability and prices for any unit in any currency and can book or make enquiries online. Payment is accepted via PayPal or Skrill (Moneybookers) and configurable confirmation emails are sent to both you and the customer.
Pricing
Rentalot Plus calculates prices using "Price Periods". You can setup as many price periods as you want, each with its own unique price. A price period can be any length of time from a single day to an entire year. For example, if you only accept booking for complete weeks starting on a Saturday, you would setup a price period for each week. Your price periods don't have to be of equal length, so if you only do full weeks in high season, but accept daily bookings out of season, Rentalot Plus can easily handle that. If a client books a period of time that crosses multiple price periods, Rentalot Plus adds up the prices of the individual periods to calculate the total price. If a client wants to book part of a price period, he is charged the full price of any price period overlapped by the booking. How you setup your price periods depends entirely on your business, but Rentalot Plus should be able to handle most cases.Rentalot Plus also offers a great deal of flexibility in the way it calculates the payment schedule associated with bookings. The initial payment can be a fixed amount, a percentage of the total, or the whole amount. You can configure up to three further payments at variable dates.
Discounts
Up to ten different discount levels can be defined to apply to multi-period bookings. You can define different discount levels for different numbers of periods. Each discount level can be a percentage or a fixed amount. Individual price periods can be flagged as "discountable" or "not discountable".Extras
Rentalot Plus allows you to configure "Extras", or options. (By the way, you can choose the words you want to use for "Extras" and "Units" on all the front end pages.) Extras are a great way to offer choices to your customers, and make a bit of extra profit along the way. Rentalot Plus provides flexible pricing of extras as well as minimum and maximum numbers that can be ordered. If you use online booking, clients can book them at the same time as they book accommodation.Reminder Emails
The Notifier Plugin runs once per day to update the exchange rates for your chosen currencies and to send you reminders about payments due, guest arrivals, and departures. It's completely automatic, just install it, enable it, and forget about it - until it emails you!Reports
Rentalot Plus is designed to help you run your business easily so that you can concentrate on your customers. At the touch of a button you can see your gross profits, money due in and money due out. Want to see if it’s worth renewing an advertisement? Just click on the lead source pie chart. Want to see which extras make money and which don't? Just click on the Extras bar chart. The Housekeeping Schedule report has just the right information for preparing your accommodation and receiving your guests. Want to know what time of year is busiest for bookings? Try the Booking Trend Graph.Multi-Currency
Rentalot Plus will display prices in any currency you configure, and automatically update exchange rates from Yahoo finance every night. Customers can book in any of your offered currencies.Language Support
Both the back and front end use the standard Joomla language file system. Our first language is English but we also supply several user-contributed translations. We can't guarantee the quality or the completeness of these translations because as we add new features to the product we often need new language strings, which we do not attempt to translate into languages we do not know. We do maintain the French translation ourselves but we are always grateful for corrections. If you create or improve a translation file, please send it to us and we will add it to the next release.
Some items (unit names, unit descriptions, extra names and so on) are configured within Rentalot Plus, and you would normally configure these directly in your site language. For multi-language sites, we supply JoomFish and FaLang content element files so that you can use JoomFish or FaLang to translate these items. FaLang is a fork of JoomFish that supports newer versions of Joomla.
Styling
Rentalot Plus has its own css file, which it loads on all its front end pages. All the page elements have css classes, so if you know css you can style everything to your exact requirements. The colours of the daily availability table are also configured in the Rentalot Plus css file.Documentation
Like all our products, Rentalot Plus is fully documented. The User Guide explains every detail, from getting started to advanced usage of PayPal and Moneybookers. It may seem quite long, but there are lots of screenshots and examples, and you don't have to read it all at once!More Information
Is it For You? - is Rentalot Plus right for you?
Demo Site - where you can try out Rentalot Plus for yourself. You can make changes in the back end and see the effects on the front end.
Frequently Asked Questions - where we answer some of the most common questions about Rentalot Plus.
Pricing and Downloads - where you can see the pricing options, buy Rentalot Plus, and download the free PDF User Guide.
