The first half of 2024 has flown by here at freetobook, with a flurry of exciting developments and launches it’s been hard to keep track! So, here’s a little round up of what we’ve been up to.  

Firstly, the big one, bloom! Bloom is what we’ve called our beautiful new booking pages that you have been loving (we’re so grateful for all of your feedback). Bloom is another step on our mission to improve direct bookings for our customers [no.1 of our 7 pledges]. The last 5 years have seen a dramatic 66% increase in direct bookings but our commitment to improvement never ends! We’re currently working on an express checkout that will allow your guests to book in less than 15 seconds by removing the stage for manually entering their details. We have a feeling this will make us one of the fastest booking engines in the world – watch this space. 

To further drive direct bookings, we’re adding improvements to the Channel Manager which will make it easier to close out (and reopen) your OTA channels.  The Channel Manager will show your occupancy and events, giving you a clearer view of when to close the OTAs so you can fill the rest of your rooms directly!  We’re also creating a Pace report that will provide even more insight to help you make these decisions. 

This year we’ve ramped up our webinars to offer a more regular and detailed insight into the features we offer. Whether you’re new to features such as Messaging and Reputation Suite or already using them, the webinars act as a great chance to really discover what they’re capable of. The webinars also allow you to ask all your burning questions that our brilliant customer service team can answer there and then. 

But there’s still so much more to come! Elevate your guests’ experience to a whole new level with our new guest app called GuestAppy – no download required! We’re slowly rolling this out to a few select properties but the response from their guests has been overwhelmingly positive. Make every guest feel like a VIP and watch your reviews flourish. GuestAppy offers your guests a one-stop-shop for the personalised details about their booking, everything they need to know about your property (branded, of course), see all their messages with you and more. We can’t wait for you to see it. 

From elevating your guests’ experience to elevating yours, we’ve launched a new way of accepting payments that no other booking software is offering in the UK. Have an iPhone? Use Stripe? You’ll be able to download our brand new GuestTappy app (not to be confused with GuestAppy above!) and boom, your iPhone acts as the terminal to take payments directly from your guests. They can simply hold their card/device up to your iPhone and it will securely process the payment, just like that. This has been a hugely exciting project to work on with Apple and Stripe to roll this out for you, and to be amongst some of the first companies in the world to offer it is a great achievement for freetobook. 

As we look ahead, we see even more exciting challenges where technology can be a force for good, and we’re eager to share our constant developments with you. We also appreciate how many of you go out of your way to promote freetobook to other businesses, so thank you for that.  

Let’s see what the second half of 2024 has in store!