Dear customers, dear partners,

the last weeks have prompted optimism: booking figures are developing positively, in some weeks even scratching the mark of the pre-Corona year 2019. But now the brutal events in Ukraine cast a dark, sad shadow over the coming months – with as yet unforeseeable consequences also for our industry.

To further support you in your business, we have however again implemented smart solutions in our latest DaVinci Release 1094. PayPal as a newly included payment method for bookings in tour operator websites is likely to offer added value for you and your customers. Much potential also comes with the new Sales Steering for web sales, which helps to optimize your occupancy in a targeted manner.

More details on these and other topics from the DaVinci world can be found below. We look forward to your feedback and will be happy to provide you with further information!

Michael Becher
CEO

The „Best of“ of DaVinci Release 1094
PayPal as new payment method in websites of DaVinci users
Optimize occupancy through flexible sales steering
Airfare rules on the itinerary – also for dynamic flights

More news from DaVinci and Dynamic Production
“Fake Bookings” in flexFlight facilitate test scenarios
Online cancellation with service providers in flexHotel

Technical Data
System Requirements DaVinci
Release Dates DaVinci

PayPal is one of the most popular payment methods in the German e-commerce market: In 2020, around 25% of online sales in Germany were processed via this uncomplicated procedure, which is also being used more and more frequently for online travel bookings.

BEWOTEC now offers the integration of PayPal payment in travel websites in interaction with DaVinci bookings. The only prerequisite is the contractual relationship between the tour operator and PayPal. The payment process runs exactly as customers are used to from other e-commerce applications:

After the successful booking request against the DaVinci system, all available payment methods are displayed for the selected offer on the website of the tour operator. Selecting PayPal opens the PayPal portal via a link that can be integrated by any website service provider. There, login and payment approval for the customer run as usual.

In DaVinci, the order ID generated by PayPal is stored via the “DI” method and the payment scheduled via the new PayPal plugin. Of course, the payment method “PayPal” is also stored in the payment information of the transaction. DaVinci also allows to subsequently switch to another payment method if it turns out later that a PayPal payment was not possible – for example, due to an uncovered credit card of the customer.

In the case of rebookings, subsequent debits can also be carried out, provided that the order ID has been released for “amount overdrafts” in agreement between PayPal and the tour operator. The refund of a PayPal payment is also possible, for example for refunding a customer’s deposit for a trip that was cancelled by the provider after booking.

Occupancy management is an important key to revenue optimization for tour operators. For distribution via the tour operator website, DaVinci Version 1094 provides a new application, which is used to steer the daily export of OTDS offer data.

By determining the variables individual hotel, complete regions/destinations, destination airports, and flight connections (or a combination of those) the tour operator can close or open offers for sales for specific markets over a freely definable period of time.

This new sales steering option, which we developed together with our customer Sunweb, is based in the OTDS area of DaVinci: All entries are automatically reflected in the OTDS export and thus influence the offer data that is displayed in the web sales-channel.

The possibility of combining several variables provides the the tour operator’s sales experts with sophisticated steering mechanisms. For example, single or multiple hotels (in the screenshot: Beachhouse, Hotel Test) can be closed for travel to one or more destination airports (CHQ, HER) from a market (France) for a specific period (1.3. – 31.3.) in order to redirect sales to alternatives. Conversely, specific offers can of course also be switched to “bookable” in order to force sales for a specific period and block all other periods.

The new sales steering has no effect on the general bookability via GenVas, as it only affects the OTDS export and thus controls the offer display in the channels supplied with OTDS.

The complexity of airfare rules has increased continuously in recent years. Particularly with dynamic airline providers, transparency for the customer often fell short because the rules could not be displayed in the itinerary, for example.

Due to an extension of the report scope, the text fields in the DaVinci “Airfares” dialog, in which the fare rules (also multilingual) can be stored, are now also read out. Their display can be specified for any document, the most common being the imprint on the travel itinerary and the invoice.

By the way, this dialog can in general also be used to display the airfare rules for internal flights on itineraries or other documents. However, it is still possible to include and communicate them via the booking code.

Tour operators who work with dynamic flights are familiar with this problem: Especially in the case of software updates or season changes, various booking scenarios need to be tested, but the airlines often only offer reduced routes or availabilities in their test systems that do not cover the needs of the test bookings. Processes that were intended as tests quickly turn into real bookings that can only be reversed with expensive ADMs.

Now, by activating the option “Offline-Test Flight Booking” in the DaVinci dialog CRS/External Systems, any number of “Fake Bookings” can be generated, which leave no traces in the airline system: For a “Fake Booking”, the underlying booking request (BA) is sent online to the airline. The resulting response is cached by BEWOTEC.

Now the test booking (B) can run offline as a “Fake Booking” against the cache and is answered with the stored information from the BA. The live system of the airline is not involved. In DaVinci, these bookings are clearly identified by the addition of “FAKE” as part of the filekey, which can also be searched for to improve tracking.

If you would like to know more about this free service function, please contact your BEWOTEC consultant.

Cancellation with service providers in flexHotel is now easier, because it can be done online. Whereas cancellations previously had to be reported manually to the providers, they can now be made online with the hotel providers MTS, Hotelbeds, and Sunhotels for hotel and transfer services. When a cancellation is made, the service provider’s reservation number stored in DaVinci is sent to the hotel provider as a booking reference.

Online cancellation is now being rolled out to the bed banks that are already connected; for all bed banks to be connected in the future, it will be implemented during the corresponding integration process.

• OS: Windows 8 / Server 2012 R2 / Windows 10 / Server 2016
• SQL: Server 2016 / Server 2017 / Server 2019 (including full-text-search)
• ODBC Driver: SQL Server Native Client 11.0
• Microsoft Framework 3.5 SP1  / 4.8

• Microsoft XML Parser 4.0 SP2 (x86)
• Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable Package (x86)  2010 / 2013 / 2015 / 2017 / 2019
• Crystal Report: Runtime 2013
• Microsoft ReportViewer  2015  Redistributables (in case of using Reporting Services Reports within DaVinci)

• Version 1091: May 31, 2021
• Version 1092: June 15, 2021
• Version 1093: September 30, 2021
• Version 1094: February 11, 2022