Campground Master Online Reservations Support

The most robust online reservation support is available through our interface with Leisure Interactive (formerly Friend Communications), using a real-time interface with their Hercules online booking engine (also known as "Reservation Friend").

This real-time 2-way integration is only available with Campground Master and Hercules.

You can seamlessly integrate their online engine with your own web site to have sophisticated online booking capabilities, and Campground Master can import those reservations made through Hercules completely automatically. Availability is automatically updated online as well, so you don't have to maintain both systems. All of your data is stored locally in Campground Master, and also synchronized with the online booking system continuously and fully automatically.

If for some reason Hercules doesn't suit your needs, the program also provides some other options (below) for manually integrating Campground Master with your web site.

This interface with Leisure Interactive enables Campground Master to provide online reservations support with a 2-way "real time" interface, rather than the one-way semi-automatic interface previously employed.

This means that you can make your complete site inventory available online all of the time -- rather than just part of it, part of the time. The availability shown to customers booking through your web site (via the Hercules gateway) will always match the availability in Campground Master, eliminating the possibility of double-booking. All of this will work as a natural integration with your own web site, as well as through various marketing portals which increase your exposure and bring in more customers.

Likewise, reservations made online through Hercules will immediately and automatically be reflected in Campground Master (optionally tagged as "pending approval" until you review them), rather than having to manually retrieve them periodically. You will still have the ability to change or reject online-submitted reservations if necessary, so you don't give up any control of your inventory.

Contact us for more information, or contact Leisure Interactive to get started with your online setup. Contact them at 866-644-8019 (option 2) or [email protected] for information about their services and pricing structure.

Important Update -- Make sure Hercules will use your existing credit card merchant account that they can link to directly, so that the reservation deposits go directly into your account. If you use the X-Charge or MCPS credit card options which are also supported by Campground Master, then those are easily linked. For other merchant accounts, they can use a "gateway" (e.g. Payflow Pro), but that incurs a small additional cost per transaction.

If you have any questions about how Campground Master works with Hercules, feel free to contact us.

If you want to read the complete documentation, you can find it here: Friend_2_way.pdf

We believe in maximum flexibility, so we give you some other choices if you prefer a do-it-yourself solution. These are not real-time like the Hercules solution described above so it can't prevent double bookings, for instance, but may be sufficient for your needs. You can use one part of the functionality or any combination of parts which will interact with your own web site or even apps like Google Calendar:

• Retrieve and extract data submitted on your own web site's reservation forms.
  
  
• Create "vacancy grid" web pages with availability data and upload them to your own web site.
  
  
• Export "iCal" (iCalendar) files to load with calendar applications or web sites that support them.
  
  
• Import "iCal" (iCalendar) files from services that provide them.