Glamping and activity bookings

Humble Bee Farm offers a range of glamping, camping and self catering cottages close to the stunning Yorkshire coast. This working farm also offers a variety of fun activities for kids and adults from Pumpkin picking and spooky Halloween trails to alpaca experiences and lambing events.

Client brief

The original project was to develop an online booking system for their range of luxury wooden cabins, cottages and camping site.

Since its inception we have evolved the system to include activity booking and ticketing system, sophisticated marketing and occupancy/sales reporting and instalment payment system.

Software functionality and application

There are a number of different areas of the Humble Bee Farm system which have evolved over the years, basic functionality includes:

Accommodation booking system

• Secure (SSL protected), password protected admin site where you can log in and manage bookings, prices, customers, minimum stay rules, deposit rules etc.
• Flexible pricing and minimum stay allowing variations for unit type, date/season and number of adults/children/infants/dogs.
• Full booking calendar and diary allowing you to easily view bookings and search for/edit a particular booking.
• Customisable e-mail templates for booking confirmation, cancellation, pre-arrival and other events as required.
• Public booking system to allow visitors to select accommodation type, required number of units, add optional extras (e.g. firepit, awning), view total cost and pay deposit* (up to 100% of booking).
• The public booking system is also security (SSL) protected would be designed using the colours and branding on your own website so the customer experience is that they are booking within your website.

* Payment of deposits are processed via your own merchant service account, we are currently compatible with either PayPal, WorldPay or Opayo and the initial integration set up between one of these three systems and your Angelfish system is included in this quote. We are also in the process of completing our integration with Stripe.

Ticketing system

Admin Site (to be added to existing admin site)

• Set up events (e.g. Stargazing, Santa’s Grotto).
• Set up tickets for each events (e.g. adult, child, family) with appropriate costs and booking limits.
• Set up date/time based sessions for each event using a simple calendar (e.g. Santa’s Grotto on 14/12/2019 at 10am, 12pm, 2pm, 4pm) with maximum person restrictions on each session.
• View tickets purchased online for each session and manually add bookings for offline sales (e.g. from other sites, phone sales, etc.)

Online Booking

• When making an accommodation booking users could optionally add tickets for event sessions, for those sessions that overlap their stay and subject to availability.  This would be added to the total cost of their booking as extras and would also count as sold tickets in the ticketing system.

Customer Portal

• Allow users to book tickets for events via their customer portal

Ticket Purchase

• A separate customer facing booking screen (similar to Accommodation Booking) where anyone can view your upcoming events and purchase tickets subject to availability.  Payment would be taken through WorldPay and the ticketing admin system updates to show new sales.

Instalment payment system

• Ability to set up payment plan rules depending on how far in advance the booking is (e.g. 25% up front followed by monthly instalments of the remainder up to 6 weeks before arrival, then the balance payable 6 weeks before arrival).
• Ability to customise payment plans on a per booking basis (e.g. for special cases).
• System automatically e-mails payment requests when they are due and keeps a record of e-mails sent out.
• System automatically adds payment details when payment confirmation is received from WorldPay (or you can add payment details manually if payment is taken any other way).
• Report/s to show all outstanding bookings with instalment payment schedules & statuses.

Angelfish comments

We have worked with Julia and John Warters and the team at Humble Bee Farm for many years now and it has been a pleasure to work on this system and to oversee its evolution.