Online booking of accommodation and activities

Springhill Farm Holiday Accommodation offer pet friendly accommodation nestled on the Northumbrian coastline between Seahouses and Bamburgh, including self catering holiday cottages, touring site, lodges and Wigwam cabins. Recently Springhill Farm have also introduced an Autumn Pumpkin Patch and trail experience, tickets are bookable online.

Client brief

Sarah Gregory at Springhill Farm approached us looking for a Property Mangagemen and online booking system. Her requirements were quite bespoke as she wanted to manage weekly cottage bookings, alongside nightly touring and glamping bookings all from one portal. Over time we also introduced additional bespoke features such as goft voucher purhasing and redemption, booking extras and pumpkin patch ticketing.

Software functionality and application

There are a number of different areas of the Springhill 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 

• Set up events (e.g. Pumpkin Patch).
• 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.Pumpkin Patch on 14/10/2023 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.)

Ticket purchase

• A separate customer facing booking screen (similar to Accommodation Booking) where anyone can view upcoming events and purchase tickets subject to availability.  
• Payments for tickets taken through merchant service provider

Gift voucher system

• Step 1: Allow visitors to purchase gift vouchers – Create an option on the booking system where the customer can select the value of their Gift Voucher and name a recipient, then purchase the gift voucher online via your chosen merchant service provider (Opayo). When payment is made the voucher is automatically set to expire after a set period of time (e.g. 12 months) and is ready for use as soon as purchased. The client is e-mailed the basic details of the voucher including recipient name, unique voucher code and value. Note that this only allows one voucher to be purchased per transaction and does not include a shopping basket to allow the purchase of multiple vouchers. Shopping basket functionality is more complex and would add a further £200 to the cost. You could always add this at a later date if you wish.
• Step 2: create one attractive printable PDF voucher – if you wanted to create an attractive printable voucher that you could either print and post or email (via PDF) for occasions when you wanted to give a gift voucher away - for a charity event for example, or attached to the customers e-mail for them to give as a gift and also shows the expiry date, value and code. 
• Step 3: Allow the gift vouchers to be spent as part of an online booking purchase – the voucher could be used by customers when booking at Flamborough online and it’s value automatically deducted from the cost of the booking. To implement this would cost 

Angelfish comments

The team at Springhiill are always a pleasure to work with and we have really enjoyed evolving the system over the last 10 years. The system also links with  Wigwam Holidays via an API connection.