🎉 New Feature Release: Rich Text Editor for Better Customization 📝

We’re excited to announce the addition of our new Rich Text Editor—a game-changer for anyone looking to elevate their content within the Ripe platform!

What’s New?
Our Rich Text Editor is now seamlessly integrated into both the Reservation Email Builder and the Ripe Landing Page Builder. This update allows you to customize your content with greater ease and flexibility. Here’s what you can do:

• Enhanced Formatting: Customize your text with bold, italics, and underline to make your content pop.
• Hyperlinking: Easily add links to important pages, driving engagement and directing users where they need to go.
• Streamlined Editing: With a more intuitive interface, editing your content is now faster and more efficient.

Why This Matters:
Whether you’re crafting the perfect reservation email or creating a compelling landing page, our Rich Text Editor makes it simpler than ever to create professional, visually appealing content that resonates with your guests and visitors.

Email Reservation Template

We recommend you only include links for evergreen content, for example, a link to the general events page is good, but don't link to a specific event as it becomes dated and a dead-end page. Other helpful links could include airport shuttle information, or unique and rich content specific to families.

Landing Pages

These are often event-specific, so it can be helpful to link to event-specific content on your website. However, keep in mind that users are in the conversion funnel for booking their lodging so the ultimate goal is to not distract too much so they can find the perfect hotel or home for them.

How to Get Started:
Simply head to the Reservation Email Builder or Landing Page Builder within your Ripe dashboard, and start exploring the new text formatting options. No learning curve, just more power at your fingertips.

Thank you for your continued trust in Ripe. We’re committed to delivering features that enhance your experience and empower you to achieve more. Stay tuned for more exciting updates!

We’re excited to announce our integration with Mailchimp. This new feature connects your Ripe platform seamlessly with Mailchimp, making it easier than ever to manage and optimize your email marketing campaigns.

What’s New:

• Effortless Synchronization: Automatically sync opt-in guest email addresses between Ripe and Mailchimp, ensuring your mailing lists are always up-to-date.

• Targeted Campaigns: Use rich guest data already found within Ripe to to create personalized, targeted email campaigns that drive engagement and bookings.
• Real-Time Analytics: Leveraging the power of Mailchimp you already have access to powerful insights into your email performance.
• Navigate to the booking engine settings within Ripe to quickly setup the integration.

Read more, including detailed setup instructions here.

As always, if you have any questions or need support, our team is here to help.

We're excited to announce a new feature update to our search results page. Previously, we only displayed the per-night rate for reservations. Now, in compliance with CA Bill 537, we will also show the total amount due, including taxes and fees for all nights. The total will remain on the checkout page where it is itemized but this change will introduce it earlier in the user experience.

This enhancement ensures transparency and makes it easier for travelers to understand the full cost of their stay. We're rolling this out for all clients and connectivity providers, not just those in California. We are doing this because it's a better practice overall and helps prevent surprises at checkout with hidden fees. We've already made this update for properties connected via Expedia and Sabre and are actively adding all other connections now.

Attention affiliates and events -- one of our most requested features is now available.

Ripe offers an add-on feature to assist with event housing for teams, meetings & conventions, or festivals. Once rates have been contracted with the hotel (we can help do this) we use the Ripe CRS to load negotiated rates & room blocks for the specified hotels.

Event Housing is an add-on feature where the cost is based on the room revenue booked. Rates vary depending on the size of your event, but generally, we use per-room night rebates to be included in the negotiated rate. If you're interested reach out to your client success manager to learn more.

Learn more about Event Housing here

We've made some improvements in our platform to return properties on the main Search Results Page even faster. Most clients and affiliates will show property listings within 4s now.

In some cases, if you are using the random sort order for the search results page the user will see a refresh and re-ordering of results about 10-15 seconds in. This is being addressed for the future, but to resolve it now we recommend switching to manual sort order within the CRS and this will no longer happen.

Prior to today once a Ripe hosted reservation was made you could only modify certain parts of it like contact information. Now, as a client, support or property manager you can also modify the dates and rates of the reservation, plus guest name, email and contact info. The ability to edit reservations within RIpe is specific to properties and rooms hosted on Ripe in our CRS, and does not apply to live connections to Sabre, Expedia, Streamline and other global distribution system or connectivity partners.

Primary use case: The primary reservation type this will benefit is group and block reservations where a negotiated rate and room block was used. Example, a soccer team originally booked Thursday-Sunday for a local tournament using a Ripe hosted group block. If that team lost and was out of the tournament a day early on Saturday morning, that reservation can now be modified in Ripe to match the actual check-out of the hotel, keeping all systems in-sync.

Just a heads up that we're making some upgrades to keep everything running smoothly for you! We’ve scheduled a database upgrade for Tuesday, May 14th, from 4-5 AM MDT. We’re keeping it to the wee hours to hopefully dodge any disruptions during your peak hours.

You might see up to 30 minutes of downtime while we're at it. This is all part of our plan to ensure no hiccups happen during checkout and to eliminate any risk of failed reservations. If you happen to be online, you'll see our maintenance screen during this time.

If you're setting up an affiliate or want to freshen up an existing one here are two things to know:

1. Affiliates can have their own curated list of properties. So if the client (remember, affiliates live under the client) has 75 properties, but the affiliates event is centralized to a specific area or cliental, they can choose to show just the 15 or 20 that are relevant. Additionally, affiliates can set a unique sort order for their properties to appear in. This means the official host hotel, or a sponsor hotel can be at the top of the list when otherwise it may not be that high.
2. Rename the special request field at checkout -- As more and more teams are joining as affiliates we've heard the need to include things like team name so groups are booked together and communication is made easier based on who as reserved their rooms. Starting today you can override the "Special Requests" field name found on checkout with whatever makes sense for you, like "Team Name" or "Group Name".

We're very excited to share that event and hotel block services are coming soon, available at the affiliate level. With this new suite of features and services from Ripe clients and affiliates will be able to support negotiated rates and block inventory for events coming to town. Previously an affiliate could show only select hotels, but couldn't support a negotiated rate or block inventory. With Ripe's Event Housing feature, you can support your events or those of your affiliates that have negotiated rooms and rates, without discounting them on your primary site.

Stay tuned or get in touch with your account manager to learn more.

Welcome to release notes!

New Search Results Page

Our new Search Results Page (SRP) is now live for most clients. The goal - be much faster for mobile and desktop users.

Depending on the inventory sources the legacy SRP could take up to 30 seconds to load. The new SRP will show interactive property listings in as little as 3 seconds. Some instancs are still longer than our goal of less than 4s and we continue to optimize where we can, look for more updates in the near future.

We load and show the first 20 properties as fast as possible, then continue loading the remaining properties asynchronously, meaning as soon as the user goes to the next page there is no delay.

Primary Highlights

• Faster page load
• Multiple map bug issues were resolved, primarily around map pins and zoom
• Improved mobile experience, including swipeable property images and clear call-to-action
• A new setting allows you to show or hide sold-out properties by default
• A new setting allows you to show all properties on a single results page (not recommended for more than 50 properties)

Improved Value Add Experience

Value Adds have also gotten improvements

1. We’ve consolidated multiple value adds into a single, smaller footprint by utilizing a drop-down option.
2. If only a single value add is offered there is no need to select, it automatically applies.
3. The user can now re-open the value-add prompt after dismissing it on the SRP.

Other Notes

• Refer to the highlighted section from our now retired SRP. We've cleaned up each listing by doing the following:

1. We only show amenities that exist, so the opaque options have been removed. These are also represented in the filters on the page.
2. Inside Scoop and Room Rates have been removed. These two elements saw less than 2% engagement across the platform, with no single client site having considerably more. Further, Room Rates is an expensive API call in terms of performance since it's looking up rates for every room on the listing page, regardless if it was clicked. Removing it has helped speed up the page considerably.