Where do we start?
We designed and built Caterbook 5 from scratch. It's hosted in the South West of the UK, and uses Microsoft's cloud hosting platform "Azure".
All your data is encrypted at rest, and each account has it's own encryption keys to ensure that we more than meet the expected standards for GDPR. Additionally, we redact all Personally Identifiable Information from our OTA logs to minimise your data footprint, should a guest ever make a Subject Access Request.
We are a PCI compliant service provider, but don't take our word for it. Our infrastructure is annually audited and certified by a third party Qualified Security Assessor where other providers rely on self-assessment. No payment card data is ever transmitted, processed or stored on our infrastructure.
We have a built-in payment Gateway branded as "Caterpay". It allows for storing CVV on tokenisation which can reduce merchant fees with many acquirers, as well as Address & Postcode verification of cardholder data and can support VbV/3DS for website bookings. Pay as you Go plans are 15p per transaction, with entry level plans from as little as £10 per month. As well as processing your telephone, OTA and website payments, you can automatically send the guest an email with a payment gateway link on the evening before they check out, which has their current outstanding balance.
Creating rates is now simple. Rates support "Cost centres" for reporting how much revenue is due to the Kitchen etc, and Caterbook can tell you on the Dashboard how many breakfasts or dinners have been booked for any given day.
You can define and assign different policies to different rateplans, and when a booking is cancelled, Caterbook will tell you whether a penalty can be applied.
Caterbook can report out the value of held deposits, as well as industry standard metrics like RevPAR, Average Daily Rate, Direct Revenue Ratio. Reports are graphical where appropriate, not just a dry list of figures.
We support sending SMS messages as well as Email, and have some very useful new features in our Messaging Centre, like the ability to send email through your own email account which will reduce the chances of emails to guests being marked as "spam" and not being received.
There is a dedicated, built-in "Shuffle" row on the calendar, where you can park multiple bookings if you need to move things around.
The web booking engine is fast, easily customisable and collects minimal information on booking to reflect the move towards mobile devices, BUT you can collect additional information post booking on each guest to populate the guest registration form, a link to which can automatically be sent out via email.
You will see far, far fewer issues with the new Channel Manager. Where previously Caterbook 4 would create "exclusions" on your calendar, or not import bookings at all for unknown rooms or rates, we will import these to a room where we can, and if we can't, we'll park them on the shuffle row for you to deal with. In each case you'll see a warning on the dashboard and receive an email notifying you that you might want to look at this booking.
Caterbook 5 has been in pilot since early December 2018. The feedback we are receiving is that this is a step change in simplifying property workflow and the new security features provide greater peace of mind for you and your guests.