Performance update, Global iCal and more

Update 13.8.3 - Link iCal to your booking calendar, fast booking calendar for hotels and more

Update 13.8.3 brings a number of powerful improvements. Among other things, a huge performance boost for the booking calendar and a renewed iCal integration. In this article, you will read everything about this update.

Various Improvements

To begin with, several smaller improvements have been implemented:

• If you are using compact mode, it remains active during your session (until you log out) after visiting other pages. If you switch to the extended view of the calendar, this will be remembered as well.
• A bug caught in the PDF reservation confirmations. Sporadically an error message appeared, this has been resolved.
• In the header of your hotel website, five photos can be presented, with the first one being displayed the largest. The quality of that first image has been increased and differs from the other (smaller) photos. This means all images are presented razor-sharp without compromising loading speed unnecessarily.
• Uploading logos and profile pictures did not always proceed correctly, due to a previous update. This issue has been fixed.
• The new MyTourist layout is now applied across all pages in your web builder.
• The mention of "Last synchronization" in the channel manager was not always displayed, this has been corrected.
• The chat button on mobile view has been moved. It was located behind the menu (hamburger icon) and is now permanently in the header of the mobile view.
• The page 'general settings' of room types has been adjusted. You can no longer specify a max. number of persons. This is now handled by price profiles. Additionally, some words in amenities were displayed incorrectly.

Renewed iCal Integration

iCal allows you to synchronize availability from MyTourist to external booking sites. It was already possible to create an iCal URL through a pre-configuration that we used per platform. Furthermore, you can now create a 'loose iCal' connection without using these pre-configurations. With this renewed global iCal integration, you create your own iCal URLs. You now have complete freedom in the connections you make.

Performance Boost

The booking calendar of MyTourist shows a lot of data and calculations. Opening the calendar or switching to another month could take too long in some situations. Especially with many rooms, many varying prices, and full occupancy, the booking calendar sometimes had to load for several seconds.

With unique caching methodologies, we can load data faster without affecting its accuracy and timeliness. In case of mutations, the cache for the specific relevant data is rebuilt to prevent you from seeing 'old data'.

Test results have shown that the server can reduce the time from 3.1 sec to 220 milliseconds to send out data. This means serving data has been accelerated by as much as 14 times!

More Efficient Translation Methodology

MyTourist automatically translates your web texts into as many as fifteen languages. Previously, your entire website was translated after you made a small change. This took a lot of time, so a few months ago we moved the translation methodology 'to the background'. This way, you would no longer experience delays due to translation time. Due to the significant increase in translations, we have made an additional optimization. Only the field (or fields) you edited will now be translated. So if you change the title of a blog article? Then we only translate the title and no longer the entire article.

During peak loads of MyTourist, sometimes a queue formed in the translation server lasting several hours. With this efficiency, we have managed to significantly reduce this waiting time.