Quick Tip: Whenever a reservation is saved (with any Status other than 'Tentative'), a unique Reservation Code is automatically generated.

This code can be included via merge codes in confirmation / reminder emails or used internally by your management team when referring to reservations.

For promoters and nightlife venue operators, a common task is to track 'house lists' -- sets of guests typically coming from a single source (a sub-promoter, for example) and usually all receiving similar admission perks, etc.

VIP Professional makes it easy to manage your house lists. Simply set up a standard reservation for each house list, omit the Organizer (or set it to the name of the promoter), and assign 'House List' as the Reservation Type.

Then just add guests to that reservation as needed.

Some tips:

• Use the Source / Tracking Code functionality to easily allow you to distinguish house lists from different sources. For example, set the Source to 'Sub-Promoter' and the Tracking Code to a unique code that identifies the sub-promoter. That allows you to run reports based on who the sub-promoter was -- allowing you to see trends involving that sub-promoter.
• Create a Confirmation / Reminder template specifically for your house lists. Since the guests in a house list usually don't know each other, the confirmation / reminder message normally needs to be worded a bit differently than you'd use for a 'normal' reservation.

Take a peek at some of the nightlife news and tips we have happening at our industry blog: Focus on Nightlife.

Today's entry gives some pointers on guest list management and how you can really drive revenues by minimizing reservation errors and gathering important contact information from your customers.

We hope Focus on Nightlife, working in conjunction with VIP Professional, will give industry leaders the upper-hand in such a competitive market. Feel free to send us comments/suggestions regarding Focus on Nightlife or Stratogistics Inc. and let us know what kind of content you would find helpful.

Our latest update, released on 04 June 2008, adds the ability for you to export any report to PDF format.

To use the feature, simply click on the 'Export to PDF' button on the toolbar of the Print Previewer:

This will pop up a standard 'save file' dialog. Select the directory where you want to save the file, give it a unique name (or accept the default name), and that is it.

While VIP Professional already supported PDF reports for notifications and confirmations / reminders, this 'Export to PDF' feature allows you to manually generate PDF reports without having to use a notification. This is mainly useful in two situations:

1. When you want to manually email the report to someone (rather than use a notification).
2. When you want to save copies of all reports in an 'archive' directory (for example, to have a 'printed' copy of booking reports saved into each client's directory).

We hope you find the feature handy. If you have any suggestions on additional features -big or small- don't hesitate to let us know!