Refunds now display on the invoice

Previously, if you have wanted to note a refund on a direct invoice, you’ve had to add the refund to the item list and payment schedule. This is no longer the case, as refunds will now be displayed below the payment schedule automatically once they’ve been processed:

Clients now receive refund receipts automatically

Previously, the client did not receive any sort of documentation regarding a refund unless you sent them a message about it. Now, once the refund is delivered to the client (typically around five to seven business days after it is requested), a receipt will automatically be sent to the client:

Agents can track refunds in their reporting tools

We recently began showing refunds that were part of your scheduled deposits or withdrawals as part of the Bank Transfers Report so you can see exactly what is contained in a bank transfer:

More recently, we’ve also added refund tracking to the Direct Payments Report to more easily locate and check the progress of a specific refund:

You can click any individual payment in this report for a more detailed breakdown, including the refunded payment and fee amounts:

We are currently in the process of updating our Help Center guides to reflect these changes, and we have more updates on the way!

Refund transparency for clients and agents was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Send a message to a nonprimary traveler

First, a popular feature request: You can now send a message to only a non-primary traveler on a trip! When you’re creating a new email on a trip’s Messages tab, the “To” field is now a dropdown:

From there, you can still CC additional travelers — including the primary traveler if you really want to — and send the message as usual.

NOTE: Keep in mind that the trip’s Messages feed is still visible to all members of the trip, so while the primary traveler will not be notified directly, they would still be able to see this message by viewing the full Messages feed!

You can see our guide for this new feature by clicking here.

Know who will be notified when you reply by email

Another feature that has been a little confusing in the past is knowing exactly who will be receiving a notification when you reply to a trip message from your email inbox. Now, right at the top of the message, you’ll be able to see who will receive a copy:

That’s it for now, but we have more exciting features around the corner!

Send messages to non-primary travelers (and other email updates) was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Greetings from sunny Puerto Vallarta! The TravelJoy team got together this week to bring you some new features, and we were joined by the newest member of our team, Stephen. This new engineer brings our team to five strong, and we’re beyond excited to have him.

As mentioned above, these team gatherings always produce some great new features, and this week is no exception. You can now export your entire calendar so that you can add your trips, tasks, and more to your favorite calendar app!

Note: A previous version of this article included a feature that was in testing and is no longer available.

Export your calendar

First up, this feature allows you to export your entire TravelJoy calendar (or part of it, such as client birthdays and anniversaries) to a file that can then be added to Google, Apple, and Outlook calendars, among many others. With this feature, your personal and professional reminders can finally live on the same page.

Keep in mind that these calendars do not generally ignore duplicates, so we recommend creating a second calendar in your app and using that second calendar for the import. This way, when you want to add a new import later, you can delete everything on that calendar and start from scratch. Learn more by checking out our Help Center article here.

Holiday support hours

One last note: To help accommodate our team spending time with family over the holiday season, there will be a few changes to our support availability:

We’ll be out of the office on Christmas Eve/Day and New Year’s Eve/Day. Due to this, there will also be no webinars on these days.

Between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, we will be providing email support. Responses may be slightly delayed on these days.

From everyone here at TravelJoy to all of you, we wish you the happiest of holiday seasons, and if you’re traveling, safe and happy travels!

Export your TJ calendar and collect loyalty info on forms was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Send a message without creating a trip

One of our most popular feature requests has been the ability to send a message that is not associated with a trip, such as birthday and anniversary emails. We’re launching this feature today, and there’s a few things you should know:

First, you can access this by going to your client’s profile (the search bar at the top of TravelJoy is the easiest way to find the profile) and then clicking “Send message,” as seen here:

This takes you to this client’s message feed where you can send an email or a form, just like you would from a trip. When the client replies, you’ll get an email notification and it will show up in this message feed.

Now, a couple of side notes: You might notice that there’s already some messages in here. This is not a mistake — if you’ve clicked “send profile update form” from the client’s profile in the past, it will be visible here. Also, please note that these messages cannot be moved or converted into trips, so if you’re dealing with a client inquiry, we still recommend doing that from a trip.

Better email “bounce” messages

We recently started sending messages when your email to a client “bounces,” or gets sent back by their mail provider. Today, we’ve added some specific error messages to those emails, letting you know specifically why this happened. Reasons can include things like the client’s mailbox being full or the client’s email address being incorrect.

You’ll only receive these if an email bounces back, so if you don’t get any, that’s a good thing!

Holiday hours: Thanksgiving

As many of you know, TravelJoy is still a very small team, and we work hard to provide support seven days a week year-round. Due to the Thanksgiving holiday, we will be out of the office next Thursday and Friday (November 28th and 29th).

This will also push back our biweekly TravelJoy 201 Q&A webinar to Thursday, December 5th at 3:00 PM Eastern.

Message clients outside of trips, email updates, holiday hours was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We’ve been rolling out a new feature and it should be available to everyone by the end of the day, so I wanted to take a moment to share some details about it.

One of the most time-consuming parts of creating an invoice can be generating the payment schedule, because if you need eighteen monthly payments, you’ve always had to add each one manually. Now, this is no longer the case, and you can create a custom payment schedule in just a few clicks!

(To skip the introduction and just read the Help Center article instead, click here.)

This feature appears just to the right of the “Add Payment” button on any invoice’s payment schedule. When you click it, you’ll see that you have three options:

Deposit & Final: As the name suggests, this lets you choose a deposit amount and due date, and a final payment amount and due date, then adds them to the payment schedule.

Monthly: Allows you to choose a day of the month (e.g. the 22nd) that each payment will be due, the final payment due date, and whether you want the payment amount to be calculated automatically (“Equal”) or you prefer to specify a payment amount (“Custom”).

Fixed: Same as the Monthly option, but for a set number of payments without regard to a schedule. Once you choose the number of payments and choose between Equal and Custom, the payments will be generated, and you can manually adjust the due dates. Very helpful for weekly/biweekly/bimonthly and other non-standard payment plans!

Check out the Help Center article linked above and reach out with any questions.

On another quick note, if you use TravelJoy for direct payment processing, check out the updated Direct Payments Report — it’s faster, more customizable, and easier to use.

Feel free to share any feedback that comes to mind, and have a wonderful weekend!

Quickly generate monthly payment schedules was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This project is about to wrap up, with the majority of TravelJoy users already using the new system, and the others required to update their settings by October 1st. If you have not received messages about this over the last few weeks, good news — that means you’re already up-to-date!

One side effect of the new system is that some providers are not showing your sent messages in your Sent mail folder anymore. The good news is that we’ve released a fix for this today!

How to save a copy of your sent messages

Quite simply, you can tell TravelJoy to BCC you on every message you send. This will result in you receiving a copy of every message you send to a client directly in your own inbox.

From there, you can set up a rule or filter (depending on your mail provider or application) to find these messages and automatically move them from your inbox to your Sent folder. Voilà! You now have a copy of all sent messages again.

You can learn more about this process and see a video about creating rules in popular apps by visiting our guide at this link!

How to finish moving to the new system if you’re receiving notices

If you’ve been getting emails from us reminding you about that October 1st deadline but you’re a bit intimidated by the idea of DNS records, I have some great news! You probably won’t have to update these yourself.

Here’s the process that has worked for virtually all of our users so far:

1. Go to Settings -> Email, click Custom Domain, and enter your name and email address
2. Copy all of those DNS settings to your clipboard (note: if your host is GoDaddy, click “yes” on question 1 before copying these settings)
3. Go to your web host’s chat support page and paste all of those settings right into the chat, and ask them to enter the settings on your behalf
4. When they’re done, come back to Settings -> Email and click “Verify”

If you get the big green checkmark, you’re all set!

Frequently asked questions

We’ve been working on this for a while, so we know a lot of the most popular questions. Here are some quick answers!

Q: Is this required?

A: Yes and no. While you must update your settings (if you haven’t done so already), you don’t have to use a custom domain. You can also just click “Disconnect” and let us send your messages from messaging@traveljoy.com.

Q: Can you enter my settings for me?

A: Since this is not something taking place within TravelJoy, the proper support team to handle this would be your domain registrar/web host’s email or chat support team. This is their area of expertise.

Q: Can I call their support team instead of emailing or chatting?

A: You can, but I would urge you to look at all of the settings and imagine reading them all out over the phone. Even one wrong letter or dot will prevent the settings from working, so email or chat would be much more accurate.

Q: Will there be an option to use my non-business email account (like a Comcast or AOL address) to send messages in the future?

A: Because messages from these addresses cannot be sent in this way, they are not compatible with TravelJoy

Q: What if my account is registered under a non-business email account? Will I still receive notifications?

A: Yes! You’ll always receive your notifications at the email address you use to sign into TravelJoy, regardless of which address you use to send mail to clients.

Q: What should I do if a client reports a message as missing or in their spam folder after I’ve updated these settings?

A: Report the message using the instructions in this guide. This will generate a ticket and a log for us to investigate the message.

That’s it for now! Have a wonderful first weekend of fall!

TravelJoy’s new email system and how to save sent messages was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

While a lot of this isn’t immediately visible (such as our ongoing rollout of improved email deliverability), I did want to take a moment to share two new features you can see today.

Group booking page mobile view

A number of agents reached out about this one. When clients were booking on their phone or tablet, the group booking page layout didn’t show ongoing price adjustments until the very last page. This prevented clients from keeping an eye on their “cart.”

With the update, clients can not only see a running total:

They can also click “Show order summary” to quickly view a breakdown of their pricing at any point in the booking process:

This improved transparency helps your clients book with confidence and keep their budget in mind when adding excursions and other add-on items.

Persistent task list sorting

This is another popular request from agents. Previously, task lists could be sorted a number of different ways, but you’d have to re-sort each time you left and came back to the list. Now, your most recent sorting method sticks with you, saving you time and keeping you focused on completing items.

That’s it for this week! With the team in San Francisco, our support hours are a little later than usual, and we have a very limited number of phone support sessions available for the week. We’ll be back to normal hours on Monday, September 16th!

Improved client mobile experience, better sorting of tasks was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Resend a trip message in two clicks

When you wanted to resend a message in TravelJoy before, you’d copy and paste it back into the message field. Gwiin, Sandra, and others suggested a better option: Adding a button to resend a message quickly. You’ll now find this button by clicking the three dots at the bottom corner of your message:

Better trip details on the client profile

Previously, the Trips tab on the client profile showed all of that client’s trips, both active and archived, and you could visit each trip page to learn more. Sarah C. let us know it would be helpful to see the trip dates and Kyle B. let us know he’d like to see whether the trip is archived (and why).

Both were great ideas, and we’ve added them! You can see the status (and archive reason) of each trip at a glance and, if you hover over a trip, you can see the travel dates:

Terms and conditions always visible on invoices

This one came from Korrine, who wanted to make sure her clients could always review their terms and conditions. Previously, the terms were part of the authorization section of a supplier invoice, and that section was automatically hidden when an invoice no longer required payment.

After the update, once the last payment is made, the authorization section is still hidden, but the terms are still displayed:

We love your feedback

While we’re still a small team doing big things, and new features always take time, we encourage you to reach out with your ideas. Everything we receive is recorded, reviewed, and revisited often.

A huge thanks to everyone mentioned here, as well as the hundreds of other agents who’ve provided valuable suggestions to help us keep getting better every day!

Agent-inspired updates to client profiles and invoices was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m happy to report that this feature is now back up and running! You can now search for relevant trip and group photos by editing your trip or group.

And that’s not all…

We’ve also added expandable thumbnails. Since our thumbnails are naturally square but the header image is a landscape, we wanted to give you the ability to see more of the image to understand (before clicking) whether a particular image would be suitable:

But wait, there’s more…

This one has been around for a few weeks, but we haven’t had a chance to talk about it yet. You can now crop your trip and group photos as well! First, find the right picture and select it, then click the three dot menu at the top-right of the photo, as seen here:

Now you can get the perfect framing of your image:

That’s it for this week! If you have any thoughts on these updates, let me know in the comments.

For anyone who missed it, we also recently completed the switch to Zendesk for our customer support platform. Now, when you click the Support button at the bottom-right corner, the suggested articles will be directly related to the page you’re on, so check those out, and check out our community forums here.

Trip Photo Search is back (and improved!) was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Drag and drop your tasks to reorder

This new feature still allows you to sort your trip tasks and group tasks by due date and name, and has now added the ability to drag them into a different order. To use this, simply visit a trip or group’s Tasks tab and start dragging and dropping:

If you sort by due date, then drag things into a different order, that order will be saved the next time you come back, so jump in and start sorting!

Bonus: This also works with task list templates, which you can find and build by clicking on Templates -> Task Lists.

A new support button

As a small team, we have always strove to reply to support requests within a few hours, but many new agents view a chat box as a place for immediate conversation. This sometimes causes confusion.

To fix this, we’re updating the support button that appears on your screen over the next few weeks. When you click the new version, you’ll see a few smart articles chosen based on the page you’re viewing, along with the option to contact us:

When you click “Contact us,” you’ll get a box to send us a message. The end result is the same — we’ll continue to respond within the same time frame — but the response will come to your email inbox. This eliminates confusion around response times and helps us continue helping you in the most efficient way possible.

Reordering tasks and small support changes was originally published in TravelJoy on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.