Les Arbres Web Solutions

Rentalot Plus is an online booking system for holiday properties

Rentalot Plus runs on your own Joomla website. You control the design, the words, the pictures, and the prices. You sell direct to the public and you keep all the profits. There are no fees or commissions to pay, other than your hosting fees and payment gateway fees. The software is open source and unrestricted. You manage the business in the Joomla administration interface, and your data is stored in your own site database.

Multi-Language

Rentalot Plus is fully multi-language. You don't need any additional software to use Rentalot Plus on a multi-language site.

Multi-Currency

Clients can view prices and make bookings in any of your offered currencies. Exchange rates are automatically updated daily.

Multi-Property

Clients can choose a specific property, or search for availability by dates and features.

Reminder Emails

Emails remind both you and your clients of important events like payments due (or overdue), and arrivals and departures.

Extras

Extras can be priced per day, per week, per stay, or per person. Guests can book them at the same time as they book accommodation.

iCal Synchronisation

You can setup incoming and outgoing iCal files to synchronise with one or more external calendars or booking systems.

The Front End

At the front end, Rentalot Plus is a marketing engine. Whether you have one or hundreds of units, it's important that your potential customers have access to lots of information about the property they are planning to rent, and easy access to clearly presented pricing information. Rentalot Plus has many different ways to display information about your accommodation, availability, and prices.

This is the "daily" view, where users can click on an arrival and a departure date to see exact availability and pricing information.

You can also show your availability as a simple list (in the "classic" Rentalot style), or a "block" view.

There's a search form, where clients can search all your properties by date, capacity, and facilities.

There's an enquiry form and a booking form. Clients can pay online and can receive a link to their My Booking page where they can download documents and make further payments.

There's a map view, which shows your units on a Google map, with markers, popup unit descriptions, and links to the booking and enquiry forms.

With the plugin, you can combine views together in limitless combinations.


There are lots of other views to choose from. You can see them all on our demo site.

Online or Offline Booking

Once a potential guest has chosen their accommodation and dates, they can send you an enquiry (which can later be converted to a booking), or they can book and pay online.

After payment, clients are taken to their personal page where they can see the details of their booking and download their confirmation letter, invoice, and any other documents you have setup. If further payments are due later, reminder emails will direct them to the same page to complete the payments.

Payments are managed by our dedicated payment extension, Payage, which supports numerous payment gateways. It also supports offline payments directly managed between you and the client. And it's flexible enough to allow for the initial booking payment to be made online, and subsequent payments to be made offline (saving in gateway fees), if you want.

Flexible Pricing and Discounting

Rentalot Plus can handle daily, weekly, or any other pricing periods. A price period can be any length of time from a single day to an entire year, and they don't all have to be the same length. You can have different prices for each day of the year, or do weekly rentals in summer and daily in winter. When a client books a range of dates, the system adds up the prices for all the price periods touched by the booking to arrive at the total price. You can set a different minimum and maximum number of days for bookings at different times of the year.

Discounts

For multi-period bookings you can configure up to ten different discount levels, giving different discounts for different numbers of periods. You can create discount vouchers, where customers enter a code on the booking form to activate the discount. You can also offer an early booking discount that applies to bookings made more than a certain number of days before arrival. Discounts can be a percentage or a fixed amount.

Payment Schedule

Bookings can be paid for by up to four separate payments. Once your payment rules are setup, Rentalot Plus does all the calculations and management, sending payment reminder emails to both you and the client.

The Back End

The back end is where you configure and manage the system. You can see, make, and amend bookings, manage enquiries, prices, and send emails to clients. The System Log records full details of everything that happens "behind the scenes", including the full text of every email sent by the system.

The various reports and charts help you to analyse your business performance, and the Schedule Report helps you or your staff to prepare your properties for guests. If you have multiple properties, the Booking Overview chart shows you their status at a glance, and the Financial and Payments Due reports help you to manage the finances.

More Features

Any Kind of Accommodation

Rentalot Plus can be used for any type of overnight accommodation - villas, flats, mobile homes, boats, or whatever it is that you rent. You can have as many units as you like and call them whatever you like. Each unit has a name, a description, its own prices and its own bookings. Each unit is individually bookable - this is not a hotel system where a client books a type of accommodation. In Rentalot Plus, clients book a specific unit of accommodation.

Extras

Offering extras like linen, bike rental, exit cleaning, etc. are well supported with many pricing options. You can set minimum and maximum numbers for each extra, including making some extras mandatory so that they add an additional charge to all bookings.

My Booking Page

All bookings have a "My Booking" page that shows the client the details of their booking, together with any documents that you have made available for them to download. Sample templates are supplied for a booking confirmation letter and an invoice, but you can change the format and add more documents.

Language Support

Rentalot Plus is supplied with Catalan, Danish, German, US and UK English, Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch and Polish translations, although some of the language files need updating. Rentalot Plus remembers the preferred language for each booking and creates documents and sends emails to the client in their booking language.

What Rentalot Plus Does Not Do

Hotels

Rentalot Plus is not a hotel system. It cannot allocate guests to available rooms, and it does not have administrative functions like moving guests from one room to another. In Rentalot Plus, each unit is specifically chosen and booked by the client. Availability is managed for each unit individually. Clients cannot book "2 double rooms and 1 single room". A booking is for one whole unit. You cannot book part of a unit, and you cannot book more than one unit at a time.

Rentalot Plus can manage large numbers of units, but in order to make sense to clients, the units must be distinct and unique in some way that makes the client want to choose one specifically.

Multiple Prices for the Same Period

Rentalot Plus' pricing scheme is very flexible, allowing different prices for different periods. However, each period can only have one price. Some businesses might have historically offered a choice of prices, for example daily bookings at $150, mid-week breaks at $400, or weekly bookings at $600. Rentalot Plus does not support this kind of pricing.

You can achieve similar results in Rentalot Plus by using daily pricing with a discount structure for multiple days, but it might not be exactly the same as your existing pricing.

Bookings of Less Than One Night

Rentalot Plus books nights, with the minimum bookable period being one night. This is, of course, the way that most accommodation businesses work. Rentalot Plus cannot manage hourly bookings or any bookings of less than one night.

Multiple Owners

Rentalot Plus is designed for a single owner who has access to all of the properties in the system. The system cannot provide separate administrative functions for properties owned by different owners.

Getting Started

Rentalot Plus is a Joomla component and a Joomla plugin. They run on any Joomla website, with any Joomla Template and alongside any other well-behaved Joomla extensions.

To build a website with Rentalot Plus, you do need a basic knowledge of Joomla, but you do not need any programming or technical knowledge. There are a lot of configuration options, but they are all well documented. You can start with a simple configuration, and continue to customise it as you learn more about the system.

The design of the site is entirely up to you. Some pages will be normal Joomla articles, and some pages will be fully or partially built by Rentalot Plus. There are four different colour schemes "in the box", and if you know some CSS you can modify the colours or make more extensive changes to the design.

Like all our products, Rentalot Plus is fully documented in a PDF user guide, so you never have to wait for answers or search forums. Our user guides are free to download, so you can check it out before you buy.

Purchase and Licensing

Rentalot Plus is open source, which means you can read and even change the code, if you choose to. One of the implications of that is that we couldn't place any restrictions on its use, even if we wanted to. When you buy our software, you can use it on as many sites as you want, for as long as you want.

There is nothing to stop you buying the cheapest option that we offer, and using it forever. In that case, you would only receive updates and support for one year, but the software would continue to work in exactly the same way after that.

Of course, we would like you to buy a longer subscription, so we work hard to continually improve Rentalot Plus with new features and improved user interfaces. You can look at the product Version History to see all the great features that we regularly add, as well as fixes and updates for new versions of Joomla.

Please click the "Buy and Download" button at the top of the page for the purchase options, or to download the free user guide.