Feature highlight: The Webbooker with Packages support
WHAT’S NEW
This month, we’re introducing the all-new Webbooker, which supports creating both bookings and packages. The separate Package Webbooker will no longer be available.
WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT
The Webbooker rework is a crucial step toward integrating bookings with packages. While booking and packages will remain independent from each other for the following months, the unified user experience already gives users a glimpse into the future, where packages are created as package bookings—bookings with packages attached to the stops.
WHAT’S NEXT
This transition to package bookings will continue in the second half of 2024, significantly improving the platform's package delivery capabilities. One of the new features we can already mention is the support for shipments—multiple packages that must be shipped as a bundle.
More features and updates
New standard for driver assigning
We’re beginning to roll out a feature that prevents assigning bookings to drivers directly; in the future, a booking must first be dispatched into a tour, which comes with many benefits. Just to name one: this ensures that whatever a driver is working on can easily be adjusted on the fly if needed. This feature will remain optional for the next few months, giving all Operators time to adapt to this new process. Beware that by the end of Q3, this dispatching method will become standard. Please contact our Customer Success team to learn more about this change and tips on preparing for it.
Filtering bookings and tours by completion time
Bookings and tours can now be filtered by completion time—the time when a driver finishes the last stop. This feature is already available via API and will be added to the Dashboard in the coming weeks. Apart from the new filter option, the Analytics and Home pages will be updated to display Completed metrics aggregated by the completion date rather than the scheduled date. Check out the API documentation for more details.
Drivers can postpone the start of claimed tours
Our previous claimed tour expiration rule was too strict: a tour had to expire no later than its scheduled time. This means that the driver would not be assigned to the tour anymore and another driver could take it over. However, in some cases where delivery isn’t precisely timed, it’s acceptable for drivers to delay the start. For such cases, we now allow the claimed tour expiration time to be a negative number. For example, if the value is -30 minutes, the tour will expire 30 minutes after the scheduled time.
Default tour service for each booking service
We now allow choosing a default destination tour service for each booking service. This ensures that dispatching processes aren’t disrupted due to any misconfiguration and enables the setups where all incoming bookings should be automatically converted into tours of a certain service.
Inheriting preferred drivers when dispatching a booking into a tour
A tour now inherits preferred drivers from a booking. It’s similar to how tours already inherit managing organizations, speeding up the dispatching process. Learn more about the Preferred drivers feature in this Help Center article.
