Stay tuned…searching by your custom questions & answers is coming soon along with some other cool features.

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(Note, your cell company may charge you, depending on what plan you have. We’re just sayin’.)

The Incentive Research Foundation’s survey of travel buyers, planners, and other industry folks to gauge interest in incentive travel for 2010 shows reason to be “cautiously optimistic,” with a third reporting that their ability to plan incentive travel events has improved significantly.

Get more of the results at Incentive Magazine’s site:  http://www.managesmarter.com/msg/content_display/incentive/merchandise/e3idbd92851d6a66e355ad35b628b2e09f5

We know we’ve been quiet for a while, but we’ve been busy making a lot of under-the-hood type changes to enable the kinds of features you’ve been asking for.

Today we’ve got two of the most requested features now up and running: you can modify an invitation to a TD after its been sent, and you can cancel and invitation to a single TD.

You’ll notice a new icon in your Events page that appears next to every invited TD. This will allow you to change the invitation dates for that TD. One important thing to note: when you send a new set of dates to a TD, the TD always has the option to decline the new dates and keep the old dates in place. We’ve made this decision so that you as the event planner can ask someone else to adjust their dates if the first TD can’t change his or her plans. If only the new dates will work, you can always cancel that one invitation.

Also, the TD has the option to decline both the old dates and the new dates if neither will work.

We’ve tested these features pretty thoroughly so far, but do let us know if you run into any problems and we’ll get them fixed right away.

Let us know what you think!

You can see the digital edition here if you don’t already get the print edition.

Thanks MPI!

The industry in general hasn’t done a very good job of defending incentive travel. While some clients have nixed programs for cash flow issues, far more have done it in fear of an AIG-like backlash. The truth is that there are plenty of companies out there who have nothing to do with the current financial disaster who know the value of incentive travel: retention of the most successful people in the organization. That’s the message that needs to get out, and sadly it’s been buried in all the “worst crisis since the Great Depression” meme that we can’t seem to get away from.

Hopefully, sites likes Meetings Mean Business and the Meeting Industry Crisis Center can make a dent in all the negative publicity. Do your part!

By default, the My Events page will show you the events you’re running — now you’ll see a toggle that will show you all the events at your company and who’s planning them, ordered by date.

Enjoy!

First, let’s talk about Public Profiles. This is a terrific new feature that allows TDs to have a public link to their schedule and profile.

If your name is… Richard Pryor, for example, you can have a link to your profile page that looks like:
www.staffreservations.com/public/RichardPryor

You can send this link to any planner you work with. They can bookmark it and anytime they want to check your schedule they can go to your page. Planners don’t have to sign in — they don’t even need an account at all! Feel free to add this link to your Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, or LinkedIn pages.

Of course, this is an optional step. We’ve left it turned off by default to respect your privacy. To turn it on, log in to the site and then go to My Account. You’ll see a new field called Public Profile Name. In most cases you can just type your name (no spaces please, and upper/lowercase doesn’t matter) and then click the Update Account button. Presto! Your new public page is ready to go! If you ever change your mind, just blank the field and your public page will vanish.

The other big news is open registration for event planners. We’ve opened up the site so that any event planner can now register for a free beta account with five seats. That means any of the planners you work with now have an even bigger reason to check us out! Spread the news — the more users we have the better the site will get.

We hope you think public profiles are as cool as we do, and keep spreading the word to the event planners you work with!

Best wishes for a great (and busy!) 2009!

=StaffReservations=

Now that the last of the turkey has made it into the last of the turkey salad sandwiches, it’s time to roll out another great feature: NOTES!

Available only for premium users, the new notes feature lets any planner at your company enter notes for a TD that are visible to all planners at your company. You can enter general notes, or, enter a note that applies to a specific past event. This second type of note is great for when you’re doing your post-trip review. Anyone can enter post-trip notes while the information is fresh in one’s memory, and then later print out or review all post-trip notes with the team. (Or, for annual events, a new planner can review which staff did well last year, and which ones didn’t do as well.)

• Before, when you created an event, the status was automatically set to Accepted, which meant your only option was to cancel it. Now, we’ve added the In Discussion status to this page.What this means is that if a planner wants you to hold a set of dates, you can enter the dates and set the event to In Discussion. To event planners your schedule will show “Tentative.” That way, everyone you can see you’ve pencilled in those dates, but you’re not committed until you change the status to Accepted. Other planners can still issue invites for those dates, and when the planner you blocked the dates for eventually sends a proper invitation, you can accept that one and cancel the first one.
• Now instead of declining an event you entered yourself, you can just cancel it.
• Canceled events are shown with lines through them and faded to indicate they’re not relevant events anymore.

What do you think? Should canceled events even be displayed at all? Or would you rather have the option to turn it on and off?

Also, caught a bug in the update event page where a date update would error out — this has been fixed.