2021 Year in Review
2021 was another challenging year, but you continue to impress us with your resilience in response to the ongoing challenges.
We wanted to take a minute to thank you for your partnership during these difficult times.
Your success is incredibly important to us, and we're continuing to pull out all of the stops to assist any way we can.
I've included a quick recap of some of this year's platform improvements below.
Wishing you a safe and happy holiday -- here's to a better year ahead!
Auto-assigning concierges with discount codes
To facilitate touch-less concierge bookings, we added the ability to map discount codes to specific concierges.
Concierges can distribute their discount codes to customers on a business card or a brochure to get credit for those bookings.
The Payment Requests feature we introduced last year has been incredibly popular, so we added a Payment Request log to make it easy for you to track the status of each individual request.
Charter base rates for standard bookings
We've had support for charter base rates in our contracts module for many years. This year, we made it easier than ever to price your publicly-bookable events any way you like.
With charter base rates, you can use any combination of per-guest and base rate pricing to collect guest fees in the way that works best for you.
For smaller vessels offering private charters that are bookable online, this is a great option!
WisePad3 mobile card reader in Canada
With the WisePad3, Canadian operators can now take advantage of a fully-integrated mobile card reader that processes directly into your Stripe account from an iOS device.
The WisePad3 is compatible with the latest versions of our Control Panel App and Kiosk App available in the iOS app store.
It supports swipe, chip and tap payments.
Default online booking gratuity rates
Several years ago, we added an optional gratuity selector for the online booking process.
If you enabled it on your account, the gratuity rate defaulted to "NONE", and customers could select a gratuity option from the drop-down menu.
This year, we added the ability to set a default rate.
If you do, customers will automatically be opted-in to the default rate, but they can still opt-out if they choose.
Operators who used this feature reported that they saw a substantial increase in gratuities!
Quickly locate and tag untagged SmartWaivers
To improve the check-in workflow for customers who sign waivers directly on SmartWaiver without using one of our special "tagged" links, our new Find Waivers feature makes it easier than ever to locate and tag those waivers from within your Event Details screen.
Integration with Google Analytics GA4
We added an integration for the latest version of Google Analytics, GA4, to the Starboard App Store!
Batch scheduling for employees
We added a batch employee scheduling tool that makes it incredibly fast and easy to assign employees (or teams) to your events in batch.
WisePOS E card reader for Stripe
We added support for Stripe's WisePOS E card reader that's now available in the U.S. and Canada.
The WisePOS E is a network-based reader that's fully-integrated into Starboard Suite.
It's compatible with any device where you access your Control Panel (computer, tablet or smartphone) and can be shared across multiple devices.
The WisePOS E is a "hybrid reader", so it works great in a desktop environment, but also has a rechargeable battery for use on the go.
It supports swipe, chip and tap payments.
QuickCharge
For operators who take partial payments from customers and then collect a "balance due", we added a QuickCharge feature to speed up your payment collection and check-in process.
For reservations with a card-on-file, QuickCharge allows you to charge the balance due to that card with one click, without visiting the payment screen or leaving the current page.
Integrated Interac processing in Canada
Canadian operators can now process in-person Interac Debit payments and refunds within Starboard Suite directly into your Stripe account.
Interac is supported in both the WisePad3 bluetooth reader and the WisePOS network reader, so there's an integration for every device (smartphone, tablet and desktop).
Dynamic price rules
As you know, every aspect of Starboard Suite inventory is built with yield management in mind.
You can vary your ticket prices, guest types, capacity and resources based on days of the week, times of day or seasons of the year.
Dynamic Price Rules take this one step further, allowing you to automatically hyper-optimize pricing in real-time as booking conditions change.
You can set date and availability-based thresholds and increase/decrease pricing automatically in real-time based on how your tickets are selling.
