Tuesday, December 21, 2010

New Feature in Control Center: Location Groups

There is a new feautre in the Control Center, called Location Groups (can be found under 'Manage' menu). The menu is enabled only If you have more than 2 locations.

You can group locations to see statistics for the group. For example you have 3 locations in City 1, four locations in City 2. You can create a City 1 Group, and you can select the group in the Purchase Report to see sales stats for those locations groupped together.

Furthermore you can define the group as a 'Roaming Group', which means that people can use their account in all of the locations in the group (but only those who bought an access within one of the locations in the group). An example: let's say you have a campground chain with 10 campgrounds and you have a hotel chain with 4 hotels. But you don't want to enable global roaming because the prices are different in the hotels, so you don't want that people who bought an access in a campground can use the account in the hotels. So you can define two roaming groups so people can only roam within the group.

The roaming can also be disabled for a specific location, let's say you have a 5 start hotel where you only want to allow internet for people who bought the access there. Then you can disable roaming (isolate the location), in Manage > Locations > click on name > Modify Hotspot Data > Default Limits > Enable roaming. If the location is part of a roaming location group, this will override the roaming settings for that specific location and roaming will not be allowed there.