New in September 2021

29 September 2021, 17:38 SAST

To help you focus on what is important to you, we continue looking for ways to provide you with added security, enhanced features and ongoing development behind the scenes.

Support For Additional iCal Providers

We have added support for the following iCal providers from this month:

  • GlampingHub
  • Alma Heritage
  • Campanyon
  • Owayy

See this support article for all the iCal providers we support.

Callback URL

We have been making several improvements to our booking callback feature over the past months:

  • Booking custom fields and guest reference is now available in the booking callback. Ledger account information has been added to booking rooms and extra options, totals including surcharges have also been added. As bookings can be restored from cancelled status, cancellation status has been added so you can track a booking that is restored from a cancelled state.
  • We now include invoices and payments, and also trigger callbacks if changes are made to invoices or payments are changed, added or linked to a booking. This allows for a tighter integration with invoice systems.
  • Booking callbacks now support both IPv4 and IPv6 endpoints as well as dual-stack. Previously only IPv4 was supported, and we have now added support for IPv6.
  • To protect confidentiality and privacy HTTPS TLS version 1.2 is now the minimum version we support. We recommend TLS 1.3 to be used, which is currently the latest version. Any versions before TLS 1.2 or plain text HTTP are not supported any longer.

See our callback feature support article for more details.

IPv6 Support

Internet Protocol (or IP) is the underlying technology that makes it possible for you to connect your devices to the web. Whenever a device accesses the Internet, it is assigned a unique, numerical IP address. However, as you might have heard from the news, the Internet has experienced increasing address shortage with the older IP version. To address and solve this, a new IP version 6 (IPv6) has been implemented and is intended to replace the previous IP version 4 (IPv4). As the versions are incompatible with each other, both are required during a transition period, meaning both client and server need one address of each.

You might even be using IPv6 without realizing it, as Sirvoy already supports this and has been for quite a while. You can see the IP address you have logged in to under Settings > User accounts > Latest account activity, or for your own account, click on your “User profile”.

If you see long addresses like 2001:0db8:0012:0034:5678:9abc:def0:1234 there, instead of what you are used to see as an IP address 192.0.2.123 you are already using IPv6 to connect to Sirvoy. The longer addresses in IPv6 allows for a larger address space. Congratulations, you are using an Internet service provider that takes the growth of the Internet seriously!

What does all this mean for you though? Just that we have your back and that you will be able to continue to use Sirvoy as normal. It might even be slightly faster on IPv6. The address format change mentioned above is one of the few visible changes for end-users. With the recent improvements of booking callbacks, we support IPv6 in this area as well, making all of Sirvoy support the new IP version. We are committed to continue to do so.

Not all of our booking channel partners, or payment providers, or other integrations you can choose fully support IPv6 as Sirvoy does. We are working together with them and hope they will flip the switch soon to enable support. If this is important to you and you are relying on some of our partners that have not yet added this, let them know. And also, let us know so we can address it with them.

Happy surfing!