New features for hotels and overnight accommodation businesses

2 minute read time · Updated February 14, 2025

MIDAS isn’t just for booking meeting rooms you know! Our software has successfully been used to manage activities for all kinds of venues and facilities. These include libraries, bowling alleys, vehicle rentals, recording studios, radio stations, golf courses, hire companies, flight simulators, airports, hotels.. and so much more!

To better accommodate those businesses that book facilities “by the night” – like hotels, guest houses, B&B’s, hostels, and camping & caravan sites – we’re introducing an exciting enhancement to v4.14. This will allow the ability to book by a number of nights stay.

MIDAS already allows you to control the type of time selector each user sees on their Add/Modify Bookings screen. These can be different for each user if required.

By default, these are simple start/finish time selectors. However, they can be changed to a start time + duration, or a drop-down list of predefined time periods.

Book By Nights

For MIDAS v4.14, there’s now an alternative option of booking by a number of “Nights”:

Tentative Booking Types

For users with this option enabled, they can simply select a check in date and a number of nights stay. MIDAS will then do the rest!

Tentative Booking Types

Administrators can predefine your check in and check out times, as well as the maximum number of nights stay permitted.

Tentative Booking Types

For example, let’s assume that your hotel’s check in time is 2pm and check out time is 11am. A user would then select their check in date and the number of nights stay. The result being a continuous booking starting at 2pm on the check-in date and running until 11am on the check-out date.

Furthermore, if you’ve enabled the Public Booking Request features of MIDAS, administrators can also enable the ability for the public to request by number of nights also!

We believe these enhancements further increase the flexibility of our scheduling software. It makes MIDAS even more flexible for hotels, guest houses, B&B’s, hostels, camping & caravan sites… and more!

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“Tentative” bookings which auto-expire if not confirmed

3 minute read time · Updated February 14, 2025

During the Summer we’ve been busy working away on the next update to MIDAS, v4.14. This upcoming release contains a whole host of new and improved features. We’re really excited to introduce you to these over the course of the next few weeks here on our blog…

The first new feature we’re unavailing is “Tentative” bookings.

What are Tentative bookings?

Currently, bookings in MIDAS can be thought of in one of two ways; either as “confirmed” bookings, or an unconfirmed “booking requests“.

“Confirmed” bookings are fairly self-explanatory. Unconfirmed “booking requests” are those which first require approval from an administrator in order to become a confirmed “booking”.

With the introduction of the optional ability to also make “Tentative” bookings, you can add bookings which only persist for a certain amount of time before being automatically removed. That is, unless you change them to be “confirmed”.

How are tentative bookings useful?

Let’s say you have a client who wants to book “Room 1” a month from today. They may also need “Room 2” at the same times as well. However, they don’t know for sure yet whether they’ll need the extra room until next week.

In v4.14, you’d be able to a regular “confirmed” booking for the client to “Room 1”. You can also a “tentative” booking (or “hold”) for the client to “Room 2”. This ‘tentative’ hold could be set to auto-expire for example two weeks from today.

Once these bookings have been added, then for the next two weeks, both Room 1 and Room 2 will be booked for the client. If you hear nothing further from your client in relation to Room 2, then after two weeks have elapsed, the “tentative” booking in Room 2 will be automatically removed. This then frees up and releases that slot for other potential bookings. Alternatively, if you do hear back from the client before the tentative booking would expire, and they confirm that they do also want Room 2, you can simply update the “tentative” booking and make it “confirmed”.

Whether a booking is added as a “confirmed” or as a “tentative” booking is determined by its “Booking Type”.

Tentative Booking Types

“Booking Types” allow you to categorize and color-code your bookings, and by default all booking types are “confirmed” bookings.

MIDAS v4.14 allows you to set individual booking types to instead make bookings that are assigned that particular type, “tentative”. For each booking type you make “tentative”, you can also set how long tentative bookings of this type should persist for:

Tentative Booking Types

You can specify a duration (in minutes, hours, or days) that tentative bookings of the selected type will persist for. Also, whether this period is measured from the point in time the booking is added, or counting back from the start time of the tentative booking.

For example, if a tentative booking is added to the system at 7am on a given day to take place at 4pm the same day, then;

  1. A booking type with a tentative persistence of “4 hours after being added”. The booking would be automatically removed from the system if it hasn’t been confirmed by 11am. or;
  2. A booking type with a tentative persistence of “2 hours before booking is due to commence”. The booking would be automatically removed if it hasn’t been confirmed by 2pm.

You can set different tentative persistence settings for each of your booking types. This provides you with maximum flexibility over your tentative booking types.

When “tentative” bookings are being added, they will be clearly indicated on user’s Booking Availability Screens:

Tentative Booking Types
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Dedicated sub domains for cloud-hosted customers

3 minute read time · Updated August 19, 2024

We are delighted to announce the completion of our roll out of dedicated sub-domains for all our cloud hosted customers!

This follows a desire expressed by a few of our customers to be able to have their cloud-hosted MIDAS systems accessible via a dedicated sub domain.

The makeup of a URL containing a subdomain
The makeup of a URL containing a subdomain

What is a subdomain?

A subdomain is a part of a website’s domain name that comes before the main domain name, separated by a dot.

It functions as a separate website, but still shares the same primary domain name.

Think of it like an apartment within a larger building: it has its own address and entrance, but it’s still part of the overall structure.

Here’s an example:
Main domain: mid.as
Subdomain: demo.mid.as

Subdomains for new hosted customers

At the start of this year (2016) we began providing this to all new customers who chose a cloud hosted edition of MIDAS.

Let’s assume that your company was called “My Organization”. If you subscribed to a cloud-hosted edition of MIDAS in 2016, you would have been able to choose the dedicated MIDAS subdomain https://my-organization.mid.as for your hosted booking system.

However, if you purchased a cloud-hosted MIDAS system prior to 2016, you’d instead have been accessing your system via https://mid.as/my-organization.

This was before dedicated mid.as subdomains were available.

Subdomains for all hosted customers

The good news is that from today, we’ve now rolled out dedicated mid.as subdomains to all our hosted customers who purchased prior to 2016 as well!

So, if you previously accessed your hosted MIDAS system via https://mid.as/my-organization, you’ll now have the dedicated subdomain https://my-organization.mid.as. Old mid.as/my-organization URL’s will continue to work and redirect to my-organization.mid.as for some time.

If you purchased a cloud-hosted MIDAS system prior to 2016, we’d like to encourage you to update your bookmarks and links. Going forward, they should now point to your new dedicated mid.as subdomain!

There are a few things to note when updating your bookmarks/links:

  1. If your hosted MIDAS URL previously contained underscores (_), you’ll need to change these to hyphens (–) when updating your bookmarks and links.
    For example:
    https://mid.as/my_organization would now become https://my-organization.mid.as
  2. If your hosted MIDAS URL previously contained a domain name (other than mid.as) i.e. .co.uk, .com, etc, you’ll need to remove the end part when updating your bookmarks and links.
    For example:
    https://mid.as/myorganization.com would now become https://myorganization.mid.as
  3. If your hosted MIDAS URL previously contained any period characters (.) (other than the initial period in the primary “mid.as” domain), you’ll need to remove these when updating your bookmarks and links.
    For example:
    https://mid.as/my.organization would now become https://myorganization.mid.as

If you have any questions, or aren’t sure what the new dedicated subdomain for your hosted MIDAS system is, please don’t hesitate to contact us. Our team will be more than happy to help!

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Firefox: The last browser to drop Windows XP/Vista support

2 minute read time · Updated July 21, 2023

Firefox on Windows XP/VistaIf you’re still accessing your MIDAS room booking system via a Windows XP or Windows Vista machine, you’ll want to read this!

As you should be aware, Windows XP and Vista are now considered obsolete operating systems. They are no longer supported or maintained by Microsoft.

As a result, over the past few years major browser vendors have been slowly dropping support and updates for their products in these operating systems.

For instance, the most “recent” version of Internet Explorer that can be run on Windows XP is IE8 (MIDAS requires at least IE9). For a while this wasn’t a major issue as XP/Vista users could simply switch to either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox instead. Both of which were still being actively updated by the respective vendors on these operating systems.

However, Google announced back in November 2015 that Chrome would no longer be supported or receive updates on Windows XP or Windows Vista after April 2016.

Since then, Firefox has been the only major browser to continue supporting and providing updates on Windows XP and Vista.

This week, Mozilla have now announced that Firefox 52 (due for release in March 2017) will be the last version of their browser to receive updates on Windows XP and Vista.

Whilst Firefox 52 will still work on XP/Vista after March 2017, it will no longer receive updates. At this point, none of the modern major web browsers that are supported in MIDAS will continue to be updated on these operating systems.

We are therefore advising any MIDAS users who still access their scheduling systems via Windows XP or Vista to upgrade their operating systems as soon as possible. This will ensure their web browser(s) are kept up-to-date and they’re able to continue using MIDAS in the future.

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