Makes sense to me Kraig. I didn't know whether it was intentional or a glitch in the system.

Caio

Julie

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Hi Kraig, 

I am excited about the changes to the trip format page.   We sure do appreciated that Olivia is trying to improve our experience here. 

BTW - I am not sure that you remember me...but I had the two accounts that had to be merged.  Just wanted to let you know that all is going well with my account !

I must agree with Evergreen that your other half is very cute !

Jo 

Hi - the two Danube riverboat cruises leave in the next few weeks, around the end of the month.  One of them is sold out and the other is close to selling out, so we decided not to go through all of the work to convert them over to the new format.

If you're traveling on one of these trips, you should have already received information about them by email.  If any of you are interested in traveling on them, there are just a few rooms left on the second week (departing August 3rd).  Any of our gals in sales or guest services would be happy to tell you more about them.

Thanks Craig. We appreciate the update......

Julie

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Hi ladies!  Last night we released new web pages for all of our trips to the website.  Every trip now has a wider "promo player" to better illustrate the trip experience with inspirational photography, and we've removed ads for unrelated items so that you can focus on exploring the trip itself.  The wider format also allows us to get rid of something that many of you found confusing, known as the "double scroll bar."  Finally, each trip's discussion group is accessible as a tab on the trip page itself, making it easy to go back and forth between the discussion group and other information about the trip.

We've also rewritten the "Traveler Info" sections of nearly every trip, and condensed it, based on feedback that it was difficult to find the essential information about a trip. 

Dear Kraig,

I just wanted to say thank you for all that you have done along with the rest of the Olivia staff family to make the Olivia experience a smooth sailing (no pun intended) process-one step at a time.  I know that you must get all kinds of suggestions and I am sure that it takes a great deal of time to consider them and decide what is really necessary, but I really do appreciate the fact that this specific change was made and I just want to say a simple "THANK YOU".  Have a Great Day tomorrow and an even better one tomorrow.

With Thanks ALL Ways, Katch

Kraig - I was one of the one's who was suggesting that changes that are made are communicated, so thanks for doing this.  I've just returned from 5 weeks in the states and the March Olivia cruise, hence the delay in responding.  These sort of updates will give people comfort in knowing they have been listened to and changes are occuring.

I totally understand the amount of suggestions you would have and the logistics of having to prioritise and work out what are cosmetic as opposed to code/system changes, as I have worked on projects implementing new sites/systems etc.

Thanks again for keeping us updated.

Sharon

Julie, that's a great suggestion.  I agree we do not want to feature groups that haven't been active for several weeks when there are other groups that have been more active!  We'll look into changing that.

The cutie who is cut off in my avatar photo is my other half, Michael.  You can get a better view of him in my profile. 

Kraig, might I suggest that on the "Group Landing" Page, the most popular groups aren't selected by # of members, as they appear to be currently. How about selecting them by the number of postings? I did forward a comment today that the "Caribbean Dreams Cruise" is shown as a popular group yet the cruise ended Feb 2nd & there have been no postings on there since late February. It doesn't make sense & would make people new to the site think that the site is out of date....not a good first impression.

By the way, who is the cutie next to you in your photo????????

Hi Julie - you are correct, we received a lot of suggestions related to the "forums" (groups) and we did usability testing with some of you who use this feature. We also asked some ladies who have never seen the website before to try using the groups feature.  We received a lot of great feedback and frankly have some work to do in this area.  Many of these are not cosmetic fixes and so I'm trying to fit them logically into work that we are doing to other parts of the website.

One of the largest issues we heard was "It's difficult to find my list of groups and see if there is new activity in them."  Coming very soon, you will see a link next to your avatar photo in the upper right corner that says "My Groups" - This will link to a page that already exists but is impossible to find, which is called the Manage My Groups page. I've been testing this and I believe those of you active in multiple groups will find this really helpful.

We are also planning to rearrange the modules on the Group Landing page.  The modules that most of you found useful (My Groups, Featured Groups, Most Popular Groups) are currently on the bottom.  We're going to rearrange this page so that these are closer to the top.  These are just a few examples and we're trying to figure out how much of our plan for this page we can implement quickly.

Thanks to everyone for their patience!