We are always working hard to improve the KOALA website — and make it work harder for you, our community of timeshare owners. Our full-time team of 17 developers is laboring around the clock to build out new features. Their work is supported by our User Experience, Product Management, and Customer Success teams as well as other departments working behind the scenes. Their collective job: Listen to owners and customers, identify problems, create solutions, and put them into action.

Here are a few of the important features we’ve introduced over the past few weeks… and how they affect you.

Partial Payments

What It Is: Travelers can now pay for their vacation in installments, rather than pay in full when they book.

How It Works: On the check-out page, travelers have the option of paying in full or choosing to pay 25% now and the remainder 14 days before the cancellation cutoff date. That means there’s plenty of time for us to collect payment in full, so you don’t have to worry about your resort’s cancellation policy. (Bookings within 14 days of the free cancellation period are not eligible for partial payments.) 

Why We Did It: Vacations are a big-ticket item, and paying for it all at once can be financially challenging for some people. They may also hesitate to commit so much money for a vacation that may be months away on a platform that’s new to them. Most travel booking sites have the option to pay over time, so adding this feature brings us up to par with what travelers have come to expect from the vacation-booking experience. In fact, 44% of users booking on our platform are using the partial payment feature already!

How It Helps You: The less friction in the booking process, the easier it is for your listings to move. “Easier booking and payment options mean more bookings for owners,” says Jeff Ruiz, KOALA’s Director of Product. Since we introduced this option last month, we’ve already seen a 23% increase in bookings!

International Payments

What It Is: We’re now able to accept bookings from travelers outside the United States.

How It Works: Previously, KOALA only worked for U.S.-based consumers. Now, vacationers from outside the United States can use their foreign-issued credit cards to book KOALA listings. Thanks to an update we made with Stripe, our transaction processing partner, our payment and authentication methods meet industry certification standards across all supported countries.

Why We Did It: With international borders opening — most critically, the one between the U.S. and Canada — more foreign travelers are interested in booking vacations in the 50 states (and vice versa). Now we can market your listings to vacationers around the world knowing they won’t have any issues booking or paying for their trips. 

How It Helps You: Opening up our platform to international visitors means more booking for your listings! Don’t worry —your payouts will be in U.S. dollars regardless of the booker’s originating country.` 

What Else is New?

We’ve made a host of other technical improvements behind the scenes that will help make the KOALA website run more smoothly and help drive traffic to your listings. These include site performance upgrades and the ability to better control how our content appears when it’s shared on social networks such as Facebook and Twitter as well as on Google search results — all powerful ways to bring consumers to your listings.

Along with the introduction of Partial Payments and International Payments, these changes add up to an important technology upgrade that will provide the performance, accessibility, and compliance KOALA needs as we evolve from a start-up into a scaled-up business optimized for international growth.