Customer types overview

Customer types are first created in the Settings section of your Dashboard. From there, selected customer types are added to individual items, where their pricing and visibility are set. Lastly, customer types are added at the availability level. This last step determines what customer type options are shown on your book form.

For a complete rundown of how customer types are set up, check out this tutorial.

Depending on what you want to update, customer types can be edited in several different places:

• Overall customer type settings (such as name and order) are updated in your Dashboard’s settings, under Customer Types.

• Customer type prices and visibility are updated in an individual item’s settings, or from the Price Sheets Overview. See also: Updating customer type prices

• Availability-specific settings like customer type capacity are updated on an individual availability, or using the availability updater.

Some important notes about updating customer types:

• If you make changes to a customer type’s pricing, visibility, or exclusivity on an item, these changes will automatically be applied to all existing availabilities for that item.

• However, if you make changes to the customer type’s capacity or per-booking minimum and maximum at the item level, these settings will not automatically update on all availabilities; they will only be applied to new availabilities. Learn how to change customer type settings on existing availabilities.

• Similarly, adding or removing customer types on an item will not automatically update the customer types on that item’s availabilities. Learn how to add or remove customer types on existing availabilities.

• Although you can change prices on an individual availability, we usually recommend changing the price for customer types at the item level. This ensures that the price is then reflected on all availabilities for that item (unless any of them have been overridden).

Exclusivity

When adding a customer type to an item, you can choose to make it exclusive. This means that once one of that customer type has been booked, all following bookings on that availability must use the same customer type. Anyone else making a booking for that availability will only have the option to choose the exclusive customer type.

Read more about exclusive customer types.

Customer type capacity

Each availability requires an overall capacity, which is the maximum number of people or seats that can be booked on that availability. You also have the option to set one or more customer type capacities on an availability.

For example, say your overall capacity for a bike tour is 15 people. On your book form, you have both Adult and Child customer types. However, you only have 5 children’s bicycles, so in this case you would set the customer type capacity for Children to 5.

You can view live customer type capacity in the capacity menu, which is located on the availability itself, as well as the manifest (under the availability name).

In the above example, the overall capacity is 15, and 10 total people have been booked (7 Adults and 3 Children).

The customer type capacity for children has been set to 5, so even though there are 5 seats left, only 2 more Children can be booked.

Per-booking minimum and maximum

When adding a customer type to an item or availability, you have the option to specify how many of that customer type that can be included per booking.

Examples of how this can be used:

• Allow customers to choose between two exclusive private tours when making a booking, and specify the minimum number of tickets that can be purchased for each tour.
• For a group activity with both People and Retail customer types, specify how many people can be booked on a reservation, while not affecting the retail customer types.
• Set booking party sizes for specific availabilities (like weekend group specials) without having to create a new “weekend” item with separate booking party settings.

Note: When per-booking minimums and maximums are used at both the item and availability level, the more restrictive setting will always be enforced when creating a booking. For example, if your item settings specify a 2-person minimum per booking, but your availability settings specify a 3-person minimum for Adults, the 3-person minimum for Adults will be enforced.

The most common customer types used are types like “Adult”, “Child”, “Rental”, and “Private Charter”, but there are also some other common options that require a special setup, such as group or family customer types. Read more about these types below.

Family Customer Types

A Family customer type is often used to sell a family package or family pass that includes multiple people. If your company works often with families, a Family customer type may be good for you.

There are several ways a Family customer type can be configured.

Option 1: Pricing per family

This option uses the price of your customer type to include an entire family. In the example below, there are 2 families booked on this Harbor Cruise. This family customer type is priced to include 2 adults and 2 children. When your customer selects 1 of this customer type, it will appear as 1 instead of 4 in your manifest. Also note that there are only 11 more family spots available on this availability. This is because the availability capacity reflects the 11 family customer type bookings available, it does not refer to the number of individual people that can still book into the availability (which, in this example, is 46).

Option 2: Pricing per person

This option for a Family customer type will be priced per person, which allows your manifest to reflect the exact number of people attending any availabilities. Similar to the example above, 1 family has been booked in the image below. However, the family is now priced per person, which is why the availability shows 4 families booked, and 46 available. With this setup, families will appear the same as other solo customer types.

Customer types for groups of other sizes

Customer types for groups above a certain number

Customer types can also represent groups above a certain size. This is a great setup if, for example, you want to offer a discount if a customer books above a certain number of people.

In the example below, this group customer type is priced to give a discounted rate for bookings that are for five people or more. Each person will be reflected in the manifest. In the example below, you can see that the availability has 10 Groups of 5 or more people.

Customer types that reflect group size

We can also configure each customer type to represent a specific group size. In the example below, the “Family”, “Group of 5”, and “Group of 6” customer types are priced to show the total for 4, 5, and 6 people respectively. Your customer will select the option that represents their group (for example, 1 Group of 6), and the total price they see will reflect their selected group size.

The number of remaining spots on the availability will accurately reflect all group sizes. In the example below, 0 families, 1 group of 5, and 1 group of 6 are booked. Based on the total capacity of the cruise, the number of available “Adult” tickets has been reduced to 39, the number of “Family” tickets reduced to 9, the number of “Group of 5” tickets reduced to 7, and the number of “Group of 6” tickets reduced to 6.