Setting up resource requirements

Resource requirements can be managed in two places. In most cases, you’ll only need to set up resource requirements in one of these two places in your Dashboard.

Shared resource requirements

Requirements set up here can be used on availabilities across all of your items. This may come in handy if you have multiple items that use the same set of resource requirements, and do not want to set up the same requirements in each item’s settings.

1. Go to the Settings section of your Dashboard.
2. From the sidebar, select Resource Requirements.

You can further customize this view in the Display options menu, where you can choose to show IDs for your shared resource requirements as well as the usage of your requirements on items and future availabilities.

Item-specific resource requirements

Requirements set up in a specific item’s settings can only be used on availabilities for that item.

1. Go to the Items section of your Dashboard.
2. Select the item you’d like to add resource requirements to.
3. Select Options & Prices.
4. Select the Resource requirements tab.

The following steps walk you through the process of adding resource requirements in your Dashboard. Before getting started, make sure you’re adding requirements in the right place by reviewing the section above.

Adding a resource requirement group

1. Click Add resource requirements and enter a name. This name is only visible to you and your staff, not to customers.
2. Click Add.

3. Once the requirement group has been added, click the pencil icon next to the name to specify whether the resource requirements in the group should affect remaining capacity. Learn more about this setting.

   

Adding a requirement

Within each requirement group, you’ll need to set at least one requirement and requirement option. This determines how resources will be used when a booking is created.

1. Click Add requirement.

   

2. Select whether the resource is required per customer or for the whole booking.

   • Per customer: This is the most common option, used for resources like boat seats, instructors, guides, bikes, etc.
   • For whole booking: Only use this if the resource should be applied to the entire booking party (for example, a parking pass). If you select this option, skip ahead to step 5.

3. Select which customer types need these resource options in order to be booked. For instance, adults and children must have a seat, but not infants.

   

4. Select whether to allow split parties. When this box is checked, it means that customers on the same booking can be assigned different resource options. Learn more and see examples.

5. Click Add.

Adding a requirement option

This determines which resource(s) to require and for how long.

1. Click Add requirement option.

2. Choose what resource to require, and how many are needed per customer or booking.

   

3. Next, determine how long the resource needs to be available. This can be a certain amount of time before/after the availability, or a set number of hours long. Some examples:

   • Length of the availability (0 hours before availability start time to 0 hours after end of availability)
   • Length of availability + prep/cleanup time (0.5 hours before availability start time to 0.5 hours after end of availability)
   • X hours long (use this option for 0-length availabilities or if you need to make the resource use a set number of hours)

   

4. Click Add.

Advanced options

• Custom restrictions: If needed, you can override the resource’s main settings at the item level. Whichever rule is more restrictive will be used.

  

• Visibility: Every once in a while, you may need to change a resource requirement’s visibility to Hidden, meaning that the resource will not be required when using that price sheet. For example, maybe you have two online booking portals: one for the public and one for season pass holders. Public users have to buy both a camping spot and a parking pass, but season pass holders only need to buy a camping spot. In this case, you could hide the “parking pass” requirement on the sheet used for season pass holders.

Adding multiple requirement options

You can add multiple requirement options, allowing the system to check the availability of each resource in order to determine which one to use. If the first resource is not available, it will check the next, and so on. These can be reordered to determine which resources are checked first.

Below, there are two requirement options: the 50 pax bus and 25 pax bus.

You can also have multiple requirements, which means that each requirement must be available in order for someone to be able to book. For example, in the the kayaker resource requirement group below, a lifejacket and kayak is needed for every customer. Each requirement is marked by a different shade of grey.

You can also add multiple requirement groups. This allows you to create different sets of rules that can then be applied to individual availabilities.

Allowing split parties

When split parties are allowed, it means that customers on the same booking can be assigned different resource options. This is only applicable if you’re setting up a requirement with multiple options.

Examples of when you might use split parties:

• You have multiple buses that take customers to the same location.
• You have several different party boats tied to the same dock, and customers can move freely between them.
• A group activity requires 1 guide for every 4 people, but it doesn’t matter which guide is assigned to which specific individuals.

Once you’ve created one or more resource requirement group(s), add them to availabilities so that resources can be tracked as bookings are made.

If you’re creating a new availability, add requirements under the Advanced settings:

If you’re editing an existing availability, add requirements under the Settings > More options > Requirements:

If you’re using the availability updater, select Resource requirements in Step 1. Determine which availabilities to update in Step 2, then select the resource requirement group in Step 3.

After you’ve added your resource to availabilities, test out your booking flow to make sure resources are being applied to bookings the way you’d expect them to.

Who should use this feature?

Companies that would be a good candidate to have this feature enabled would be companies that use the same large resource setups across multiple items.

Best practices

• Resource requirements should be set up at either the item level or company level, but not both.
• Don’t enable company-level requirements for existing companies unless you plan on re-adjusting their resource setup to use company-level requirements instead of item-level requirements.
• Don’t give resource requirement groups the same name.

You can customize the view in

Enabling shared (company-level) resource requirements

1. Navigate to the company’s advanced settings.
2. Check the box labeled “Company-level resource requirements”.
3. Select Save changes.

You can now build shared (company-level) resource requirements in the Resource Requirements section of a Dashboard’s settings, located under the “Build” section. Remember to follow all steps and best practices normally required for standard item-level resource requirements.

Here you can customize whether or not the resource is considered “used” when booking, and what Dashboard users and online users see when overusing resources.

• Create uses, check overuse (default): Creates the resource use, warns Dashboard user when overusing resources (if the user has permission to overbook), doesn’t allow online users to overuse resources.

• Create uses, don’t check overuse: Creates the resource use, doesn’t warn Dashboard users when overusing resources, allows online users to book even when overusing resources.

  This option can be employed when you want a certain customer type or item to be able to overuse resources, and once that customer type or item has been booked, all other options using the same resource will be unavailable.

• Don’t create uses, check overuse: Doesn’t create the resource use, warns Dashboard user when overusing resources (if the user has permission to overbook), doesn’t allow online users to overuse resources.

  This option can be used in child requiring adult scenarios. In these cases, we don’t care how many resource uses are being created; we just want to make sure that children can’t be booked until at least one adult has been selected.

Once a resource has been booked for a time period, you can tell the system to only allow the rest of the resources to be used for the same item, availability, or booking during that time period.

• None: Select this option if the resource can be used by any item, availability, or booking during the same time period. Bike rentals is an example. Another less common example is boat seats that are shared across different items (e.g. everyone goes out on the same boat, but scuba diving and snorkeling are displayed as two separate items).

• Same item: Not very common, but comes in handy if you have location-specific items like an East Island Tour and a West Island Tour. This way, once one of those items has been booked, the other item becomes unavailable, so that you only have to worry about operating on one island.

• Same availability: This is the most common option when it comes to resources that can’t be split up, like a boat or a tour bus. Once one use of a resource has been booked, the rest of the uses (seats, etc.) will only be available for the same availability.

• Same booking: Not used too often; more for situations where we have to hack a solution, or for a private charter.

You can come back and edit these settings at any time by navigating to Items > Shared resources, then clicking on the resource name and going to its settings.

Adding resources to the Bookings calendar

Likely, the client will want to be able to track their resource uses. You can set this up for them by creating a custom calendar showing resource uses. See Using the resources timeline for more info.

More info

Here are some additional pages on resources:

• Resources on Resources (internal page)
• Example setups (internal page)
• Resources and Bookability: Examples and Explanations (internal page): A page where we document some weird scenarios and how to explain them to clients
• Client-facing help pages about resources: Includes overview, FAQs, overrides, making/managing bookings with resources, etc.

At times, clients may ask to restrict certain resources to be available only for Direct bookings and not for Online bookings. You may be tempted to achieve this through changing the visibility of the resources on the Direct/Online sheets as seen below:

However, we avoid using this method because it is very difficult to troubleshoot and adjust and has a large margin of potential error.

The alternative is to only offer certain resources on back-end only, duplicate customer types. This may look something like below:

This is the cleanest way to approach having Direct or Online – only resources available and should be the go-to method.

Clients frequently request to add a capacity on the total number of bookings that can be made on a given availability, regardless of the number of people included in each booking.

This is especially prevalent on private group items that use “Adult,” and “Child” customer types, as well as items that have to adhere to COVID-19 restrictions.

To accomplish this we need to add resources that are equivalent to the total number of bookings that can be made per the client’s request.

“Only 5 bookings can be made on the Train Tour for any given availability” translates into 5 resources named “Booking 1 – Train Tour,” “Booking 2 – Train Tour,” etc.

Notice how we set the max use to some arbitrary, large number like 100. We also set all of the resources to “Same booking” and then “Do not allow split parties” in the resource group itself.

These steps were all done because we need to have some figure added as a max use and 100 is large enough not to affect the capacity in most cases, each resource should close for further use once one booking uses it, and we don’t want to allow one booking to use multiple of the resources.

Once these requirements have been created and added to the availabilities, they should begin to restrict the total number of bookings to 5 for each availability and any overlapping availabilities.

If they truly want there to be only 5 bookings for each specific availability time without overlap, then shorten the usage length to something small like .01 hours long.