ASN Book Buttons & QR Codes

ASN links can be used by a variety of clients and affiliates for a myriad of purposes.

• An affiliate reselling multiple charter companies’ activities on their website.

• Charter company reselling another charter company’s activities as an affiliate Reference the Charters Reselling Each Other in confirmation emails if needed.

• Hotel/Concierge reselling charter company’s activities as an affiliate.

• Affiliate wanting to resell using QR codes on paper marketing.

ASN Link (simple):

ASN Link (more options):

QR Code:

Once the unique code is created, these can be used on any paper marketing materials! The customer just scans the code with their phone’s camera and it will pull up the booking link in their browser. Anytime a booking is made through the QR Code, it will track as coming from the affiliate & their commission.

1. Aggregator Sites

   Best Vegas Attractions is a reseller website, reselling FareHarbor companies through ASNs. In this example below, BVA is reselling FareHarbor charter Vegas Indoor Skydiving. Once you hover over ‘Book Online Now’, you will notice that the ASN URL is shown at the bottom of the screenshot. As long as there is an asn=(affiliateshortname) in the URL, the affiliate is being tracked.

   

   Gimifun is a Dutch company reselling tours and activities in the south of Portugal. Visitors on this website usually fill in a booking form to request more information, but with the FareHarbor ASN, customers are able to purchase some of the activities directly on the website. As you can see here, they are reselling FareHarbor charter Fly Algarve.
   

2. Hotels

   The Mills House is a hotel with an ‘Explore’ page that features FareHarbor clients such as Bulldog Tours. Once you hover over ‘Book Online Now’, you will notice that the ASN URL is shown at the bottom of the screenshot below. As long as there is an asn=(affiliateshortname) in the URL, the affiliate is being tracked.

   

   Hostels Vall D’aneu is a small hotel group located in Catalonia, Spain. You will find the FareHarbor Lightframe under the ACTIVITATS (Activities) category. When clicked, you may see that they’re using an ASN button containing a booking flow, in order to sell tours from Pirineus Parc Aventura.

   

3. Any Other Company

   Hawaiian Airlines has a partnership with FareHarbor, in order to provide their passengers a curated list of activities in Hawaii. The activities resold here are from varied FareHarbor operators, and these are divided by the different islands. You may notice that this part of the website was created by our Sites Team. Learn more about FareHarbor Sites for affiliates here.

   

• Online Booking Fee

Since bookings through ASN integrations take place through FareHarbor’s online book form, FareHarbor collects a booking fee. When a booking is made using an ASN, 100% of the money will go to the charter company. We cannot autosplit/pay commissions to affiliates for ASN bookings.

• Effortless real-time booking for the client and the affiliate

Once the buttons are integrated on the affiliate’s site, it’s just up to the customers to make the bookings!

• Customized rates

We can assign different price sheets to ASN links in order to adjust rates shown, or make different customer types and/or custom fields show through the book button on the affiliate’s site.

• Customized booking flows

We can create booking flows for a specific affiliates website and attach it to the ASN link.

• Tracking

ASNs and ASN Refs are essential for companies that work with affiliates and want to track bookings made through affiliate websites. For example, this information can determine which affiliate companies are generating the most online bookings, and for which activities.

With the embed generator, creating ASN links are easy!

Before creating the ASN link, add the affiliate to the charter dashboard. Then create the ASN link by going to Settings–>Book Buttons & Embeds and following the steps below.

1. Select a widget type

Typically we use a link for either a specific item or a specific flow.

2. Either select or deselect the ‘include items and description’ box and then select ‘Advanced Settings’

Under Advanced Settings and Pricing is where you can select the total price sheet the ASN link should pull from and the affiliate that should be tagged.

If the Pricing option isn’t showing up with a dropdown of total sheets, it means that the dashboard doesn’t have any sheets that have been made ‘bookable online’. In this case, the ASN link will automatically pull the Online Total Sheet.

If you created a specific sheet for the ASN link, open the Total Sheet and select ‘bookable online’.

As a security measure, price sheet IDs are changed to a long UUID code. This prevents clients and affiliates from changing the price sheet used in a link on their own.

Next, select the affiliate you’d like attached to the ASN link. This will make it so any bookings made with the link will show in the Charter’s dashboard as coming from this affiliate.

After the affiliate is added, add any Ref or ASN Refs needed.

In the “Return-to URL” field, add the affiliate’s website URL. The reason for this is because by default, if the online customer booking through the ASN link selects ‘Leave Checkout’ they will be taken back to the charter’s homepage, rather than back to the affiliate’s homepage where they first found the tour. When this happens, the affiliate tag is lost so if the customer ends up making the booking through the charter’s website, the affiliate will not be tagged, and therefore not receive credit for that booking.

3. Choose the code (typically a URL / link)

Copy & Paste the code and send it to either the Charter or Affiliate. If the affiliate knows how to integrate it onto their website, perfect! If they need help, ask for the websites username, password, and location they want it integrated on and then submit an integration request by clicking here and our integrations team can do it for them. If the website was built by FH, our sites team can integrate the ASN link for them.

4. How to hide ‘Call to Book’ availabilities

• If you want to hide Call to Book Availabilities from the generated link, this syntax ?bookable-only=yes can be added to the end of book buttons and embed links, hiding any availabilities with a “Call to Book” from the calendar view.
  • If you have multiple queries on a link or embed, be sure to start all queries beyond the first with an ampersand &;. Example: https://fareharbor.com/embeds/book/exampleco/?full-items=yes&bookable-only=yes.
  • Note, full-items=yes is the first query, so it starts with a question mark ?. bookable-only=yes is the second query, so that starts with an ampersand &. Any additional queries would also start with an ampersand.
  • For example, https://fareharbor.com/embeds/book/cooltourlisbon/?asn=almalusa&full-items=yes&flow=170507&bookable-only=yes only the “&bookable-only=yes has been added because ? exists in the generated link already. The URL leads to specific flow and the syntax has been added to it to hide the “Call to Book” availabilities.
  • Another example that the ASN link leads to the general items view would look like this https://fareharbor.com/embeds/book/cooltourlisbon/?asn=epicsana-euro&bookable-only=yes
  • Note Until this is included in the embedded generator, please add manually to the end of every book button we generate.

• ASN Ref

The ASN Ref is an optional attribute you can use to collect additional information about a booking. It will appear under the affiliate’s name on the booking overview, in the Voucher field.

Typically, voucher numbers are only used when an affiliate collects full payment from a customer directly, and provides the customer with a physical voucher that they can then present to the activity provider for admittance.

• Ref

This is the online booking reference; i.e. “where did the booking come from?” Refs should be used whenever possible.

An online booking reference can be a website or specific page, an email, or any source that leads to a customer making an online booking. Some examples of Ref values: confirmation-email, homepage, explorepage etc.

The ref is displayed in the booking notes at the bottom of the booking overview and can also be included in reports.

When creating an Advanced report, you can add the online booking reference column (be sure to search under “detailed” or “all” columns) to see where online bookings are coming from during a certain time period. This column pulls data directly from the Ref attribute.

You can also add the online booking reference column to a legacy Detailed bookings report using the “Other options” menu:

Booking flows

Click here to learn about booking flows.

Click here to view an example of a booking flow created for a specific affiliate.

Affiliate booking flows

Oftentimes a new booking flow will need to be created when creating an ASN link for an affiliate. An affiliate booking flow is the same as a regular booking flow. The difference is the flow is created for an affiliate and will be integrated/shown on an affiliate’s ASN link.

When are affiliate booking flows used?

• If a charter only wants their affiliate to sell some of their items

• If a charter wants the flow in a different format than their default booking flow

• If an affiliate needs a customized header or label for one of the items

• If a charter has a gift card item that they don’t want their affiliates to have on an ASN

Should I make every new affiliate their own booking flow?

Creating a new booking flow for an affiliate is not always necessary when creating ASNs. If you can avoid making more flows, do it! You can send multiple affiliates links from the same booking flow as long as they want them to see the same items through the link.

What can I customize on an ASN booking flow?

The order in which the items appear, the size of each item on the grid, the photos that show up for each item and whether or not to have multiple items within each photo grid.

Attaching an affiliates Booking flow to an ASN

1. Settings > Book Buttons & Embeds

2. Select the flow you would like a code for from this dropdown from the first “Choose widget type” section.

Can Charters create their own booking flow for an affiliate?

Yes! The Booking Flows section is located under Settings > Booking Flows. Dashboard users can only see this section if we adjust their permissions as even the Director level permission group does not include this.

The “Manage booking flows” permission check box is located under Settings > Users & Permissions > Permission Groups > Edit > Setup

To ensure bookings made through the QR code are tracked, the QR code must be generated with an ASN link.

To generate an ASN link:

1. Log in to FareHarbor and navigate to Settings > Book Buttons > Embeds.
2. In Part 1, for “Choose Widget Type”, select either a flow you want to open when the QR code is scanned or a specific item.

3. In Part 2, for “Options”, enter the following:

   For online ref: enter qrcode. Then select the affiliate company you are generating a custom link for.

4. In Part 3, select “Copy this code for your site”.
5. Select the link version.

Then, you must insert the ASN link into the QR code generator to create the affiliate QR code.

To generate the QR code:

1. Visit this website. Note: Codes generated with this third-party site may expire in 14 days after creation. Please verify that this will not cause issues for the affiliate/client. Alternatively, you can use https://www.online-qrcode-generator.com/ if you want to be sure.
2. Select ‘URL’.
3. Insert the ASN link.
4. Save the QR code and send to either the charter or affiliate.

Bookings made through a QR code will appear in the Dashboard in the same way that online bookings appear; however, it will tag the affiliate that the ASN link was created with.

Can an affiliate collect payment through an ASN?

No, the charter is always collecting payment for bookings made through an ASN link.

Are split payments possible through ASNs?

No. At this time there is not a way for commission to go to an affiliate’s bank account and the remaining amount go to the charter’s bank account once a booking is made through an ASN link. The charter will need to pay the affiliate their commission.

Can an ASN link match the “look” of the affiliate’s website?

Yes, ASN links are customizable so that once integrated, the book button will resemble the “look” of the affiliate’s website. Take a look at this help page!

If I update pricing for an affiliate, do I need to create a new ASN link?

No, as long as pricing is updated on the price sheet that the ASN link was made with. You can find the sheet the ASN link was created with by referencing the URL. Copy the long UUID code, then go to any price sheet on the dashboard and replace the short price sheet ID in the url with the long UUID code. This brings you to the price sheet used in the ASN link. Here’s a quick video!

Note: If you create a new price sheet for the affiliate and assign it to the affiliate, then a new ASN link will need to be created.

If company A has their tours listed on their website in a booking flow, can the same booking flow, have company B’s tours in it?

Yes, the ASN link can be added to a booking flow as an External Link. However, this will open the ASN in a new tab rather than within the Lightframe, and trying to go back to the flow using breadcrumbs will lead the user to Company B’s booking flow instead of Company A’s. For these reasons this setup is not recommended, but is possible if the client insists.

If company A has combo items hosted on their dashboard, can these be added as ASN links within their own booking flow in order to track commission owed to the combo partner?

If the flow is integrated with the Lightframe and the ASNs are added as External Links, the Lightframe will see that the External Links have the same origin as the others in the flow, and will override the additional parameters such as ASN tag and Online Booking Reference in order to keep the book form within the Lightframe. Instead of moving to the simple booking page like an External Link to another dashboard’s item would, the item stays in the Lightframe and does not tag the affiliate.

A workaround for this is to put the ASN link through a URL shortener such as this one, then add the shortened link as an External Link in the booking flow. Because it doesn’t include the same basic embed info and shortname as the other items in the flow, the Lightframe will treat it as a true External Link and move to the simple booking page and retain the ASN tag as expected.

I can’t select a price sheet for the ASN link, why?

The pricing option to choose a price sheet will only appear if the total sheet you want to attach is set to ‘bookable online’. If the pricing option doesn’t appear, it is going to pull the dashboards online rates.

Can the affiliate book through an affiliate dashboard at different rates than the ASN link?

Yes. The total sheet assigned to an affiliate will be the rates that appear when booking through an affiliate dashboard. The total sheet assigned to an ASN link are the rates that the ASN link will sell at. The invoicing will be calculated off of the total sheet assigned to the affiliate, even if the ASN link is pulling a total sheet with different rates.

If the affiliate is set up with the default option ‘affiliate taking payment’ or ‘don’t add payment now’ will the ASN link still work?

Yes, but payment will be required to complete the booking and it will be the charter collecting payment (regardless of what the set up shows).

Can I hide ‘Call to Book’ Availabilities with ASN buttons?

Yes, this query ?bookable-only=yes can be added to the end of book buttons and embed links, hiding any availabilities with a “Call to book”

Can I add the company’s logo to the booking flow?

Yes, you can add the “branding” parameter to the ASN link to show the logo at the top of the Lightframe. Take a look at this help page to learn more!

Can I create an ASN link where the booker doesn’t have to enter in a credit card?

If a charter doesn’t want a credit card to be entered for bookings made through an ASN link, adjust the rate to $0 and the spot to enter a credit card will disappear. If it doesn’t, check the item’s bookability settings and ensure “Collect credit card from online customers when making bookings even when no payment is required” is NOT checked.

Can I change the ‘book now’ to something different?

Yes, if the HTML code is given out, the ‘book now’ can be replaced. For example:

Can FareHarbor create a website for the affiliate?

Yes, check out this help page for pricing and restrictions.

Can affiliates who book with ASN Links send payment links?

No, affiliates are not allowed to send payment links, regardless of the booking method they are using.