Affiliate Rules Feature Kit

Affiliates offer our clients a valuable booking channel, acting as a distribution and sales person for clients. However, this channel comes at the cost of commission. We’ve built Affiliate Rules which allows charters to restrict affiliates’ access to their bookable inventory. By setting strategic affiliate rules, clients can limit affiliates’ access to bookable inventory and ensure ample availability for online and direct sales, effectively maximizing their revenue potential

This brings a lot of value to our clients: * Affiliate rules put our clients in the driver’s seat, giving them full control over affiliate access to their bookings and helping them maximize potential revenue by driving online sales. * By using affiliate rules, clients can ensure they have plenty of availability for both online and direct sales, effectively increasing their revenue.

• Tiers: All tiers can enable it
• Regions: All regions
• Clients utilizing affiliates, including OTAs, who often sell out.
  • These clients may not need to rely on affiliate channels if they sell out. By capping affiliate access, the charter leaves more space to online bookings and a higher net revenue.
• Clients interested in utilizing affiliates, but are concerned with the high commissions.
  • They can now utilize affiliates worry-free by starting off slow and limiting available capacity for affiliates to book!
• Clients who want to limit affiliates to book certain items only.
• We recommend prioritizing higher tier clients (T3+) for this functionality as they would find more value in the dollar savings if they have significant affiliate volume.
  • Clients with 40-80% share of affiliate bookings

There is no monetization involved with this feature.

Not Available

Below are additional resources to share with clients:

• Success Story: Get Up and Go Kayaking

• Compass Article

Internal Training

• Original Training Deck

• Continued Education Training Deck

• Recorded Continued Education Training

Demo Dashboards

• Island Tours

Tableau Reports

• Affiliate Rules Revenue Report
• Affiliate Rules Breakdown by Shortname

• Capacity-based affiliate rules – Released
• Permanently restrict affiliates from booking certain items on their Dashboard – Released
• Setting the release restriction to 0 days before availability start time. Previously the minimum was 1 day so rules would always release 24 hours before availability start time – Released
• You can now view which items and affiliates a rule is applied to in the Affiliate Rules table, saving you a click into the rule each time. – Released
• An icon is now shown to Admins and charter users on availabilities that have Affiliate Rules applied
• There is now an activity log for Affiliate Rules to help with troubleshooting – Released
• Added a warning message when the charter is creating a booking on behalf of the affiliate, if there is a rule active to that affiliate and availability – Released
• Apply affiliate rules based on specific times of the day – Released
• Improve UX with affiliate Rules & Blocks Facelift – modernizing the legacy code for Blocks, improving the UX copy for better user understanding, and ensuring compatibility with resource management systems – TBD
• Last day booking cut off for affiliates – The users can define affiliate rules for the last days before the actual availability. – TBD

Don’t see an update here? Submit the client and functionality gap to the idea box.

• Ensure the affiliate rule name is descriptive of what it’s doing
  • If additional information is needed for the rule, add it to the rule notes
• If using a capacity rule, consider whether or not that capacity rule can apply to several items. If item capacity varies, it will be best to have separate rules for each item.
• How to effectively limit Affiliate A to 50% of bookable capacity:
  • Rule 1: Limit Affiliate A to 50 seats on my Boat Tour of 100 total capacity
  • Rule 2: Limit Affiliate A to 5 seats on the Walking Tour of 10 total capacity
• For clients – ensure affiliate rules do not break charter <> affiliate contracts. Clients should check their contract with each affiliate to see if there is a clause about limiting bookings.
• If two booking rules are in place for an affiliate, the more restrictive rule will be applied.

• It is not currently possible to run reports on the affiliate rules.