Setting up returning resources

There are three common setups used for setting up returning resources:

• Setting durations as Items and boats as Customer Types
  • Best for: Companies with a small number of Customer Types
    • For example, “Tandem v Solo” or “Adult Bike v Child Bike”
  • Pros: Cleaner Customer Types and Resources
  • Cons: Creates more items

• Setting boats as Items and durations as Customer Types

  • Best for: Rentals without many durational choices (ATVs, Kayaks with half day, full day, 3 day, 1 week, etc)
  • Pros: Fewer items

  • Cons: Can get cluttered quickly if the client needs a lot of duration booking options

    Tip: For this setup, try splitting the hourly and daily rentals into their own items so that you don’t clutter the Dashboard with Customer Types too quickly.

Lodging setups are one of the more common instances where a returning resource setup might be good. For example, a client may want to know which campsites, boat slips, or cabins should be empty so they can clean, kick out people staying later than they should, etc.

Which returning resource setup you use depends on how that lodging needs to be viewed and managed. You may want to set the items as the name of the campsite/cabin and the Customer Types as durations. In other cases, you may want to set the item as the duration (such as a 1 night campsite rental) and have the CTs as site types (such as “electric” or “non-electric”).

Tips:

• A lot of returning resource setups can involve a complex price schedule, but these setups generally won’t have any impact on how the resources need to work.
  • The only exception to this is if the Dashboard has resource visibility configured within the price sheets, but this is rare.
• Remember that though all these setups function similarly, the Dashboard you are working with may be best suited for one or the other depending on other factors.
• While configuring these setups, use a bookings calendar in the timeline view to get a good idea of when your resources are in use.

Check out how each setup is configured on this demo Dashboard (March 15, 2022; March 22, 2022; and March 29, 2022 have demo bookings that can be understood with the timeline calendars and manifests).

The overall concept of this setup is to create a resource that’s only “in use” on the last day of the booking. Once you’ve decided on the best returning resource setup based on your Dashboard, the next step is to create the returning resources.

For bookings less than 24 hours in duration, we set the to-be-returned resource as “in use” from midnight on the day of the availability and lasting for 24 hours.

For bookings greater than 24 hours in duration, we set the to-be-returned resource as “in use” starting however many hours after the availability starts that will leave 24 hours left in the booking and set it to lasting 24 hours. For example, if the booking is 48 hours, we set the to-be-returned resource as “in use” starting 24 hours after the availability starts (which leaves exactly 24 hours left on the booking) and set it to lasting for 24 hours.

Now that the returning resource (returners) have been created, they need to be viewable. The easiest way to do this is to create a “resource manifest” that selects the returners.

Additionally, creating multiple returning resources allows you to get more granular with your manifests. For example, if you wanted to see the boats but not the cabins, this wouldn’t be possible with only one returning resource because that single resource would be in use on boats as well as cabins. For this reason, it’s best to create multiple returning resources depending on the Dashboard.

Here’s an example with multiple returning resources and all boats, cabins, and campsites selected:

Here’s an example of multiple returning resources with only cabins selected:

Once the returners have been configured and have been made viewable on the manifest (and you’ve tested the setup to ensure it works as intended), the returning resource setup is complete.