Setting up the availability of your hour-based resources

Video transcript:

In this video we will demonstrate the setup of hour-based rentals.

At this point we've already created a new planyo site.

Let's go to the time related settings of the resource.

In the rental duration drop down you can select from fixed, flexible or predefined rental durations.

Select always same duration if the rental duration is always the same, for example you offer appointments which always have a 30 minute duration.

Select duration time freely chosen by client if your clients should be able to freely choose the duration.

An example in this case is a conference room rental where the client can select any duration between 30 minutes and eight hours.

The value client can choose from pre-defined values is useful if you allow a small number of duration choices, for example a sport field can be booked for 60, 90, or 120 minutes.

Make sure to set the text label for each duration choice.

Your customers will see these texts on the booking form.

The predefined values are also used if you offer half day and full day bookings or if you offer different services which require different durations, for example foot massage of 30 minutes and full body massage of 45 minutes.

Then set up your opening hours and click on the weekly schedule if your availability varies on different workdays.

Simply mark the unavailable times or days.

With the setting: allowed start quarters you can limit if you want to allow your customer to start a booking at each hour, each half hour, or each quarter of an hour.

With the setting: restrict starting times you can limit the times when the reservation can start by specifying comma separated values, for example 8am 1pm or 2:30pm.

The setting minimum time between consecutive rentals is useful if a resource cannot be rented immediately after the previous booking.

You can specify the time needed to prepare the resource for the next rental.

With the setting minimum / maximum time between reservation and rental you can determine when a reservation can be entered into the system.

For example if a client can enter a booking no more than seven days in advance or if you need to know at least one day in advance that there is a booking for given day.

You can add unavailability periods in site settings > resource vacations, for example national holidays or vacations or maintenance periods.

You can enter one time or recurring weekly, monthly, or yearly vacations.

Please note that administrators can still reserve during the unavailable periods.

They will be however presented with a warning message and the reservation will be marked as a conflict.

Of course your customers cannot reserve during vacations.

If you need to make frequent updates to the availability calendar you should instead use the availability page.

You can alternatively go to the schedule page to add vacations on the daily, weekly or monthly schedule calendar