FAQ Q144: How does Planyo handle trusted customers / members?

There are a few ways you can set up your Planyo site if your business has a group of trusted customers:

• If you only want to allow a small group of customers to make bookings (e.g., you have a driver's ed school and know your students), you can assign passwords (either the same one for all or unique) to users and require the password to enter a booking. To do this, set the 'Confirmation Method' to 'PASSWORD' in Resources > Reservation Process.
• In Resources > Reservation Process, you can decide to only take bookings from customers who are logged in. To do this, check the box labeled Only customers who are logged in can make reservations. If you are using advanced integration, you may have an existing mechanism in place that only gives a login to trusted users. By integrating Planyo with your website's login, you can prevent users who are not logged in from making reservations. More about this...
• If you want to accept bookings from both new and trusted customers, you can mark the trusted users as pre-approved. You can do this is many places, including reservation or user details or Customer list / banned and pre-approved users. Reservations of pre-approved users are always confirmed immediately and automatically, even if you require obligatory payments (in such case the pre-approved users don't need to pay anything).
• If you want some resources to be reservable by specific customers e.g. from a mailing list or having access to a specific page on your website, you can go to the reservation process settings of a resource and select the checkbox Reservable only via special URL. This will hide such resource from all the listings and only allow reservations to be made by customers to whom you provide the direct reservation link
• If you want the ability to reserve or the price to depend on the customer, for example member rate vs non-member rate, first go to Site settings > Custom user properties and create a new custom user property (e.g. called 'member' of type 'checkbox'). Please note that you can also connect this to a booking form item (Q215). The next step would be selecting the customers which are members (Customers > Customer list) and then you can add a pricing manager rule of type Custom property (user) to change the price depending on the membership status. In the membership example, select 'member' and type 'yes' as the required value. As for the price, you can then type -10 and select percent (%) as the price unit. Note that you can also bulk import customers from a CSV file. The import can also determine the values of your custom user properties.
• If you want price discounts to be applied for customers with multiple bookings, you can use the Pricing Manager rules: Number of times/hours reserved recently or Total number of existing rentals/hours in given period. The former is based on the time when the bookings were made and the latter on the time of rental.
• If you want your customers to buy a membership card, you can do this with the coupons feature. This way the customer purchases a membership card for X months and can make as many reservations without paying single entries as they wish during this period. You can optionally make the membership mandatory, therefore not allowing single reservations from non-members.
• If you'd like to work with points/credits instead of real currencies, see Q295
• If you'd like to do a custom verification, for example allow reservations only from users with given domain name in their email address, you may want to create a custom unavailability script. This requires development but is a very easy task (pretty much a single line of code).