Blog
We have just released two updates to the Booking system in At The Yard. The first, exclusive bookings which brings the ability for you and your users to exclusively book a facility for a horse. The second, multi slot bookings to make it quicker and easier for users to book extended sessions in a facility.
To make the most of the facilities you provide many yards allow multiple horses to use a facility at the same time. At The Yard’s social features means your customers cam see what others are doing with their horse, letting them decide if it’s a suitable time to join in or if the need to wait for another slot.
However there are times when a horse must have the facility to itself, an exclusive booking. The most common example of this being a riding lesson with an external instructor which typically requires the entire school so not to interrupt the lesson.
There are two different ways to set up exclusive bookings. The first is to simply allow users to choose when they want to make one. This can be done by going to the facility in the admin panel and checking the ‘Allow users to book exclusively’ checkbox.
Once setup the users will see a new option (shown above/to the side) when booking that will allow them to make it an exclusive booking.
The second way of setting up exclusive bookings allows you as a yard owner/manager a bit more control. It works by integrating with the defined uses for a facility. A new option called Exclusive Booking? is now present when making/editing a defined use. By checking this option it will make any booking for that specific defined use automatically an exclusive booking, all without any extra user interaction.
This allows you to offer the facility exclusively when required whilst stopping users from just choosing to have exclusive use of a facility either excessively or unnecessarily.
The second new feature called Multi Slot Bookings allows for bookings to be easily made which span multiple booking slots. The maximum length of these bookings is defined by the Maximum allowed bookings in a row value set for the facility in the admin panel.
When a multi slot booking is available to a user they’ll see an Extend Booking button whilst making a booking, When clicked it extends the length of the booking by one slot length. It automatically checks the availability before offering the extension and if it’s possible it’ll allow to user to extend the booking more than once (up to the allowed number of bookings in a row).
This is also available for members of staff when making bookings on behalf of the users and will be coming to the kiosk view soon.