Getting setup with the Booking Experts integration
Before your users can start booking their future holidays with the Booking Experts integration, there’s a few things to setup.
General Setup
Channel
Bookings made through this Booking Experts integration will be assigned to a Booking Experts channel. Usually this would be a separate channel designated for the App. These are set on a per-administration (park) level.
Pause Bookings
If you wish to temporarily pause your bookings, you can toggle the pause bookings switch on. When you do, you’ll also be able to enter a message to show to guests who visit the booking page.
Contact phone number
If the booking should fail for any reason, the phone number here will be presented to the user as an alternative contact method.
Show quantity for these Extras
In Booking Experts, there are a wide variety of extras that can be created and added to an order. These extras having many different calculation types to choose from ie. Per Person, Per Person Per Day
With a number of these calculation types it wouldn’t make sense to show them in the booking summary with a quantity ie. Breakfast for every person every day would show as
1 x Breakfast
Which could be confusing for visitors. Instead, with the ‘Per Person Per Day’ option enabled here it will just show in the order summary as Breakfast without the quantity.
In Booking Experts every park is known as an administration and every administration (park) has rentable segments which are accommodation types. Those rentable segments (accommodation types) may need different rules for booking.
These rules can be:
- Minimum number of nights
- Specific arrival days only
- Fixed stay lengths ie. 3 day weekends and 4 day midweeks
What these rules are will determine what availability shows. An example could be that your caravans and lodges can only have 4 night stays arriving on a Monday, and 3 night stays arriving on a Friday.
Setting up an Accommodation rule
The highest level under the Booking rules tab is the Administration level (Parks). First, we must choose which Administration (Park) that the accommodation is on.
Then choose from the drop down for the rentable segment type. ie. Holiday homes
You will now see some tabs;
General Settings, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
General Settings
Maximum nights
On the general settings tab you can choose the maximum number of nights that anyone can book this accommodation type for.
Seasonal blackouts
You can also set Seasonal blackouts which are dates when the accommodation is not bookable ie. the park is shut or maintenance work.
Exceptions
These are periods of time where the normal rules are suspended and these new rules are applied. ie. You may have different rules over a half term or Christmas
Day Specific Rules
Each day of the week has a corresponding tab where you can set:
- Allow arrivals on that day
- Minimum nights allowed
- Fixed stay options (only allow certain length stays ie. 4 nights is you arrive Monday)
Search Waterfall
The search waterfall is a set of fallback rules that run automatically when a user’s original search returns no results. If no results are found, the system reruns the search using alternative parameters, in the following order:
- Accommodation type
- Length of stay
- Dates (within a configurable range)
Example flow:
- A user searches and gets no results.
- The system reruns the search using the same criteria but with different accommodation types.
- If there are still no results, it reruns the search again, this time adjusting the length of stay.
- If results are found at this point, the process stops.
- If not, the system performs a final search using different dates (e.g., up to 14 days before or after the original start date).
