Customer-chosen recurring (multiple) dates
Recurring reservations can be entered by both administrators and customers but only if the shopping cart feature is enabled. You can enable both the shopping cart and the recurring reservations in
Site settings > Active features.
1. Enabling Shopping Cart Mode
To utilize advanced booking features, start by enabling the shopping cart mode:
Once this is activated, you can enable additional options:
2. Enabling Recurring Reservations
Recurring reservations allow both administrators and customers to book repeated rentals. This feature is only available if the shopping cart mode is enabled.
- In Site Settings > Active Features, check the box labeled 'Enable recurring reservations'. Note that this option is not compatible with resources that can only be rented for entire days or nights.
- Then, go to Resources > Resource Settings > Time-Related Settings for each resource that should use recurring reservations and check the 'Enable recurring reservations' option.
Once enabled, customers will see a dropdown labeled 'Repeat this rental' when making a reservation, allowing them to select how many times the rental should recur (e.g., weekly or daily). The desired dates are added to the shopping cart, and the customer can check out to finalize the reservation. This feature also lets you specify the number of recurring time slots and the intervals between them, down to 15 minutes.
3. Enabling Return Trip Option
The return trip option allows customers to select an additional date/time for a return trip, which is useful for transportation services like shuttle buses, taxis, or ships.
- In Site Settings > Active Features, check the box labeled 'Return trip'.
This option lets you specify a different resource for the return trip. For example, if you have a shuttle covering routes A - B - C - D and D - C - B - A, you can create two resources for each route and set the other resource as the return trip resource.
4. Allowing Customers to Choose Multiple Dates
This feature allows customers to add up to 9 additional dates to a single reservation, making a total of 10 dates.
- In Site Settings > Active Features, check the box labeled 'Allow customers to choose multiple dates on the reservation form'.
Customers can quickly add multiple dates using a single reservation form by clicking on the 'Add another date' link under the date selector. All chosen dates will be added to the shopping cart.
Admin-entered vacations
If you don't want to use the shopping cart feature, you can allow for recurring reservations which can ONLY be entered by the administrators. In this option recurring reservations are entered in form of recurring vacations which can be found in
Site settings > Resource vacations. In the comments field you can write which customer the given resource vacation (reservation in this case) is for. A vacation will work well because it will not allow other clients to reserve the same resource and can be set up as recurring periods (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly). At the same time the admins can see in the schedule tab what which client uses the resource.
Please note that you can also enter recurring reservations for a limited time period only, e.g. all fridays in January and February 2011. To do this, click
limit this vacation to a specific period when adding the vacation.
Long-term reservations (e.g. courses)
Please note that if you are looking for a way to allow bookings for classes/courses (long-term), and you don't want your students to sign up for each individual lesson, see
Q243 for set-up instructions.