Allow groups to book a time slot and make the remaining inventory unavailable to non-group participants.
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A
Alex Grant
As a merchant, I want a customer to be able to book up to X amount slots but once they've booked a time slot, that time is no longer available to other customers outside their group even if they haven't booked the full limit.
e.g. "I offer private tours for up to 12 people but even if a group of 4 books the 1 pm time slot, it's marked as sold out since it's a private tour."
Why this feature?
Because people want to bring private groups of people (business, family, school, etc) to an experience that doesn't include other members of the general public. This is a known pattern for experiential commerce and it's reasonable to offer private experiences.
Possible features to comment on:
- Should the public be able to close out any time slot or do they have to request it first and the store admin can grant it?
- Does any time slot with at least one booking remove itself from being bookable by a group? (This seems fair to that one person in our opinion. However, a store admin could request to move that person to another date and then allow a group to book that now open time slot)
- As a merchant, do you want to set aside certain time slots for groups only?
- As a merchant, do you want to restrict certain peak times from being purchased by a group?
- As a merchant, do you want to charge a premium for groups to buy out a time slot? This may be appropriate where you allow a group of (let's say) 10 to close out a time slot that could accommodate 25 people.
- What do you think about the way Airbnb does it? There's a minimum group price for a time slot that goes up after a certain amount of people sign up. See this gif for an example. https://share.getcloudapp.com/L1uWmdvB
Chip Keyes
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We're excited to announce one of our latest new features "Group Booking". You can read more about how to offer private group experiences in this article:
https://help.experiencesapp.com/en/articles/6640604-how-to-take-group-bookings-for-your-experiences
Chip Keyes
in progress
w
whiskey-del-bac.myshopify.com
We do the same thing and need this feature to be able to automate our private tour bookings.
Mark Sandeno
whiskey-del-bac.myshopify.com: Thanks for chiming in. We're considering the best way to implement this feature.
Do you want the customer/group to be able to shut down any time slot? For example, if there's a 3pm slot on a Tuesday that could accommodate 35 people, but a group of 15 books it and somehow says, "we want a private experience/tour/etc", then no one else can book that time?
w
whiskey-del-bac.myshopify.com
Mark Sandeno: Yes, you got it right. We host private tours so we can take up to 15 at a time but we normally have groups of 4-6 people book that time slot. We'd love for it to automatically shut down that time slot for private events as soon as one group books it. Right now, we manually have to adjust the max limits as soon as an order is placed otherwise we're getting double bookings for those events and have to manually reschedule the second group that booked after the first. Some sort of private event setting where those experiences would automatically shut down the time slot after one booking would be really helpful. Similar to a medical booking or calendly. Thanks for your help on this. It will save many headaches and manual processes.
Mark Sandeno
whiskey-del-bac.myshopify.com: Thanks for that feedback. It sounds like you're ok with foregoing the revenue from the remaining bookings (e.g. a group is only 4 of a potential 15 time slots) if the patron says, "we want a private experience" in some way. Or, are 100% of your time slots meant to be private events where as soon as one person books, no one else should be able to make additional bookings?
w
whiskey-del-bac.myshopify.com
Mark Sandeno: Hi Mark, we are ok with that. We price our private tours higher than our public tours knowing that we'll have less people there. Our tour experiences are split between private (we want closed with one booking) and public (all 15 spots are available to be booked by multiple groups). Hope that helps.
Mark Sandeno
whiskey-del-bac.myshopify.com: Interesting. Would you be interested in a customer experience where it was one published experience but the customer could choose to make it private for an additional fee? See this gif for an example. https://share.getcloudapp.com/L1uWmdvB
That way you have less to manage in the backend, I assume.
w
whiskey-del-bac.myshopify.com
Mark Sandeno: I could see that for some experiences but our schedule/staffing is based around public and private tours so we wouldn't want to have the customer be able to determine which time slots are private vs. public. Public tours take longer to set up so we space them out longer than private tours. Example: Saturdays we have private tours at 12/2/4/6pm but since public tours take longer to setup and turn around, we only have them on Sundays at 12pm & 3pm.
Mark Sandeno
whiskey-del-bac.myshopify.com: Ok. That's helpful to know. In summary, you'd like to have two (or more) separate experiences published and at least one of them is set up specifically for groups, only accepts group bookings, and closes out the time slot after at least 1 booking (in your case). Thanks for all the details, you've been very helpful!
w
whiskey-del-bac.myshopify.com
Mark Sandeno: Yep, that's exactly what we'd like. An option to decide is it's a capped booking at one booking and the ability to host an event open to multiple bookings. Thank you so much for working on this for us. Always happy to help with any other questions. Cheers!
Chip Keyes
Merged in a post:
Group Booking Filter
d
dry-fly-distilling.myshopify.com
Can you please creat a filter where only 1 group can book on that day and can input how many are in the group.
Thank you.
Mark Sandeno
Merged in a post:
Allow a customer to buy out a time slot for a group if it meets minimums
Mark Sandeno
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