Setup Experiences

What is an Experience?

Experiences are used to set availability, capacity, and pricing type for groups of products.
All activities will need to be linked to an experience to determine how they behave. For example if your tickets are General Admission, with Adult / Child options - the experience would be General Admission, with Adult and Child activities linked to it. 

 

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Adding and managing experiences.

To add a new experience, enter the details required in the Add Experience section on the left hand side of Booking Dashboard > Setup Experiences. To amend an existing experience, click [edit] next to the experience you want to change under the Existing Experiences section on the right.

Experience settings.

Parent experience	This is used to link experiences together. For example if you have multiple party rooms and a party can go into any available room, you'd have Party Room 1, Party Room 2, and Party Room 3 - on Party Rooms 2 and 3 you'd set the Parent Experience to Party Room 1 to link them together.
Extras category	This is used to set a default extras category for each experience if needed. If no extras category is set against an activity, it will use the one set here. This can also be set at a system-level for all experiences in System Setup > Booking System.
Scheduling style	There are multiple options for Scheduling style: Standard Capacity Based: The most straight-forward option, each session has a capacity which dictates the number of people who can be booked into that slot. Once the capacity is reached, the session is no longer available. Skilled Employee Based: Relies on Instructors to determine availability. Sessions are only available when there is an instructor scheduled for that time. Specified Program Based: Uses the Programme Setup function, where sessions or courses are added individually - ideal for use with lesson-based setups, like skiing/snowboarding where the session times may not be the same from one day to the next. Time & Duration Based: Used for when an activity has a duration, and needs to take up space on the experience based on that duration. For example if an activity is 60 mins, and there's time slots every 15 mins, a booking at 12:00 would also reduce the capacity of the 12:15, 12:30, and 12:45 sessions.
Booking Calendar style	There are 3 options for this: Standard: Displays each time slot with a bar that fills up based on the number of slots filled, and lists the orders below. Compatible with any scheduling style, as if the booking has a duration beyond the single time slot it's booked into, the subsequent slots will show eg '2 from prior slots' in yellow. Restaurant: Useful for linked experiences such as when a table or a room is used for an activity, shows experiences down the left hand side and times along the top. Bookings show as a bar spanning the time slots based on the duration of the activity. Contains a 'Move Bookings' option where bookings can be dragged & dropped to change the start time.  Time & Duration Based: Similar to Restaurant but simplified - multiple experiences can be selected and viewed together, bookings can be moved via drag & drop, and the booking spans multiple time slots horizontally based on duration.
Is this experience age based?	Opens additional settings when ticked: Minimum and maximum average age: Sets the average age of the group that can book onto this experience. Child cut off age: Sets the oldest age for a child eg. 17, then 18+ would be an adult group. Age tolerance: Enables you to set the number of years between average ages that can book onto the same session. Useful for example for Laser sessions - if a group of adults book into a session but there's still availability, you might only want other adults to book the remaining slots.
Is this the default experience?	Setting an experience as default means when first opening the Booking Calendar this will be the experience selected.
Exclude from Performance Hub participants figures?	Used for when the experience is solely for booking in an extra or something additional to the 'main' entry product. For example if General Admission has an optional add-on for Soft Play which is booked into a time slot, you may want to exclude Soft Play from the participants figure as everyone booking Soft Play will already be counted within General Admission. Other reports will still include bookings for all experiences even when this is set.
Auto check in on activity date	When ticked, any bookings for the experience will be checked in automatically at the booking start time.
Show as same day events on booking calendar (website only)	Adds an icon to the date on the calendar when booking online, so if for example when booking General Admission there's also an Easter Event taking place on some days, this could be ticked for the Easter Event experience and an egg icon added to show that there's special events taking place on particular days.
Allow website bookings X minutes before session start	This is used to determine when a time slot will be removed from the website. Settings here will override the Location setting for the same thing.

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What is an experience?

Experiences are used to manage capacities and resources. Use of experiences will differ vastly across industries and businesses.

Example A (General Admission): A single Admission experience with the overall site capacity, with Adult / Child / Toddler etc tickets all linked to this experience.

Example B (Rooms/Resources): A range of Classroom or Party Room experiences, with a capacity set for each one.

Example C (Specific Activities): There could be multiple activities each with their own experience (i.e Mini Golf, Soft Play, Go Karts), which are all handled separately, with their own set of products each.

Additionally, Bundles and Parties can be used to book activities into multiple experiences at once.