Setting up Rental Activities with Pricing per Passenger

Overview

Before setting up a Rental activity, please make sure you have completed the following:

• Create Activity Categories
• Create Taxes/Fees
• Create Inventory/Equipment

Passengers or Equipment

When you start creating your rental activity, consider the type of rental you will be offering.

• If your pool of rental equipment is homogenous, that is, all the same size and price (for example single kayaks), we recommend creating the activity using passenger pricing. Follow the steps in this article.
• If your pool of rental equipment is not homogeneous and you have various sizes and/or prices (for example bike rentals) equipment pricing should be used. This type of pricing also allows you to keep track of inventory to avoid overselling a particular size.  If you are going to use equipment pricing, follow all the steps in this article, then when you reach the passenger pricing section head to this article to set your rental up with equipment pricing.

This article will cover the following topics:

• Defining Rental activities
• Offering Different Types of Rental Equipment 
• Where do I go to create a new activity?
• Activity Name/Date Information
• Rental Hours
• Internet Booking Configuration
• Activity Notes and Restrictions
• Per Passenger Pricing Configuration
• Taxation Information
• Capacity and Inventory Assignment
• Pickup/Dropoff Locations
• Activity Description
• Activity Specific Cancellation/Reservation Policies

Defining Rental activities 

Rental Activity: An activity that calculates the price based on length of time on a piece of equipment. Ex. Ski Rental, ATV Rental, Boat Charter

Offering Different Types of Rental Equipment

Depending on your rental business, you may offer different types of equipment for customers to choose from (ie - different brands/sizes of bikes for mountain biking). In order to offer different types of equipment using Zaui, make sure you create a separate rental activity for each different type of equipment. (see screenshot below for example). 

Where do I go to create a new activity?

1. From the navigation bar, select Activities > Activity List.
2. Click on the Activity type you wish to create on the shortcuts panel (in this case, select Rental). 
3. You will be brought to your Basic Settings tab, which is where the majority of your configuration occurs.

Activity Name/Date Information

As soon as you have saved your new activity, the system will auto-generate a unique Activity ID which is useful for differentiating between similarly-named activities. The Activity ID will also need to be provided for OTA connections. 

1. Enter a Name for your activity.
2. Select a Category Name (which should have previously been created).
3. Enter the Activity Location (where does this activity take place).
4. Insert an Image and Image Caption to display on your online booking engine. The Zaui online booking engine is image-heavy, so you want to ensure you upload high-resolution images.
   
    File size must be less than 781.25 KB, at least 765px x 430px and must be .jpg / .jpeg
5. Set the Start Date and End Date.
6. Select whether you will offer multi-day rentals or not and which days of the week you operate on.
7. The Rental Buffer Time feature restricts how closely new tours can be booked on the same piece of equipment. For example, if a horseback riding tour requires horses to have a 30-minute break after each tour before they can be booked again, select the buffer to 00:30.

Rental Hours

This section allows you to configure whether your customers will have the ability to select a pickup and drop-off time for their rentals, or whether this will be configured ahead of time.

If you select I allow my guests to choose their own pickup and drop-off rental times, you have the ability to set this based on your Business Hours (configured in your System Settings, in the Business Hours of Operation section) or by configuring custom hours (specific to this particular rental activity).

If you select Business Hours, you can define the rental intervals: whether you want to accept bookings on the hour, half-hour, quarter-hour etc. 

If your rental hours change throughout the year, select I will configure specific pickup and drop-off times, and click on Add activity time range. 

Create a Custom Rental Time will allow you to specify exactly what time rentals start, their duration and set a date range for each configured time option. Your customers will only be given the option to rent based on what you have configured.

You can create as many rental time options as you need. 

 When entering and adding start times to custom rental times, it is important to add them in order (ie: 8 am, 9 am, 930 am). There is no way to re-order them if for example 930 am is added before 9 am.

Internet Booking Configuration 

Check the Publish to Internet? flag if you wish to allow this activity to be booked on your front-end website.

For the passenger types settings, you can customize which are enabled and redefine them if needed. If you leave the User Defined field blank, the system will use the default definitions.

Keep in mind that the customization you make here is specific to this activity. To customize your passenger-types system-wide, check out this article. 

The Advanced Settings tabs allow further customization.

A popular flag is the Require individual guest details, for companies that require guest details for each person booked on an activity. 

Activity online booking threshold time allows you to configure a minimum time limit (for example, if you put in 24, this means customers cannot book within 24 hours of the activity), as well as for a maximum time limit (for example, if you put in 72, the online booking engine will only show options until 72 hours into the future). 

Keep in mind the threshold times entered here are specific to this activity. If your threshold settings will be the same across all of your same-type activities, you can configure those system-wide under your Portal Settings. Check out this article for more information on setting system-wide thresholds. 

The Activity Web Sort Priority box allows you to organize the order in which each of your activities will display, both online and in Zaui Core (back office). A priority of 1 will put the activity at the top of the list. A value of 0 (default) does not consider priority and will place the activity below any prioritized tours. 

Activity Notes and Restrictions

This section is where you can attach any Activity Notes/Restrictions that you have created.

To create Activity Notes/Restrictions,

1. From the navigation bar, Select Settings > Online Bookings > Notes & Restrictions.
2. Click on Create Note/Restriction on the shortcuts panel. 
3. Note that the text field is limited to 100 character counts. 
4. Click on Save. 
5. These notes will be displayed on the activity and checkout pages of the online booking engine, as seen below.

Per Passenger Pricing Configuration

This section is where you will attach the price codes that you have previously created. Check out this article for information on how to create price codes. If you are offering different prices on different date ranges, you can attach more than one price code. 

If you are setting up equipment pricing, head over to this article.

If no price code is attached, your activity will display as $0.00 on your Online Booking Engine, so make sure to add it before going live!

This section is also where you can add price codes that are either based on the Activity Date or the Purchase Date. For example, you would like to offer a cheaper price for bookings made from November 2020 to March 2021 for your April-June 2021 tours, and a regular price for bookings made during your operating season. For this example, make sure you base your activity price on the Purchase Date.  

When entering the start and end date of your price code, ensure the end date is always past the end date of the activity (in Activity Name/Date Information section) to prevent any pricing errors. 

Taxation Information

Only taxes that have been previously created will be listed in this section. Check out this article for information on how to create taxes/fees. 

Enabling When booking this activity apply all per person per day charges will apply the tax per person, per day for Rental or Multi-Day activities. This flag needs to be enabled in conjunction with the Per Person Per Day taxes mentioned in this article. 

Capacity and Inventory Assignment

This section is where you will attach equipment or set the capacity for your activity. Please check out this article for information on how to create and assign capacity/inventory onto each different type of activity. 

Pickup/Dropoff Locations

If your Standard or Custom activity offers pickup/dropoff services, this section is relevant to you.

You want to ensure you have your Zones created prior to continuing this setup.

1. To allow customers to choose their pickup locations when booking online, check the Enable guests to select pickups for online bookings box. 
2. Click on Add Pickup Configuration.
3. Set the Start and End Dates of when this pickup location will be available to choose from.
4. Select the Pickup Zone previously created.
5. Pickup Offset is used for an overnight trip where the dropoff might occur the next day.
6. Pickup Start and End Time refers to the window of time within which the pickup will occur. 

1. Repeat steps 2-6 for all additional pickup zones offered. 
2. The Dropoff Assignment works the same way as the Pickup Assignment.

Activity Description

Short Description Line 1: This field will be part of your page title when customers view this activity on the online booking engine. The description here will be important for any search engine placement.

Primary Activity Description: This field is where you will want to provide your customers with details about your activity. This information will be displayed online before the customer purchases the activity as well as on the Zaui Core (back office) dashboard, by hovering or clicking on the I icon.

Additional Activity Information: This field will be visible by the customer on the online booking engine as well as on email confirmations. 

Ticket Text: This field will only display on Point of Sale tickets. 

 Don't forget to scroll back up to the top of your page and Save when you're done!

Activity Specific Cancellation/Reservation Policy

You learned where to add your overall company Terms and Policies under System Settings. This section is where you may wish to add activity-specific cancellation/reservation policies. For example, perhaps you would like customers to know before they purchase one of your tours that there is a 4 passenger minimum requirement to run this specific tour. 

1. In your activity set-up page, you will want to select the Additional Settings tab.
   
   
   
   
2. Scroll down to Activity Specific Cancellation/Reservation Policy and enter the activity-specific policies here. 
3. Don't forget to click Save.
4. You will now be able to see Cancellation Policies on the Online Booking Engine's specific Activity Booking page.