Creating Private Rental Equipment Bookings on the Fly

Overview

If you are offering charters where your equipment can be booked for more than one group at a time (Ie - a bus or helicopter), you may want to offer the option to book the equipment privately to your customers. 

Example - You offer Helicopter Charters where customers can book a helicopter for a period of time. You have a helicopter with a maximum capacity of 4 seats. A group of 2 makes a booking for a tour and would like to be the only ones on the tour so that the additional 2 seats don't get filled by strangers. 

This article will go over the two different ways of turning existing rental bookings into private ones.

If you would like for ALL of your bookings to always be booked privately onto a piece of equipment, make sure you set-up that activity with the Private Tour flag checked. Check out this article for more information. 

1) Using the Private Booking Flag

If a customer wishes to have their existing booking be private, you can go back into the booking you just made and make it private so that no other bookings can be made to that piece of equipment on that timeslot. Bookings can still go to other equipment for the same timeslot. 

1. Click on the rental activity you just made the booking on from your main dashboard. On the next screen, click on the booking you wish to make private.
   
   
   
   
2. A pop-up will appear where you will be able to Make the Booking Private by ticking the checkbox. 
   
   
   
   
3. Make sure you click on Update Booking once the changes are made.

2) Setting a Private Booking Block

Another way to make a booking private is by blocking equipment so that no other bookings can be made for the timeslot of the original booking. 

1. Click on the Rental activity from your main dashboard to bring you to the rental screen. Click on the  icon located to the right of the specific equipment you wish to block off. 
   
   
   
   
2. A pop-up window will appear where you can configure the block of date/times for that piece of equipment.
3. Each private 'block' of time will show on the screen behind any booking which overlaps it (private booking must be made before blocking off the time). 
4. When a piece of equipment is marked as private, any bookings that already exist within the private period will also be locked in place - they will not be shuffled by the Best Fit Algorithm. 
5. Once the private block has been created, no new bookings can be made within the time block or overlapping it in any way.