What is Shared Capacity?
Shared Capacity is when one or more tours are shared with a parent tour that hosts the capacity. All bookings across the shared tours are pooled into a single-parent manifest. In other words, you can create what we like to call a Parent activity that manages the equipment that is then shared among one or more Child activities.
In Zaui, you can share, a simple numbered capacity, single pieces of equipment (such as a bus), or pools of equipment (such as a pool of bikes). You can also go a step further with Intelligent equipment Assignment. This article will introduce the types of shared capacity to help you determine which type is right for your needs.
This article will cover the following topics:
Capacity Sharing Rules
- For the most part, you want to create Parent and Child activities using the same activity type.
- A Rental Parent activity however can have a Standard or Interval Child activity.
- You cannot have a Child activity be the Parent of another activity (ie - You cannot have a third activity share capacity of the second activity, it will have to share capacity from the parent activity).
- When a Package pulls capacity from an activity, it will reference the parent of that activity.
- The total capacity of a child activity can be the same as or less than the parent. It cannot exceed the parent.
- If you have an interval parent and interval child activity, the available times of the child can not be outside the available times of the parent.
Which Type of Capacity Sharing is Right for Me?
The type of capacity sharing (ie - parent activity-type) depends on whether you wish to share a numbered capacity, a piece of equipment or an equipment pool (multiple pieces of equipment) across activities.
Example 1
You operate 2 city tours, a 4-hour and a 6-hour tour. The tour begins the same, with the first four hours identical and the additional 2 hours visiting an additional attraction. When attendance is lower in your shoulder season, you may wish to share capacity (bus seats) between the 2 tours.
As the 2 tours share the capacity of a single piece of equipment (the bus), this example would be set up using a Standard Activity for both the parent and child activities.
| For more information on sharing a single piece of equipment across multiple activities, check out this article on Sharing a Piece of Equipment. |
Example 2
You have a fleet of bikes that are available to rent, but also for scheduled bike tours. In order to ensure each person will have a bike available no matter the activity they book, you can use Common Equipment Pooling. This will allow the parent activity (bike rentals) to assign equipment to your child activity (bike tours).
As the 2 activities share the equipment pool (multiple bikes), this example would be set up using a Rental activity-type as the Parent activity, and either a Standard or Interval activity-type as the Child activity.
| For more information on using common equipment pooling, check out this article on using common equipment pools. |
Example 3
You have a fleet of helicopters your run helicopter tours with. Each helicopter has a different max. capacity and operating cost. As bookings come through, the Intelligent equipment Management tool will assign bookings to equipment in order to maximize the number of bookings that can be accepted while simultaneously minimizing the number of pieces of equipment used.
| For more information on using the Intelligent equipment Assignment tool, check out this article. |