Overview
You were introduced to the topics of Shared Capacity in this article. We are expanding this topic here with a different type of shared capacity: Common Equipment Pooling.
Common Equipment Pooling is the ability to share a pool of equipment across tours and rentals via a Rental Parent Activity (the activity that will hold the equipment).
For example, I own a bike rental company and would like to share my pool of 20 bikes between a rental activity and a scheduled bike tour, to make sure that equipment is never over-booked.
If you are an equipment rental operator, you will be familiar with setting up your individual pieces of equipment for sale through a Rental activity (if not, check out our chapter on Rentals, here). Common Equipment Pooling allows you to share Standard and Interval activities with that Rental Parent activity.
This article will cover the followings topics:
- How can Common Equipment Pooling help me?
- I don't offer Rentals, is Common Equipment Pooling still useful for me?
- How to set up Common Equipment Pooling
How can Common Equipment Pooling help me?
Say your company rents bikes AND operates bike tours. Currently, since tours and rentals are two different types of activities, you would have to block out a certain number of bikes each day for your tours, reducing the possible number that can be booked as rentals, or manually manage how many bikes to allot to your tour on a daily basis based on the number of bookings. We think that is way too much effort!
Now your tours and rentals can all share the same pool of equipment. This means less work for you manually managing your availability each day.
I have a finite number of pieces of equipment for my tours, but I don't offer Rentals
Common Equipment Pooling can help you too!
Let's say you offer three different Zipline Tours but only have 100 harnesses that can be used at any one time. You can set up a shared pool of equipment and share your three Zipline Tours into it. If across all of your tours, all 100 harnesses are booked, you will not be able to make more bookings until another harness becomes available, even if there are still spaces on a tour!
How to set up Common Equipment Pooling
A key point about Common Equipment Pooling is that you don't need to be offering a Rental tour-type in order to utilize this feature. You will however have to create a Rental activity that will hold the equipment for your other activity types.
Create Equipment Pool
- Start by creating your Equipment Pool by going to Activities > Equipment > Equipment Pools and click on Create Equipment Pool from the shortcuts panel.
- Then, create your individual pieces of equipment, assigning them to the pool you created. Pieces can be created one by one or in bulk by going to Activities > Equipment > Equipment > Create Equipment from the shortcuts panel.
|
For more information on creating equipment /pools, check out this article. |
Create a Rental Parent Activity
- Then, move on to creating your Rental parent activity.
If you will not be selling your rental activity, it can be created with no price in a hidden and unpublished Category. This way it will just manage the equipment from behind the scenes. - In your Rental activity set-up, scroll down to the Capacity and Equipment Assignment section and assign your pool, making sure that Auto Assign Equipment is enabled.
- From this Rental activity, you can now provide equipment to multiple Interval and Standard tours:
Creating Child Interval/Standard Activities
- Continue by creating your Standard or Interval activities as usual.
- In the activity set-up for those activities, scroll down to the Capacity and Equipment Assignment
section, click on Advanced Settings and select the Rental Activity you just created in the Equipment is Shared/Managed by field.
- If you don't want the capacity of this new activity to be equal to the number of pieces of equipment in the pool it is managed by, you can use the Capacity Assignment fields to cap your availability to any number smaller than the number of pieces in the rental activity pool.
- Don't forget to Save these changes.
- Now, when you make bookings in your Standard or Interval activities, they will be assigned to a piece of equipment from your Rental [parent] activity.
Check out this Video Tutorial on how to Optimize your Availability with Shared Equipment.