Editing Bookings Online

Overview

A new feature of the Online Booking Engine is the ability for customers to now make simple edits to their own bookings online. This allows more self-service for your customers and gives your staff more time to manage other parts of the business. 

This article will walk you through how the Online Editing Booking tool works and how to manage it.

This article will cover the following topics:

• Enabling/Disabling Online Editing Booking Tool
• Including the Booking Reference ID in your Notification
• How to Retrieve and Edit a Booking Online
• What Can Be Edited
• Troubleshooting Tips

Enabling/Disabling Online Editing Booking Tool

Not every business would like to give their customers the ability to edit their own bookings, and we get that! You have full control over whether you would like to give access to your customers to edit their own bookings or not.

You can control whether to allow your guests to edit their bookings and when by navigating to Settings > Online Bookings > Portals and selecting the portal you wish to enable, typically this should be your default portal. 

Below, we've included the definition for the three settings so you can choose how to best use these settings for your business: 

The self-editing threshold can only be set in hours and not in minutes.

Including the Booking Reference ID in your Notification

In order to enable your customers to make edits to their own bookings online, you will need to provide them access to their Booking Reference ID. 

The Booking Reference ID is an auto-generated unique ID that the customer will need to enter online in order to retrieve their booking. 

Zaui created Booking Reference IDs in addition to Confirmation Numbers as they are random sequences and safer to use as a retrievable process. Because Confirmation numbers follow a sequence order, this would make it too easy for anyone to retrieve a booking online.

1. You will first want to ensure you update your email templates to include the Booking Reference ID and a link to the Edit Booking page.
2. Navigate to Settings > Notifications 
3. Select your Confirmation Email Notification. 
4. You will first want to include the Booking Reference Id Smart Tag (Reference_ID) which will populate the unique Reference ID for that booking in the customer's confirmation email. 
5. You will also want to add the Edit Booking Smart Tag (Edit_Booking), into the body of your email for customers to have access to the editing functionality. Feel free to use similar formatting/wording as the example below. (Tip - you can replace the wording and Smart Tag on the existing Print Tickets button or check out the Html code listed below).
6. Don't forget to save your changes.

Here is the HTML code you will want to place in your source code to add the Edit Booking button (for those of us who aren't HTML/CSS wizards): <tr> <td align="center"><a href="{EDIT_BOOKING}" style="text-decoration: none; color: #fff; background-color: #3686da; padding: 20px 40px; border-radius: 3px;">Edit Booking</a></td></tr>

How to Retrieve and Edit a Booking Online

Customers will be able to access their bookings online in one of two ways:

1. By clicking on the Edit Booking button that is included in their confirmation email.
2. By accessing the menu on the Online Booking Engine of your website which now has a My Bookings button available.
   
3. Once customers click on the  Edit Booking link or click on My Bookings from the OBE menu, a tab will open up where they will need to enter their Booking Reference ID and Last Name on their booking.
   
4. The system will then refresh and list Customer and Booking Details. 

If you've enabled the Edit Booking tool, we strongly recommend you create and enable a new Booking Notification to send out automatically once a modification has been made to a booking. This way, your customer will receive the most up-to-date email regarding their upcoming activity in their inbox.

What Can Be Edited

The fields that are editable depend on the activity type on a booking.

Please note that bookings cannot be fully cancelled, only edited from here. Customers will need to contact your team directly to cancel a booking.

• Changes that result in additional costs will prompt the customer to pay the balance before committing the changes. 
• Changes that result in reduced cost will allow the customer to obtain a refund for the difference in cost only if the custom paid by credit card originally.

Bookings with more than one credit card payment are not eligible to receive refunds online and the customer will be prompted to call to make their changes and receive a refund.

Troubleshooting

If a customer is on the online editing page, no other user can access the booking. If you need to access the booking while a user has it open online (and they are having trouble logging out of their booking), you can force-close their editing session by using the option under Settings > Database Maintenance in the back office called Clear Single Cart Session. Enter the booking number to close their open session so that you can edit the booking on their behalf.

All changes made in Database Maintenance are Permanent. Only certain user types will have access to Database Maintenance to complete this task.