Setting up Rental Activities with Pricing by Equipment – Zaui Software Support

Overview

There are two ways of pricing rentals - per passenger and per piece of equipment.

Passenger pricing is best used when your rental items are homogenous, that is, all the same size and price. An example of where passenger pricing can be used is for renting single kayaks. This article walks you though setting up a rental activity with passenger pricing.

Equipment pricing is used when your pool of rentals is not homogeneous. The size and the price of the rental item may differ and you may have differing quantities of each size. Equipment pricing should also be used if you want to keep track of inventory to avoid overselling a particular size. An example of where equipment pricing is recommended is for renting bikes of different sizes.

Important note: If you have an existing rental activity that was built with passenger pricing you cannot switch to equipment pricing. You will need to create a new rental activity from scratch. Do not use the duplicate button.

This article will walk you through the specifics of how to set up and book your rental activity with pricing per piece of equipment.

If you would like more information on pricing per passenger, check out this article: Setting up Rental Activities with Pricing per Passenger

This article will cover the following topics:

Creating Your Inventory
Creating Your Activity
Making a Booking Through Your Online Booking Engine
Making a Booking Through Zaui Core (Back Office)

Creating Your Inventory

Equipment hierarchy is now Inventory Pool > Equipment Category > Individual piece of equipment

Create Inventory Pool as normal (Activities > Inventory > Inventory Pools > Create Inventory Pool)

To start creating your equipment, navigate to Activities > Equipment > Create Equipment.

You may notice that you now only have one option to create equipment instead of two! You will now be able to create either a single piece of equipment or multiple pieces of equipment all from the same screen! Here is what that new screen looks like:

Equipment Type will default to “Rental Only”.

Equipment Category is a new field that is listed below the Equipment Type field. All pieces of equipment must belong to a single category in order to be able to assign a price to it. Example categories may be Child Bike, Adult Bike, Large Helmet, Small Helmet, etc...

The Equipment Category field is a hybrid between a free form field and a dropdown menu. You can either choose from a category that you've already created or create a new category all from the same screen!

Enter the Equipment Capacity.
Select how many you would like the system to create. The default will be 1 but you can change the number up to a maximum of 100 pieces of equipment.
By setting the Equipment Category, the equipment name will be auto-populated to match. You can change this if you prefer but the best practice is to leave them as-is.
Add your equipment to an Inventory Pool.
Save

For activities where you are renting more than one category, each category needs to belong to the same inventory pool. So if you have Adult Bikes, Youth Bikes, and Child Bikes to rent, all three of those categories need to be assigned to the same inventory pool. You will assign an inventory pool to the activity and determine pricing per category within that inventory pool.

Creating Your Activity

Navigate to Activities > Activity List > Create Rental Activity and fill in your regular details such as Name, Category, Location etc...
In the Rental Hours section, set your rental options (either custom or specific)
Scroll down to the Capacity and Inventory Assignment section to assign your newly created Inventory Pool and save your activity
In newly saved rental activity, scroll down to the Pricing Information section and click on “Add Equipment Pricing” and click the blue “+” button
- - If you have custom pick-up & drop-off rental options, you will see the Rental Interval listed under the Duration of Rental column
  - If you have specific rental options, each rental option will be listed under Duration of Rental and you will need to enter the pricing for each option
  - There is currently no way to do graduated pricing like you can with a price code
Add your pricing - you will see a column per equipment category and a row for each rental time option (specific only)

Enable Passengers for Equipment Pricing Setting

Enabling this setting will allow guests to select both a piece of equipment and add the number of customers in their group.

We do not recommend enabling this setting as the field is optional and may end up just causing confusion to guests as to what they need to select.

Making a Booking Through Your Online Booking Engine

The only major change for how to make a booking for a rental activity using equipment pricing is that guests are choosing how many pieces of equipment they would like instead of how many guests are in the group:

For rental activities that use specific or custom rental options, they still need to select either their rental duration and start time or their pick up and return time.

Making a Booking Through Zaui Core (Back Office)

When booking through the Back Office, you will notice a few changes in the process but overall, it's very similar.

If you opt to create a Group Booking, you will have two options to choose from when it comes to what equipment you would like to book. The first option is the default when the "Auto Assign" flag is enabled:

When this flag is enabled, you need to select the number of pieces of equipment you would like to book. The system will then choose the equipment according to what's available.

When the flag is disabled, the system will prompt you to select the pieces of equipment you would like to assign to the booking. This is useful if you have equipment available for specific circumstances:

If you opt to create a booking by click on a specific piece of equipment, there is no difference in how you would move forward with the booking.