What is your schedule like?
Sep 17, 2018
Netbookings has looked at schedules from various aspects such as the needs of the customer and staff requirements and how they differ and how they are alike. This research has helped us build scheduling software that offers structure when needed and flexibilty when ideal or required. When you look at a task in depth it is often more complex than what you might initially think.
Our team has been able to define schedules are auto-scheduled or manually scheduled. The differentiation is not always easy and various questions usually arise to make the dertermination.
For example, if we take a boat charter business that operates a trip in morning and the afternoon for most of the year but is subject to the weather, boat maintenance, minimum numbers and seasonality the schedule is consistent while also requiring some order so that everyone understands what is happening on a given day. Building a system for staff to be able to schedule this type toursim operation requires flexibility and structure all in the same logic and interface. Thus the Tour Wizard was born, it allows staff to schedule tours at the same time every day of the year, or every Tuesday for the month of may, or only on weekends in the afternoon. Then on the tour calendar you can change the minimum or maximim quantity of people on particular tours, delete tours or move individual tours to different days. On the front end it is easy for guests to see what is scheduled an make a booking. Also needed is the avalability of the boat. if it is booked from 9:00am - 11:00am it can not run another trip at 10:00am. Each Tour can be assigned a resource, Netbookings will not allow you to create a schedule that requires the boat to be in two places at the same time. You will also need to know if staff available to work on the boat. So this business would be manually scheduled, helped by the wizard.
Another type of business that require scheduling software is a day spa. The availability of each therapist and the rooms that are used for treatments require individual schedules. The rooms are auto-scheduled to be available and the staff are auto scheduled as not available. Netbookings allows for staff rosters to be entered manually or imported from a rostering system such as TimeTarget. When making a booking either online or via staff, Netbookings auto assigns the room and therapist. This makes for a seemless booking experience for guests and a great time saver for staff and the therapists calendar shows visually where they need to be, the time and what is happening at that time. This business has a blend of auto-scheduled and manully scheduled.
Each Netbookings module addresses the questions of, what are the scheduling requires for resources and people? and what is the best way to create the schedule? Take accommodation for example, a room/bed is assumed always available until booked. Therefore it is auto scheduled. However an accommodation business that also provides meals will need to be able to provide a flexible times for the delivery of these services. Meals are typically divided into breakfast, lunch and dinner. But within those there may also been seating times or 'just turn up'. To properly cater for a guest to check-in at 2:00pm and have dinner at 6:30pm a booking system is required create an itenerary for both elements. If then add a spa treatment or winery tour in afternoon then the intinerary is required to have far more detail.
Take the example above as a guest intinerary for their getaway. We have 5 key elements:
- Arrive at 2:00pm
- Massage at 4:00pm for 1hr
- Dinner at 6:30pm
- Retire for the evening in their suite
- Breakfast at 9:00am
- Checkout at 11:00am
Behind the scenes we have the following scheduling software requirements: staff to great the gustes, clean and ready suite, the massage room and therapist, table in the restaurant at 6:30pm, restaurant staff, table in the restaurant at 9:00am, restaurant staff and staff at reception at 11:00am.
Communicating this to the guest is one task, with each email confirmation the guest also receives an attachment, by clicking on this attachment it is instantly entered in their electronic diary. Communicating to the each business operation centre is a totally different task and Netbookings has various reports to achieve this goal.
More information on scheduling tours, also take a look at our bathing booking system which takes a unique approach to dealing with high demand leisure centres and their scheduling requirements.
