You'll learn how to enable instant booking and configure business rules for both Meeting Rooms and Packages.
The instant booking settings make it a breeze to handle all that you need for your meeting rooms:
- Enable or disable instant booking
- Adjust minimum lead time
- Adjust maximum lead time
- Adjust the maximum delegate count
To adjust any setting, you can start by selecting the rooms you want to apply your choice. You can conveniently choose multiple rooms from different venues.
After making your selection, you can adjust the settings to your liking. Here are some pro tips for adjusting the values:
- If your selection contains different values for the same setting, you'll see a "Mixed" value.
- Only the values you change will be updated to the selected venues. In other words, if some field has a "Mixed" value and you don't change it, the original values for each meeting room will remain the same.
Let's next take a look at each of the setting sections.
Instant booking
If you want your meeting room to be instantly bookable, set the instant booking setting to Enabled. The packages associated with those meeting rooms are then also available instantly. On the other hand, if you don't want to enable instant booking, set the value to Disabled. We encourage enabling instant booking for as many rooms as you can. If the instant booking is disabled, the rest of the instant booking settings don't have an effect either on meeting rooms or on packages.
The default value for instant booking is Disabled.
Minimum lead time
Minimum lead time helps you prepare for instant bookings by providing a minimum time (in hours) between the moment of booking and the event time. For example, an instant booking made on Friday for an event on Monday might require a longer preparation than a booking made on Tuesday. In this case, you'd like to set the lead time for Monday to something in the range of 48 to 72 hours. Set the minimum lead time to zero (0) if you want to accept instant bookings without a minimum time to prepare.
The default value for the minimum lead time is 48 hours.
Maximum lead time
Similar to the minimum lead time, the maximum lead time will determine the maximum number of days between the moment of booking and the event date. This setting will make it easy for you to limit the instant booking to be available for, say, only 90 days from the moment of booking. We encourage you to keep the limit either disabled (0) or long enough to offer a better selection of rooms for the booker.
The default value for the maximum lead time is zero (0), which means it's disabled.
Maximum delegate count
The maximum delegate count setting does what it says: It enables you to limit the maximum amount of delegates in an instant booking. To get creative, you can, for example, disable the maximum lead time (set it to zero) and set the maximum delegate count to 30. That would ensure that the meeting room would be bookable for any time in the future, but only for 30 people or less. Talking about convenience!
The default value for the maximum delegate count is zero (0), which means it's disabled.
Summary
Using minimum and maximum lead times together with the maximum delegate count will give you flexible control of your instant bookings. The selection tool will allow you to select just the rooms you want to tinker with. Enjoy!