A reliable calendar underpins any successful business. Especially one that books experiences on a daily basis. That’s why our programmers have been focusing on making FishingBooker’s calendar more effective and ultimately more useful, both for captains and their customers.
We’ve been working closely with a number of captains to gather information about the calendar and to make it better. It’s close to becoming widely available. Here are the major benefits you can expect once you make the switch.
Set Availability for Individual Trips
One of the problems with old calendar was that the way it blocked off time didn’t always match how trips work. You could block off either a full day, the morning, or the afternoon on any particular date, but you couldn’t set any more precise time limits than that.
That was fine until you got into a situation like this: Someone books a six-hour trip in the morning, and the morning gets blocked off on the calendar. Then, someone else sees that the afternoon is free and books a four-hour afternoon trip. This trip’s start time overlaps with the previous trip, meaning the captain has to reach out to the customer and ask them to start their trip two hours later. Not great for the captain, and not great for the customer.
Now, instead of looking at whether a trip starts before or after 12:00 p.m., our system considers the entire length of the trip. So, if the six-hour morning trip lasts until 2:00 p.m., only trips that start after that time will be available.
As well as avoiding overlapping commitments, this is also good news for anyone with shorter trips. If someone books your two-hour trip, you no longer have to write off your whole morning.
As well as avoiding overlapping FishingBooker trips, the new calendar lets you block out availability on a trip by trip basis. Here’s how:
Set Free Spots for Shared Trips on a Trip-by-Trip Basis
Just like being able to mark individual trips as unavailable, you can now adjust the number of free spaces according to the trip, rather than the time of day. So, you’ll be able to set different numbers of free spaces on your four-hour 6:00 a.m. trip and your four-hour 10:00 a.m. trip, for example.
We’re expecting this will make it easier to manage shared trips than ever before.
See and Manage Your Availability Settings Better
Last month, we released a new way of managing availability through FishingBooker’s calendar. This lets you set the minimum amount of time before the trip date that you can get booking requests. You can also use it to stop people from reserving a spot that’s too far in advance for you to accept.
In the new calendar, you can immediately see whether a date has been blocked because of your notice settings or because of another booking. This makes it easy to see at a glance what you can expect in the upcoming few days.
Remember, even though availability settings block off short notice dates to stop people from booking you at the last minute, you can always open up any date directly in your calendar.
Here’s how you set your advance notice, and how this gets displayed in the new calendar:
See the Status of Your Bookings at a Glance
The new calendar uses a “traffic light” system for your booking requests. Green for accepted bookings, yellow for booking requests, and red for declined or canceled trips. Any date with a FishingBooker booking will have this traffic light code, so you have all your booking details at your fingertips.
Simply click on the calendar date, and you’ll get a link to the booking. There, you can check and update the booking details with ease. Managing your bookings just got smoother than ever.
What’s next?
We’ve developed a way to manage multiple listings’ calendars all in one click on desktop computers. This should be a significant improvement for anyone with a fleet of boats, as you won’t need to switch between listings in order to update each boat’s availability. Stay tuned for more on this in next month’s Product Updates.
We’re excited about rolling out the new calendar and giving all our captains the chance to manage their time and their bookings better. Give it a try and let us know how it goes!
