In Flybook, there are two different types of activities, pre-scheduled and open-scheduled, and the primary difference between the two types is how their availability (or lack thereof) is determined.
Open-scheduled activities are:
- generally private activities (ie, one reservation per activity)
- have the check box that says "Create new scheduled activity per incoming reservation" selected under Front End Settings in the activity setup and won’t ever have the “Merge duplicate start times” box checked
- have their availability determined by the Start Times tab, Blackout Availability tab and Capacity Overrides tab
- do not appear on your Activities/Rentals calendar until someone books them
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Pre-scheduled activities for example, are:
- generally group activities that multiple reservations can join
- have the check box that says "Only join existing scheduled activities" selected under Front End Settings in the activity setup and might (but most of the time don’t) have the “Merge duplicate start times” box checked.
- have availability added by manually scheduling the activity on your Activities/Rentals calendar,
- do not use the Start Times tab, Blackout Availability tab or Capacity Overrides tab in the activity setup
Possible Front End Settings for Pre Scheduled:
- Option 1 (most common)
- Option 2 (second most common): By default, pre-scheduled activities will always show the # of spots left when booking on the FE but if you want to have it not show until it reaches a certain number left, that’s when you use the “Enable remaining spots threshold” checkbox.
- Option 3 (uncommon): The “Merge duplicate start times” box is used if you have pre-scheduled the same activity at the same start time multiple times. Example: I have two group/public walking tours that both take place at 9am on March 7th, each with a capacity of 20 (the alternative would of course be to just do 1 tour with a capacity of 40, but perhaps for staffing, maybe splitting it to 2 activities at the same time is easier for some). If you don’t check the merge duplicate start times button, customers would see two 9am start time buttons to pick from online which could be confusing. If you check that box, the FE customers will only see one 9am start time button, and the system will work on filling one activity before filling the next.
- Option 4 (very uncommon): a combination of option 2 & 3
Other Pres-Scheduled Activity Setup Things
- Pre-scheduled activities do not use the Start Times, Blackout Availability, or Capacity Overrides tabs within the activity setup
- Pre-scheduled activities also do not use the Max Activities Per Start Time option on the General tab of the activity setup
- The availability of pre-scheduled activities is solely determined but what is on your Activities/Rentals calendar. See below to see how to add that availability:
- To remove availability of a pre-scheduled activity, you'll go to that activity on your Activities/Rentals calendar and either:
- delete it (after removing any reservations already associated with that date/time)
- or mark it as front end disabled (which would still allow back end bookings)