How to set up “By Invitation Only” reservations

By default, the WebReserv booking system will show all products/rentals/tours in the booking calendar. This works great when we use WebReserv as a tour booking system or rental booking system or similar type of activity where all our products are available to the public.

However, sometimes we may offer tours or rentals that are available only to a specific group of people. Here’s how to do it:

First, go to Setup – Products & Reservation Rules – [Select Product] – Description and set Show in booking calendar to No.

Now our Haunted House Tour is hidden from the public, so how do we make it available to the select few? The trick is to create a special URL to the booking calendar, that specifically contains the private tour or rental.

First, we need to get the unique product id for our Haunted House Tour. We can find this id in the address bar of the browser while we are editing the Haunted House Tour. Look for text ptid. The product id is the number that comes right after. In the example below, the product ID is 35860.

Next, we need to create a link just for this tour. Click the Website menu link to get to the page that contains the booking calendar code. Set Booking Calendar Style to Link and click the preview button.

The HTML code contains additional information that we don’t need, so mark and copy the text that is inside the double-quotation marks:

Paste the link into the address bar of your browser and add &productfilter=[id] where [id] is the productid for your privat tours or rental.

Our productid was 35860, so our link will look like this:

That’s all there is to it. We can now email the link to the select few that are allowed to book this tour.

Tip: If you want to allow you customers to select between a number of tours or rentals, enter all the product ids in the link, separated by comma.