Summertime means warm days, fireworks, and fun days on the lake. If you rent boats, bikes, or watersport equipment, this is your busiest time of year. Customers are flocking to your area to get a chance to enjoy a great day on the water or explore the area. Managing a fleet of rentals can be challenging if you do not have a great system that can easily assist you in getting bookings.
WebReserv is the best booking system on the market for managing rentals – all types of rentals. What makes our system the best is its flexibility. As you know, having the ability to manage your rentals how you want and need it is the key to your sanity and your customer’s happiness. This means that the system must be flexible and allow you to change, move, cancel, re-book and block out as needed.
WebReserv gives you the ability to set certain rules that online bookings must abide by in order to book – this includes options such as:
- Minimum booking time in advance: ensure that you get some notice prior to a booking, can be set at 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week or any time in between.
- Minimum/maximum booking lengths: allows you to set minimum booking lengths such as 2 hours and a maximum length such as 8 hours.
- Set deposit amount: can set a deposit rule as a % of the total, fixed amount, or full payment.
This is the beauty of having online booking – you can rest assured that your bookings will come in online (24/7!) with the options in place to provide a seamless and fun renting experience for you and your customers.
Flexibility also means that when you want to bypass some of these set rules, you as the manager of the rental business can do that, too. WebReserv’s administrative side of the system, called Frontdesk, allows you to do just that. When you have walk-up traffic or phone in bookings, you can bypass these rules you have set in place for online bookings when booking through Frontdesk.
WebReserv’s Frontdesk allows you to easily do the following tasks:
- Book for a customer without all of their information needed: if you only have the customer’s name and email, but don’t have their phone number of address.
- Accept a deposit amount that is outside of the online deposit rule: you can take full payment, set another deposit amount, or take no payment at that time.
- Change a rental type or day with one click.
- Block out a boat/rental that is out of service quickly through the Master Calendar.
- Add charges or discounts as needed on a booking.
Our newest feature, just released, takes this flexibility to the next level. This feature allows you to book for any length of rental that you choose. For example, you have your time rules set to allow bookings at certain times for a certain length(s). This new feature allows you to bypass this when booking through Frontdesk.
Here’s how it works: When you use the Hourly reservation type, you will use a setup page called Time Rules. Here you will create your start times and lengths of booking that you want for your rentals.
In the example below, this boat rental offers 2, 4, 6, or 8-hour options, and wants their online customer to select a start time of 10am, 12pm, 3pm, or 6pm.
The setup looks like this:
Online bookings look like this:
Set Start Times:
Set Lengths:
The final setting on the Time Rules page, Frontdesk Bookings, gives you the option to allow for any booking time for office bookings. Enable it here, then go to Frontdesk – New Reservation to make a new booking. You’ll see now that you can book any date and any start/end time. Enter the dates, start time and end time (use format 00:00 AM).
How’s that for flexibility?! This new feature release is available now. Check it out in your account, and let us know if you have questions or comments.
If you don’t currently have a WebReserv account but have been looking for a flexible and affordable booking system – we’re here for you. You can try us out for Free for 30 days. Sign up today!
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