Will MIDAS permit double-booking?

However, we appreciate that some businesses may want to be able to add multiple bookings to a venue at the same time. Consider the following example scenarios:

1. A business may wish to allow two different booking possibilities for a space i.e. a "Confirmed" and a "Tentative" (or "reserve" / "first refusal") booking
2. A business may have a large space (for instance a sports hall) that can be booked as a whole, or sub-divided into smaller areas allowing more than one activity or booking to take place in the venue at the same time

MIDAS provides the tools to facilitate both of these example scenarios!

Scenario A:

Solution 1: Tentative Bookings

MIDAS includes a feature allowing you to make "tentative" bookings. These differ from "confirmed" bookings in that they automatically expire (and are removed from the system) if they've not been confirmed after (or within) a certain time period. This allows businesses to provisionally book clients into multiple spaces initially, and then firm up the client's exact room requirements at a later stage.

For more information on the tentative booking features of MIDAS, please see this blog post and our "How To Make Tentative Bookings" video tutorial.

Solution 2: Multiple Venue Entries

An alternative solution would be to instead add separate venue entries for each booking state - i.e. "Room 1 (Confirmed)", "Room 1 (Tentative)", etc.

This would allow you to effectively add two bookings into Room 1 at the same time (by entering one into your "Room 1 (Confirmed)" venue, and the other into "Room 1 (Tentative)").

As MIDAS allows you to filter the venues which are shown in your booking grid, you could easily create a venue group for all your "Confirmed" venues and another for all your "Tentative" venues, allowing you to easily distinguish between the two states.

Furthermore, you can "drag and drop" bookings around the booking grid to reschedule them - so moving a "Tentative" booking to a "Confirmed" booking would be a simple case of dragging the booking from the "Room 1 (Tentative)" venue into the "Room 1 (Confirmed)" venue.

Solution 3: Booking "Requests"

A third solution is to make use of the "Booking Requests" features of MIDAS. Whilst two bookings may not concurrently occupy the same venue, multiple booking "requests" can. For instance, Person A and Person B could both make a booking "request" for the same venue and for the same times. These remain in the booking system as "requests" until an administrative user decides which of the two "requests" to approve (and convert it into a confirmed booking) and which to deny/reject.

For more information on the booking "request" features of MIDAS, please see the booking requests documentation.

Scenario B:

In the example of a sports hall, which can be booked as a whole, or as two separate halves, you can add all three areas to MIDAS as separate venues (i.e. "Sports Hall", "Half Hall A", and "Half Hall B", and then use venue blocking rules to ensure that when the whole Sports Hall is booked, neither Half Hall A or Half Hall B can be booked, and when one of the half halls are booked, block bookings in the hall as a whole space.

For more information on the venue blocking features of MIDAS, please see this blog post and our "How To Block Other Venues" video tutorial.

So in summary, whilst your MIDAS system won't permit "double-booking" as such, there are a multitude of ways to achieve a similar result if your particular business scheduling needs require.