How To Make Tentative Bookings

Topics covered in this tutorial:

• Making booking types "tentative".
• Setting "tentative" booking expiration times.

Tutorial Video Transcript

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can make "tentative" bookings.

Now, tentative bookings differ from confirmed bookings in that they only persist in MIDAS for a certain length of time.

This is great if you've got a client that you know definitely wants to book your facilities, but they're not quite sure entirely which room they want.

You can book them all out as tentative so that nobody else can book those slots, and then when the client confirms which room they specifically want, you can make that one confirmed and the tentative bookings will be automatically remove if they're not confirmed.

So the first thing we have to do is we have to set up a tentative booking type.

Our booking types are set up by going to MIDAS Admin Options and selecting "Manage Booking Types" from the drop-down.

You'll see there's no booking types at the moment, so let's create a couple.

Let's create one called "Confirmed" and let's make that yellow - Save Changes - and let's create a new type called "Tentative", and let's make that one magenta.

Now before we save change to this one, you'll see underneath here we have a little tick box, so we'll select that and it says "Bookings of this type are tentative and will auto expire if not confirmed".

Now, we can have tentative bookings automatically expire after a set period after they've been added, or at a certain amount of time before the booking's due to take place.

So for example, if I set this to "60 minutes after being added", once I add a booking that's a tentative, it will stay in MIDAS for 60 minutes.

If I've not confirmed it in that time by changing its booking type to "Confirmed", the booking will automatically be removed.

Alternatively, if I select this to "before booking it's due to commence", with this setting the booking will stay in MIDAS until 60 minutes before the booking's due to commence.

If the booking hasn't been confirmed by then, MIDAS will automatically remove it.

And we can do this by minutes, hours, or days.

So if we set this to "Days" and set this to "1" - so if a booking hasn't been confirmed 24 hours before it's due to start, it will automatically be deleted from MIDAS.

So we'll save changes to that, and you'll see there's our two booking types there.

So now back on our booking grid, if we add booking here for John Smith and we make it "Tentative", you'll see it's available, but you'll see there's also a warning now on the Booking Availability Screen, that this booking will expire one day before is due to commence.

We then click "Tentative Book All Available".

And you'll see that's appeared and there's little stopwatch icon shown on the booking as well to indicate that he will expire, and if we hover over it you'll see exactly when it does expire.

So if I do nothing further with this booking at 10 o'clock the day before - which in this case would be the 24th of May - this booking would automatically be removed from MIDAS.

To make the tentative booking confirmed, all we do is click it go to Modify Booking, and change its booking type to a confirmed type, check availability and modify, Book All Available.

And you'll see we now have a confirmed booking.

So as I say, this is a really useful feature if you have "holds" or "first choices" or "first reserves" for your clients - you can reserve the slot, if it's not being confirmed after a certain amount of time it automatically gets removed and frees the slot up for someone else.

Thanks for watching and be sure to check out our other video tutorials online.