How To Offer Booking Alternatives

This tutorial covers how to set up alternative times and venues (rooms/bookable spaces) in the event a desired venue/time is unavailable.

Topics covered in this tutorial:

Enabling booking alternatives.
Marking rooms (venues) as suitable alternatives for each room/venue.

Tutorial Video Transcript

Hello and welcome to MIDAS tutorials.

In this tutorial I'm going to show you how to offer booking alternatives.

That is, if a venue isn't available at the time you wish, MIDAS can automatically offer you alternative times, or alternative venues.

Now normally if I try to book when another booking is taking place, as you can see this booking here in Room 2.

So if I booked across that, and click "Check Availability & Book", you'll see it's unavailable.

There's a little icon here I can hover over and then in the booking information panel, it will show me what conflicts with this, and what is preventing me from booking, but no alternatives are offered.

So to enable booking alternatives we go to MIDAS Admin Options, and we select "Manage MIDAS" from the drop-down.

We need to be in the "Bookings" tab here, and you'll see there's a whole section of options here for booking availability.

So in the event of a conflicting booking we can configure MIDAS to offer the same times, but in a different venue.

We can configure MIDAS to offer an earlier time or indeed an earlier day in the desired venue, or a later time or later day in the desired venue.

So we'll select those three options there, and we'll click Save Changes.

Now MIDAS doesn't know which are suitable alternative venues so we need to tell it.

So we go to Manage Venues and we'll select Room 2, and the "Alternatives" tab, and from here we can tell MIDAS which are suitable alternatives for Room 2.

So we'll say that if Room 2 is booked, then a suitable alternative is Room 4, and we'll go "Save Changes".

So now if we go back to our booking grid, and we'll try and book again over the top of Room 2.

You'll see it's unavailable, but now we have this little icon here saying "Alternatives".

If we click that, you'll see it's found an alternative time earlier in the same venue, later in the same venue, or in a suitable alternative venue - in this case Room 4.

So let's go for an alternative venue, we select that.

"Book All Available", and you'll see there's our booking in Room 4.

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