A highly specific shopping list for a booking calendar

August 22, 2023 2:46 PM

I'm willing to pay for software that will let me run a public booking calendar, but with some fairly specific requirements...

The most challenging elements to date are in bold below:

• Public facing calendar to book a tour at certain times (i.e., 1 pm at 3 pm Monday – Friday).
• Times are set with a minimum and maximum lead time.
• Each slot has a maximum capacity of guests.
• Times only appear if at least one guide is free. Pulls availability from their Outlook calendar.
• Booker cannot pick which guide they get.
• They answer a custom set of questions when they book.
• Guide is assigned by system, system chooses a guide who has worked the least often recently.
• That tour now belongs to that guide (i.e., Guide A). Guide A will receive an email that they are booked with the booking details.
• Every future booking into that tour (until the max # of participants is reached) will now be added onto Guide A’s tour. Even if all other guides are available, the system will not create multiple tours at that time.
• Booking confirmation will be emailed to booker.
• Supervisor ability to go in and reassign shifts manually.
• Reminder emails (or texts) to tour guides.
• Reminder emails to tour booker.

It's pretty easy to find solutions that get most of the way there, but the key gap is around having multiple guides, some of whom may have availability that overlaps, but only allowing one tour at a time without a lot of supervisor intervention in manually assigning tours, following up, etc.

posted by Shepherd to Technology (3 answers total)

Check out Microsoft Bookings, though it may need more M365 backend to do everything you're asking.
posted by jazon at 2:57 PM on August 22, 2023

If it were me I would be looking at Fare Harbor. I see them used a lot for scuba diving, where you have staff with varying schedules (dive guiding is almost no one's full-time gig) and you obviously want all 5 people (or whatever) to go with one guide before another guide is pulled in to run a trip. The shops I have spoken to about it as a service praised it highly, and as a consumer I love it.
posted by wnissen at 4:05 PM on August 22, 2023 [1 favorite]

MS Bookings cannot be configured to allocate the tour to a guide based on how much they have worked recently. It looks at availability by going down the list of guides, always in the same order. We have researched feature extensively & have now just given up & reallocate work manually.
posted by cantthinkofagoodname at 11:17 AM on August 23, 2023