Overview: Reservation Products
- Jenni Buonanni
- Sarah Holst
- Marty Niessen (Deactivated)
This feature is supported for: RTP|ONE
This feature is NOT supported for: Siriusware
Feature Descriptions
Following are Feature Descriptions for both standard Reservation products as well as a special product that combines Reservations with Fast Flow (often used for Mountain Collective or IKON Friends and Family redemption.)
Feature Description - Reservation Products
Watch this video for a 2-minute overview
This product configuration supports reserving or booking $0 date-based products that are fenced to only guests who have purchased a precursor product such as a membership, pass or pack product, but they don’t have unhindered access to eligible products and must “reserve” their spot to play. The reservation flow offers an improved calendar view, can enforce limits on how many reservation products can be “on the books” for a given eligible customer at a time, can enforce penalties if a guest is a no-show and doesn’t cancel, and also allows guests to self-serve in canceling reservations themselves as long as it is within the allowable cancellation window.
Improved reservation calendar view: Because most reservation products are $0 products, displaying a calendar full of $0 dates is not desired. Therefore, a custom calendar treatment can be applied only to reservation calendars that replace the price with a “Reserve” message, and color codes dates that have a lot of available inventory as green and dates that are running low on inventory as yellow, also listing the available quantity left.
Example of calendar view for reservation products
Limiting allowed reservations: Some reservation products may want to use a “rolling” limit, meaning that a guest can have only a certain number of future dates reserved, but once a reserved date has passed, the date “rolls off” and becomes available to book another date. For example, if a pass holder reservation product said that a guest could have 7 days on the books and a pass holder booked Nov 1, 2, 3, and Dec 23, 25, 27, and 28, as soon as Nov 1 passed, the guest would have another date to reserve, and after the 2nd, another date, and so on. There are additional rules that can be set to check whether the guest skied or not.
Some reservation products may want to use a “fixed” limit, meaning that a guest can only have a certain number of dates reserved period. Both of these are supported, and a shop can have a combination of rolling and fixed reservation products.
Enforcing penalties: Reservation logic can be set up to enforce penalties if a guest has a “no-show” and doesn’t cancel a reserved date within a predetermined, configurable window. It would only hold back that single “no-show” date, so if a guest hadn’t maxed out their reservation days they would still be able to book more days, but that “no-show” date would continue to count against their total allowed dates until the penalty window passed.
Self-serve cancellations: Reservation dates can also be canceled by the guest without needing to call up guest services. Allowing cancellations is an optional configuration. Restrictions to cancellations, such as preventing cancellations of the day of or day before bookings can be configured as well.
IMPORTANT: Cancellations are only compatible with $0 products.
NOTE: Setting up a reservation product does require working with Aspenware representatives to scope your requirements, deploy a custom procedure to your RTP|One environment, and train you and audit setup as there are a lot of nuances to set up for both RTP|One and Aspenware Commerce. This time spent by Aspenware is billed as professional services but can vary from anywhere from 5 hrs of pro serv time to 20 hrs depending on the complexity of your offerings and willingness to self-serve with documentation.
HINT: Watch this video (1hr) for a full demo and training overview.
Special Feature Description - Fast Flow with Reservations (Used for Mountain Collective Redemption)
When combined with Fast Flow and Assignment Validated Prompts, Reservations provides a powerful solution for resorts looking to implement advanced product configurations and can be used as a form of fencing products so that only eligible customers can checkout with these restricted products.
Assignment Validated Prompts (Stored Procedures) with Fast Flow
Fast Flow and Validated Prompts that are set up to validate customer assignments can now be used in combination. There are many unique applications for using these features together to support your fenced product requirements, including offering a one-stop flow for Mountian Collective or IKON reservations.
Reservations with Fast Flow
In combining Fast Flow and Reservations, reservation products can be configured so that a guest can validate that they are eligible for your reservation product by entering or scanning their media code or entering their Mountain Collective voucher code (read more below).
Fast Flow and Mountain Collective Redemption and Reservation
Aspenware already supports the redemption of Mountain Collective days with its voucher functionality so that these guests can bypass the ticket line; however, by combining Fast Flow, Reservations, and a custom Stored Procedure, you can enable the entire redemption and reservation process in a single product.
First, guests validate that they are eligible to redeem their Mountain Collective days at your resort by entering their voucher code online.
When they enter their voucher code for the first time they are auto-created as a customer in RTP|One. If the voucher template is configured properly, it can also add DOB, address, phone, and email in addition to first and last name.
Once validated, the number of days the guest has available to reserve is returned, and they can select days they wish to ski. If they had previously entered their voucher here and reserved days, existing Mountain Collective Reservation days would also be returned, and these would count against the available days.
As the guest adds day(s) to their cart, these items in the cart count against their available days so that the guest cannot exceed their available days.
The guest can purchase new resort media for their access control, but if the guest has resort media already, they can load these days onto existing resort media.
These are booked in RTP|One as Access Products that can be canceled/changed (see next step).
Finally, these guests can re-enter their voucher ID to see their reserved days and can cancel/change the dates of their reservation themselves. Additional logic can be added to enforce penalty days but to ultimately give the day back to the guest if a guest doesn’t ski on the date of their reservation.
Submit a helpdesk ticket asking for a professional services project to discuss how to enable this or other custom stored procedure functionality in your store for the coming season. We expect these product configuration options can reduce staff overhead and guest frustration around selling certain fenced products.
Aspenware’s Professional Service Team must be engaged in setting up these products as custom stored procedure work is required. Aspenware also can deploy a number of SQL Jobs and custom reports to make this product implementation as smooth as possible on accounting, guest services, and product admin. All of the custom work we can enable in RTP|One is detailed within the configuration guide.
