Reservations with staffing
Scheduling staff for reservations can be challenging. There is always a balance between demand (the guest making a reservation) and supply (the staff member who needs to carry out or supervise the reservation).
Examples
- An escape room reservation requires a game master
- A boat rental reservation requires a staff member for handover
- A meeting room reservation requires a host or service staff member
- A workshop reservation requires an instructor or facilitator
- An equipment rental requires a staff member for instructions or support
In i-Reserve, staff can be assigned directly to individual reservations. This can be done manually for each reservation. Staff can also indicate their availability, making it clear who is available when a reservation takes place.
Before you can add staff, you first need to create a resource with a staff type.
Then you can add the actual people. See the video for the steps.
Relevant settings
- Specify availability or when a person is unavailable
- Enter a first and last name
- Link to a user so that they can enter their own information
- More optional fields are available
Employees can indicate their availability or unavailability.
This often depends on the type of employee. A full-time employee usually benefits more from indicating their unavailability. For example, if they need to go to the doctor or hairdresser, they can easily block this.
An employee who works part-time, for example, only on Fridays, will benefit more from indicating their availability. Only when the employee indicates their availability can they be scheduled.
To simplify matters, you can create recurring schedules. For example, "Always on Friday" or "Tuesday for the next 4 weeks."
To add staff to a reservation, the "BookingPeople" block must first be added to the reservation dashboard.
From here it is possible to assign a staff member. The system immediately checks availability and shows a notification if the staff member is not available.
An email is automatically sent to the staff member who is scheduled for the reservation.
When staff are scheduled on a reservation, emails can be sent to them. To do this, click the email button in the staff section of the reservation. You can then select which staff members should receive the email. For the available email templates, you can preview them and choose one to send.
Creating an overview using filters is crucial for the planner.
Relevant fields include:
- Reserved product
- Employee name
Besides adding them as a column (or Tip: create a view and save it), searching by these fields is also practical.
This allows you to create an overview that shows reservations for which no staff has been scheduled yet.
Now that there's a schedule, it's obviously helpful for employees to see when they can start working.
We're now checking our own schedules again.
