How do I block a room while an activity is taking place?

Do you use the same physical room both for internal activities (e.g. trainings, courses or meetings, see what is an activity) and for public rental? Then you want to prevent a visitor from booking that room online while an activity is already scheduled — and vice versa.

You arrange this by linking the room, as a resource of type Location, to the product used to rent the room out to the public.

How does it work?

1. Create (or use) a resource of type Location for the physical room, via Configuration > Objects > Manage resources.
2. On this resource, fill in the “Required […] for location” field with the product visitors use to book this room publicly.
3. When you then schedule an activity (e.g. a training) and link this location resource to it, i-Reserve automatically books the same time slot on the linked product.
4. As long as the activity runs, the room is no longer publicly bookable: the automatic booking blocks the availability.

Example

A gym runs its own group classes in a room, but also rents that same room out to external hirers. The room is set up as resource “Room 1” (type Location), with “Room 1 - rental” as its required product. When an instructor schedules a group class (activity) in Room 1 on Monday 19:00–20:00, i-Reserve automatically books “Room 1 - rental” for Monday 19:00–20:00. An external hirer can then no longer book that room at that time. If the room is already rented out externally at that time, the instructor cannot schedule the class there: i-Reserve shows a message that a booking already exists.

More on setting up this field: Required room type for location: how do I set this up?.