Development Blog: Inquiries, Hard Reservations, and Soft Reservations
Read the thoughts and ideas of the developers and contibuters to Arctic Reservations, an online reservation management tool.
by Zachary Collier
Inquiries, Hard Reservations, and Soft Reservations
Pete and I just had a long talk about the difference between a company that mainly runs one day trips vs one that runs mostly multi-day. There are several differences about when money is taken and what it means to take a reservation versus an inquiry. Then there is a soft reservation versus a hard reservation. I think that "payment plans" deal with most of this and that we'll need to work on the vocaubulary a little.A soft reservation for ECHO (multi-day) would mean that someone is interested in a trip and needs a few days (by definition..10 days..which we've defined in payment plans) to make their deposit. A hard reservation means that we have a deposit. When someone calls us, this information is vital to our sales because we can quickly say yes, no, or maybe. The ability to say "Maybe. I'll call you back in the morning" instead of "Sorry..We're full" is huge.
A soft reservation for a one day company(Pete comment if I'm wrong here) would mean that spaces for a trip will be held for a variable amount of days until that person can make a decision. Pete would like to be reminded somehow(probably in the home page) when this amount of time is about to expire. Also many people in this stage don't have an exact date in mind, but more like a range. I think what he wants is to be able to make a "soft reservation" (or mayber there is a better word) for a person without specifying the date. Or maybe specify the date, but easily switch it.
One thing that you should know when working on this is that with ECHO we know our trip dates for this summer and we can only start on specific dates. Pete can start a trip on any of his rivers on pretty much any date that he wants to. He may have a group call tonight that wants to put a trip together for the weekend. And he'll make it happen. We do this about 0.001% of the time if at all.
December 22, 2005 5:18PM • permalink
Comments
1hey guys,
The more I think about it- For me I think the soft res and "leads" or "trip interest" are two diferent things. We do get people that we basically reserve a space for they just have not put a deposit down but we are 90% sure they will. But we also get a lot of people who are calling for info, still trying to figure things out. We want to show they are interested in a trip and we want to follow up with them, but we definately do not want to reserve a spot.
The more I think about it- For me I think the soft res and "leads" or "trip interest" are two diferent things. We do get people that we basically reserve a space for they just have not put a deposit down but we are 90% sure they will. But we also get a lot of people who are calling for info, still trying to figure things out. We want to show they are interested in a trip and we want to follow up with them, but we definately do not want to reserve a spot.
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