Editing Reservation Experiences and/or Schedule

Before making "permanent" edits to your existing events or schedule it is a good idea to outline your proposed changes and then ask yourself: Are you making minor changes that will not impact your existing reservations?

Before making "permanent" edits to your existing events or schedule it is a good idea to outline your proposed changes and then ask yourself:

Are you making minor changes that will not impact your existing reservations? Examples of minor changes are: Price, Deposit Policy, Email Template, Cancellation Policy, Capacity.

Or, will your changes will have a big impact on your existing reservations/schedule?

Could you potentially overbook yourself or cause yourself a guest management issue with the proposed changes? Examples of major changes are:  Removal of Times, Days of the Week, Event being discontinued or Event Name Change. 

If your changes fall into the minor change category, go ahead and make your edit. Just beware that your changes will be effective upon saving and any pre-existing reservations will not reflect your changes.  However, if you answer falls into the latter then this sounds like a complete schedule overhaul and it is recommended to Create New Events instead of Editing existing ones and follow the process below.

1. Check for existing reservations
- Resources included: Event Dashboard, Calendar Monthly View, Reports either Monthly Activity - by event date or by date booked to locate all reservations
- Print or save (available on select reports). Trust us, you will need this information again and will thank us for this step later on.

2. Edit Existing Events and Mark as Private or Inactive
- This will help isolate your existing reservations so that you may easily locate them later for rescheduling or just to know where they are so you do not forget about them. 

Hint: We like mark these events Private, this way they will still continue to appear on all your Calender views so that all existing reservations remain front and center for you and easily. Marking them Inactive will remove the events & reservations from your Combined and Schedule views on the Calendar, but the reservations will still be visible in Reservations Dashboard and Reservation View on the Calendar.

3. Clone your existing event(s), if your changes are only to the schedule of an existing event and you would like to save time by not re-entering all the basic settings, descriptions, etc...
- You will need to create the new schedule as the times/days of the week will not be created when 
cloning. Be sure to set your new Start Date to the first date this "new" event should be effective (Today for immediate changes or sometime in the future if you are being proactive)
 
- OR -
 
4. Create New Event, if this is a new tour/tasting/experience all together or you just want to start completely fresh. Be sure to set your new Start Date to the first date this "new" event should be effective (Today for immediate changes or sometime in the future if you are being proactive)

5. Determine what do do with existing reservations
Remember when we had you pull all your existing reservations earlier? This is where they come in handy.  Review your existing reservations and decide if they need to be rescheduled or if you need to contact the guest and cancel. You should only reschedule reservations if the days/times are the same. 

Hint: When Rescheduling a reservation, un-check the Send Confirmation box (no need to confuse your guests, right?) Decide if you need to manually adjust pricing when the new event costs more/less than the original event.

Also, If you are using LIVE payment processing and the reservation has a credit card and/or payment on file, manually change the deposit policy while in Reschedule screen to Charge Upon Arrival - Require CC  to avoid any undesired refunds/charges.  If you went with the recommended, action of marking your "old" events Private, then you can easily work from the calendar to reschedule previously existing reservations. If not, you may find working from the Reservation Dashboard the best place to complete this task. 

This is an important step and worth the time to do right so that your capacity is in sync and you do not accidentally overbook yourself or forget about these reservations and have a surprise sometime in the future.