Your club and league site now includes a Venue Calendar and Reservations System. This is a powerful new tool that can help you manage your venues and allow your members to request reservations when a venue is available.
To set up your Venue Calendar, log in to the site as the web administrator, and go to the Venue Calendar page. The first thing you should do is make the necessary changes to the General Reservations Settings, by selecting the general term you would like to use to describe your venues (e.g., field, court, etc.) and by selecting the type of user who you would like to grant permission to request reservations. You can choose to give reservations permission to:
- No one, which means that your visitors can view the venue calendar but cannot place reservations.
- Just coaches / team administrators (as you define on your Teams page)
- Just members who are registered under your latest registration program
- Both, coaches and registered members
Once you've edited your General Reservations Settings, you should select a venue from the list provided. If there are other venues that you manage that are not on this list, go to your Directions page and add the additional locations there.
When you select a venue, you will be presented with the set-up options for that venue:
Each venue can have a different venue manager who would be responsible for replying to automated email requests for venue reservations whenever a permitted user makes such a request. (See below). To set up a venue manager, simply enter the email address in the box provided.
You should select the time period for which you would like to publish the venue calendar and make reservations available to your permitted users. You will also need to define the duration of a reservation -- in other words, how long does a permitted user get to use the venue when he/she secures a reservation? You can also set a turn-over time between reservations to allow people to leave the venue before the next group can use it.
Finally, you'll need to enter the available start and end times for the venue for each day of the week that the venue is available for reservations.
Once you submit the set-up form, you will be presented with the venue calendar, where you can block additional reservations (within the start and end times that you set). When you place a reservation, you can add a description of the event, and you can have it recur for the rest of the day, the entire day, once a week, or once a month (on either the same weekday or the same calendar date). This is a great way to block off the venue for other events that fall within the reservation periods that you've made available to the permitted users.
Once your venue calendar has been made available to the public, a new "Venue Calendar" page will appear on the public site. Visitors can go to this page and view the venue calendar by selecting the specific venue from the list of venues you've made available. They can then click on an available date to view the schedule for that date, and they can log in and select an available time slot to request a reservation.
Once a permitted user, places a request for a reservation, an automated email will be sent to the venue manager. The venue manager can then simply click on either the "Approve this request" or "Deny this request" link. The permitted user will then receive an automated email response with the status of his/her request.
