Often, you may want to offer exclusive sessions, but don’t want to turn off regular sessions and miss bookings to do so.
For example, if you have four time slots per day in your regular bookings, you may want to offer them as as exclusive hire party sessions, but keep them as regular bookings if people have already booked.
Setting a Session as Exclusive
Firstly, create a new repeating session for your exclusive hire dates. You can either make a new session, or duplicate an existing session if you wish to use most of the same rules.
Next, in your per session settings, head to capacity limits and set either “Max Bookings Concurrently” or “Bookings Per Each Interval Slot” to 1. If your exclusive sessions are going to available in the same time slots as your normal sessions, “Bookings Per Each Interval Slot” will work best.
This will tell BookingNinja to only allow a maximum of one booking of this type.
Next, in advanced options, we’ll turn on “Exclusive Booking”. This tells BookingNinja two important things:
Only show this time slot as available if nobody has made ANY other bookings in that slot and;
Once a booking has been made, don’t show this time slot as available in any other session
Finally, in opening times, set your new session to use the exact same opening, close and last booking times in your as your regular sessions to make sure all your time slots match up.
And that’s it! Customers will now be able to book a private hire session, but only when no regular customers are booked in. As soon as we accept a private hire booking, no normal customers will be able to book - all sorted automatically.
Deposits are Recommended!
We’d recommend any exclusive hire session to also set up a deposit, so that customers can’t just book out an entire day and then change their minds later, losing you an entire time slot. Even a small, fixed refundable deposit of £50 is enough to stop this from happening in most cases.
Using Capacity Groups for Advanced Exclusivity
Sometimes you might want to run exclusive sessions that don’t shut down your whole venue, but only certain sessions. For example, if you have a party option for soft play and a party option for golf in one venue, you don’t want a golf party to make a soft play party not bookable. To do this, you can set use capacity groups to assign sessions together. If your session is in a capacity group, exclusivity will only apply to the other sessions it shares in the group.