Who are these instructions intended to assist?
These instructions are for tour operators who offer shared group tours that can start on any day until the first client books a start date – that date then becomes a scheduled start date. Tour operators offering this type of tour usually have a limited number of vehicles and guides. They consider a tour to be unavailable if a group is fully booked or when there is no vehicle, guide, or accommodation available.
Most of these operators can be found in southern Africa. Shared group tours that can depart on any day are also popular in East Africa, but availability problems are usually solved by hiring extra freelance driver-guides or merging clients with groups belonging to other tour operators. If availability issues can be solved that way, indicating availability on SafariBookings is probably not needed. But please note that you cannot decline quote requests for start dates marked as available. Not indicating availability is at your own risk.
How to work with the availability tools
Until now your availability workflow probably consisted of keeping track of when you have tours scheduled and you would only consider the availability of start dates after receiving a quote request. This will have to change a bit when working with the availability tools on SafariBookings, since the purpose of the tools is to indicate availability of start dates before clients request a quote. That is a different approach and requires some work from your end.
Using the availability tools for an individual tour
You will find an availability tool in the ‘Dates & Rates’ section of the forms used for editing your tours, and the "Availability" section on your company profile. Here you can change availability for one tour at a time, or for your company profile.
Using the availability tool for multiple tours
The more advanced availability tool can be accessed from your dashboard page. Using this tool is recommended because it enables you to change availability for multiple tours at once.
- Select all the tours you want to edit.
- Click "Edit Availability".
- The tours are shown at the top, each represented by one column. Make sure you are working under the correct tour.
- Choose the start date.
- Choose the end date.
Finally, select which status you want for the chosen dates, and click "Apply."
Remember to do this for each tour/column.
Example A: Your availability is based on your vehicles and/or guides
In the following example, let's assume that you have one vehicle that has room for 7 passengers plus a driver/guide. The Johnson family booked your four-day tour for two people with April 3 as the start date. This means that you still have availability for five people to join on April 3.
-
Set availability for the first day
Double-click the first day of the tour (April 3) to open the availability box and set availability to five people. Only the first day of the tour should be set to five people because it is the only start date on which other travelers can join the group.
-
Mark day two to four as not available
Day two until four (4-6 April) should be marked as not available because travelers cannot join on those start dates as the tour has already departed, using your only vehicle.
-
Rest days (if applicable)
If you need a day in between tours for servicing your vehicle or to act as a rest day for your guide, you should mark that day (April 7) as not available as well.
-
Consider the start dates before the tour
When you have a four-day tour and your driver needs one rest day, the tour will require five days in total. In this example, you have only one vehicle. That means that a new four-day tour can only start five days before an already scheduled tour; otherwise, the vehicle would not be back for the tour already scheduled on April 3. Therefore, the four start dates before the April 3 tour should also be marked as not available.
-
Update your other tours
Your other tours should be marked as not available on start dates that your vehicle is used for the scheduled tour. Please note that if the other tours are longer, more days before the tour will have to be blocked to ensure the vehicle is back on April 3. The same applies to shorter tours. For shorter tours, less days before the tour will have to be blocked.
-
Multiple vehicles
The same logic and workflow applies if you have multiple vehicles. The main difference is that it will take longer before availability becomes an issue because you can base your availability on two or more vehicles.
If you have multiple vehicles it might be helpful to first create an availability overview in Microsoft Excel and customize it to your situation. You can then use the Excel overview as a source document when changing availability for your tours in the SafariBookings system.
-
Tours using the same vehicle
In some cases tour operators have only one vehicle and use it for multiple tours. For example, some clients go camping while others stay in a lodge. If this is the case, tour operators might have decided to upload two tours to SafariBookings; a camping and a lodge tour. When considering availability, both tours should get the same settings, because they use the same vehicle.
Example B: Your availability is based on accommodation
If you know that during annual peak seasons availability of accommodations is an issue, you should mark those periods as ‘uncertain’ or ‘not available’. You should do so from the moment you first hear about accommodations having availability issues for the next peak season.
For example, let's assume that your tour uses SANparks camps in Kruger. These camps tend to get fully booked for the Christmas holidays and July and August. And they often are fully booked a couple of months in advance. You might hear in November that the camps have availability issues for the Christmas holidays. That would be the time to mark availability for the Christmas holidays as ‘Uncertain’ or ‘Not Available’ for all tour that use these camps.
If you don't, you risk paying for quote requests that you cannot action because the accommodations don't have availability.