Learn the key differences between Parent and Independent schedules and when to use each one.
Parent Schedules
Parent Schedules are used to link different packages that use the same resources and share availability. An example of when to use a parent schedule might be for your Lane Reservations and Bowling Birthday Party. In this example, Lane Reservations would be the Parent Schedule and Bowling Birthday Party would be the Child Schedule.
Your lane reservations should already have a schedule with a certain number of lanes made available (let’s say 16). By setting the Parent Schedule to "Venue Schedule" your Bowling Birthday Party package will share that availability with the lanes available for regular lane reservations.
This means that if you have 16 lanes available for lane reservations you will now have the same 16 lanes available for bowling party packages.
Filters
When using the parent schedule, there are some additional filters you can provide to limit the availability for the child schedule. In our example above where both Lane Reservations and Party Packages share 16 lanes, you may want to limit the number of lanes available for Party Packages while still sharing the lanes. In this case you have the option to override the parent schedule. When overriding the parent schedule you can set a different availability for the child package without ever going over the total number of lanes for the parent package.
This is configured through the schedule builder of the specific package:
It might look like this:
Parent schedule = Lane Reservations = 16 lanes available
Child schedule = Bowling Party = 6 lanes available
Both reservation types will share a total of 16 lanes and can not go over 16.
Although parent and child schedules share resources, you are still able to set different available times, pricing, and pricing method. The parent schedule refers to the number of resources available and not the times.
Both parent and child schedules can have their own time slots and variable prices for those time slots. They can also have different pricing methods. A child package can be priced per person while its parent schedule can be priced per lane.
Independent Schedule
An alternative option to assigning a Parent Schedule, is be to have a package with an Independent Schedule. In this case, instead of sharing the 16 lanes, Lane Reservations and Bowling Birthday Party would each have their own availability. For example Lane Reservations might have 14 available and Bowling Birthday may have 2 available.
To set a package to have an Independent Schedule, find the name of the package you are making adjustments to from the Parent Schedule dropdown and select it so the name of the package and Parent Schedule match
In this example the name of the package "Bowling Birthday Party" and the Parent Schedule match.