Development Blog
Seasonal availability is on the way!
Currently on Athleticalendar you can set repeating availability on a weekly template basis. Monday to Friday — 9am to 5pm. Maybe open later for rentals on weekends. This is a decent first step to automating your availability, but what if your availability changes depending on the season, or week, or month? This means you would need to frequently input exceptions and adjust your availability templates accordingly. Not a great solution at all.
Enter Seasonal Availability. We are developing a widget that will allow you to set a start and end date for each availability template you have. Spring and summer hours? Sure. Summers have late night available with the later daylight? That works too. Here is how:
When creating or editing your listing’s availability you will have the start date default to today, but if you aren’t quite ready for your availability, you can adjust that too. Then the end date will end the running of that availability template and automatically create a new one with no availability set. That means you can control how far in advance you are willing to take on bookings as well!
As an example, let’s use a baseball field. Here in New England, those definitely qualify as seasonal. This fictional field also happens to not have any lights.
Winter is out.
March through June you can rent from 4pm-8pm every day.
July through September you can rent from 4pm-9pm (since it is light later) every day.
October and November you can rent 4pm-9pm, but not on weekends, since that is additional fall maintenance time for the field.
You can now create this variable schedule to reflect the day and time differences in availability while you are creating your listing. If next year you want to start renting from 2pm, that is also easily adjustable when you set the next year’s availability window.
This new seasonal availability feature will enable more accurate listings, less need for exceptions, and more control over exactly when your space and/or programs are available. We plan to launch seasonal availability sometime in September of 2020.
Sign up today and book or list your space or program at athleticalendar.com