How to create an hourly service booking engine in Mews Operations

If your property doesn’t have any hourly bookable services configured, you need to set one up first.

First, follow the instructions in Creating new bookable services to set up a new bookable service for your property. Ensure that the Bookable period is set to Hour.

Before creating a booking engine for the hourly service, you need to configure its settings.

This includes setting the price by configuring the rate and setting booking restrictions.

You can learn more about configuring an hourly service here.

Configure the rate

Configuring the rate is how you determine the pricing of your hourly service.
You can learn more about setting and configuring rates here.

Setting up restrictions

Restrictions let you control when a guest or customer can book a service. Most properties need to set restrictions on their bookable services so that, for example, guests can only book the service during the property’s opening hours.

Create restrictions on your hourly service so that customers and guests can only book your service during the times you specify.

Note:

• When setting up hourly restrictions, select the days and times which you want to block.
• For example, if you want to completely block bookings on weekends, your restriction looks like this:
  
  
  

• If you want to only allow booking between 09:00 and 15:00 on weekdays, your restriction looks like this: 
  
  
  

You can learn more about setting up restrictions here.

Mews calculates and displays your space availability in Mews Operations and across the distribution channels according to space categories.

You need to create a space category for your hourly bookable services to manage their availability, pricing, and occupancy.

Navigate to the hourly bookable service you created in Step 1 by going to the main menu  > Settings > Services > Space categories.

You can find more information in our help article How to create a space category in Mews Operations.

Note:

• It is important that you select an appropriate Space type for the hourly service space category, as this determines how it appears in your booking engine.
• Mews strongly recommends adding an image to your space category, because this image appears to your guests and customers when they use the booking engine.

Mews handles hourly bookable services as spaces. Now that you have created the space category for your hourly bookable service, you need to create the spaces for them.

For example, if your hourly service is a meeting room, you need to create a space for each available meeting room. If you want to rent bicycles, you need to create a space for each available bicycle.

Follow the instructions here to create spaces: How to create a space in Mews Operations.

You are now ready to create the booking engine for your hourly service.

Follow the instructions here to create a new booking engine for your hourly bookable service: How to set up and configure your Mews Booking Engine.

Preview your booking engine by navigating to your hourly bookable service and navigating to Booking engines, selecting the booking engine you created in Step 5, and then clicking Preview.

You should verify the following:

• Check the booking engine’s background image. If you need to change it, refer to the steps here.
• Test the date and time picker to verify your restrictions on the service.
• Check that your mapped space categories appear.
• Verify the image, pricing, and availability of your space categories.

Once you configure booking engine as you want, you can connect it to your property’s website to begin offering it to your guests and customers.

Learn more about setting up the Mews Booking Engine for your property’s website here.