Selling tours and renting bikes

selling tours and renting bikes

Please Note - this is an optional premium feature

We are also improving the usability of the feature-set.

So, what if your business sells tours (e.g. wine-tasting afternoon with guide, on bikes) AND rents bikes.

You have shared inventory between your tours and rentals, this is the tricky bit, and is where BRM / RSM is unique because we work up from the inventory management layer. It doesn't matter if you sell a tour or a rental it still tracks your inventory globally.

How do you use BRM for this?

Let's start with this diagram:

First of all what are the similarities:

1. they both involve your inventory - say bikes.  You need to track them, and can't go over-booked.
2. they both have a start time, duration etc.
3. they both have customer(s)
4. they both have prices
5. they both need tracking.  This your rental lifecycle;  Booked?  Paid? Out? Returned?
6. You may sell both in-store and online
7. You are going to want to differentiate between Tours and Rentals (for accounting / management purposes)
8. Both are going to need to generate paperwork (invoices / receipts / waivers etc)

Now the differences:

1. The key difference is how the pricing is calculated

- Tours are often based on a per person basis (with min. participants often) & set duration.

- Rentals are based on per bike /  variable duration basis

2. Tours may also require additional resources per tour - like a guide
3. Tours may have additional meta-data to help sell (e.g. images, description, times & durations)

Okay, so how do you actually do this with BRM / RSM ?

Starting with the similarities...

• You sell / manage a tour just like any other rental ticket.
• It has inventory, start times, duration, customer.
• Lifecycle Tracking is normal
• you can sell in-store and / or online.
• you differentiate by creating a ReservationType for each type of tour.

Now the differences...

Tours and ordinary rentals can use the same bike inventory. When the actual bikes are included in a tour booking, their availability is shared with rental bookings.

For the new Events page, use Event Pricing to charge for the event itself. You can add no event charge, a charge per booking, or a charge per participant. The participant option counts one item as one person; it needs care when one person has several items. Bike rental prices can still apply alongside the event charge. See Events page 3.0 for examples. Do not assume every store has the new Events page: if the store uses the older version, ask which version it has before recommending its pricing setup.

And what about the tour guide / minibus / etc ?

So imagine for each tour you sell you need to assign a tour guide to actually run the tour.  How do you manage that part?
Again you have a choice....

- You would assign the tour guide by checking a 'guide' extra checkbox - with the respective price
- OR you could create inventory items for each tour guide, and add them to a rental like any other resource.

Note that you can also to create a special Reservation Type that prices like a tour, not based on individual items & duration.

This will mean you get the best of both worlds - pricing like tour, with the full power of BRM inventory tracking built in.