In this video, we will explain you how to configure cutoff timings for your tours.
Transcript
Hello! In this video, we are going to explain how to set up cut-offs.
Understanding Cut-Offs
To do this, you need to go to Products, select your Tour, and then in the Setup section, you'll find the Times and Cutoffs tab. At the bottom, you can configure the cut-offs. Here, we will focus on standard cut-offs, not advanced settings like "ask first," just the usual cut-off configurations.
What exactly is a cut-off? A cut-off defines the time at which bookings are no longer accepted for a given departure. For instance, if we have a tour running every day at 10 o'clock in the morning, we might decide to accept bookings until 9 o'clock in the morning – one hour before the departure.
Cut-Off Examples
Let's look at some examples:
- Hop-on Hop-off Tour (Same-Day Booking): Imagine a hop-on hop-off tour operating throughout the day, from early morning until evening. We want to accept bookings on the same day. In this case, we don't have a hard cut-off in the traditional sense, but we can specify that bookings are accepted until the end of the day, or until closing time. For example, if our buses run until 8 o'clock in the evening, we can set the cut-off until 8 o'clock and then save. This is one scenario.
- Last-Minute Bookings (Fixed Start Time): Another example involves a tour that accepts last-minute bookings. Let's return to our example of a tour running every day at 10 o'clock in the morning. If we wish to accept bookings up to one hour before departure, we would select "one hour before the departure." This could be one hour, six minutes, or even zero minutes if you don't want to set any cut-off, but you must have a fixed start time for the departure. If there isn't a fixed start time, the system wouldn't work because it cannot calculate "zero minutes before the start time" without one, and it would close the departures for that day. So, if you want to set up a tour with a zero-minute cut-off, you must have a start time defined. Coming back to our example, if we have a tour running at 10 o'clock in the morning and we want to accept bookings until the very last minute, then the cut-off would be "zero minutes" (no cut-off). Then, save changes.
- Tours Requiring Preparation Time: A final example is a tour that requires preparation time, perhaps for organising transport or equipment. In such a case, we wouldn't want to accept last-minute bookings. We might decide to stop accepting bookings one day before the departure, and then save changes.
These are three common and useful examples of how cut-offs can be applied. And that's all!