Cutoffs determine the point at which sales are no longer accepted for a given departure. You can set the cutoffs for each tour in Products >Tours > Setup > Times & Cutoffs.
This article explains how to set up cutoffs in two of the most common cases: Hop-on Hop-off tours and tours allowing last-minute bookings.
1. Hop-on Hop-off tours
Usually, hop-on hop-off tickets are sold even when the operation has started for the day and throughout the operating hours of the tour. This means that if the hop-on-hop-off is running from 9 am until 5 pm, you still want to be able to sell tickets between 9 am and 5 pm.
The setup in TourCMS should look like the following:
This way you’ll be able to sell tickets during the day while the operation is running. After 5 pm, no more bookings will be allowed for that day, so customers will have to choose a date from the next day on.
Sometimes the final customer doesn't know what time the operation ends for the day, so if you want to prevent customers from buying tickets too late to actually enjoy the tour, you can also set a cut off one or two hours before the operation ends. For example, in this case, at 4 pm “Closed at fixed time (Same day)”.
Note: It is a common mistake to set “0 minutes/No cutoff” believing this will allow the tour to be sold for the whole day. Actually, if we were to apply that setting in this case, same day ticket sales would stop at 9 am (0 minutes before the start of the operation) and customers would not be able to buy tickets for that day, only from the next day on.
2. Tours with one or several departures allowing last-minute bookings
For tours set with start and end times, one or several departures per day (for example, a typical walking tour) you might not want to allow bookings once the tour has started. In this case, you need to decide if you will allow last-minute bookings or consider how far in advance you want to stop selling tickets for a given departure.
Let’s say you offer a walking tour from 10 am to 12 pm. If you accept last-minute bookings, you can set the cutoff to “0 minutes/No cutoff”, allowing customers to book until 10 am the same day.
3. Tours not allowing last-minute bookings
For tours that do not allow last-minute bookings, you can set the cut off some hours before the departure or the day before. For tours that require more organization (for example organized excursions, multi-day trips, etc) you can set the cutoff a few days before the departure.