Showing your Alpha Flow Activities online

Modified on Thu, 11 Apr at 4:41 PM

This article explains how to show your activity formats on your Alpha Flow Online Booking website including their appearance and the availability of the activity online. Please make sure you have read the Activity Formats article before following the advice on this page.

For an Activity to show online, as a minimum it must have:

At least one customer category with a product with a Web Booking Price (set in the pricing section of the Activity Format)
A Website Description

then it needs either one (or both) of:

An existing non-exclusive event in the diary for that activity with enough available space
One or more availability rules on the activity format (see below).

Online Booking Availability Rules

Here you can set when a particular activity is shown as available to be booked online. You can set rules to protect you diary from unwanted or low value bookings. The Rules can be set to apply to new bookings or to new and existing ones. If you use availability rules, any existing Shared Activities (non exclusive bookings) will no longer be shown online, unless you apply availability rules to "bookings for new and existing ones".

To create a rule click Add Availability Rule.

You can choose the days to apply and set the minimum number of participants and number of days before the booking date required for a customer to book.

This prevents a booking on a Saturday 4 weeks ahead with just two people, but allows a booking of 10 people or more. You can then create multiple rules each with their own configuration. So you could then create a second rule allowing bookings for just two people, 3 days before the event.

You can even provide dates for when the rules start and end i.e. during term time. The "from" and “to” time is when the activity can start.

Here are a few examples:

This allows bookings of 5 to 20 people, with the event starting between 9:00 and 20:00 Wed-Sun at least 10 days before the event
This allows bookings of 1 to 20 people, with the event starting between 9:00 and 20:00 Mon-Fri at least 5 days before the event
This allows bookings of 10 to 20 people between, with the event starting 9:00 and 20:00 any day at least 10 days before the event
This allows bookings of 5 to 20 people, with the event starting between 10:00 and 20:00 any day at least 5 days before the event, with the event happening between 26th July and 30th August.

Configuring Alternative Dates

If a customer books an activity online but their selected date/time or quantities are unavailable then the system will offer some alternative options.

You can then configure a message to be displayed if there is no availability when a booking occurs online. This could be because the activity is restricted to a specific day/time e.g. Monday evenings. Leave it blank to use the standard message set in your website settings.

You can also tick the Show alternative dates with availability box to automatically show the dates the chosen activity is available for.

You may also want to Show any remaining spaces on booking slot by ticking the respective box so that if a customer has selected three participants, but only two slots are available, they'll understand why those slots are not bookable and can amend their quantities as required.

Alternatively if there is still no availability you can offer another activity in its place. See the Offering an Alternative Activity guide on how to configure this.

Website Description

Here you can configure the appearance of the activity within the online booking portal, including the addition of an image. Each activity can have it’s own background colour and text as they are specific to the activity.

If the text section is left blank, the activity will NOT appear online. Activity photos should be square or at a ratio of 4:3 and be between 400—600px in size.

Once you have completed, press the Save button.

An example of the above settings would appear like this on the Alpha Flow Online Booking Page: