How do I add pricing based on availability events?

Set up availability event pricing to automatically apply higher rates, discounts, or custom pricing rules.

Learn how to add pricing increases, decreases, or custom rates to your product availability events, e.g., pricing schedules associated with your products, including adding an availability event, adding pricing, and previewing the experience.

Accessing the features mentioned in this article

Where can I find this feature using the top menu?

• Availability Events: Inventory > Products > Availability
• Availability Event Rates: Inventory > Products > Pricing

What more do I need to use this feature?

• Admin permissions to manage inventory or restricted permissions to View Products and Assets and Manage Products and Assets.
   

Which Checkfront version supports this feature - classic items, classic products, or both?

• Your account must have access to classic products (Inventory > Products), a key feature of our classic products version of Checkfront. This feature is not available for use with classic items (Inventory > Items) in our classic items version. → Learn more about products. 

How do I create a product? This article focuses on adding pricing to the availability events during product configuration. For a detailed walk-through of product creation, please see the following series. Introduction to products and the product builder

What is an availability event? An availability event determines when the product is available for booking based on specific dates.

You can follow these steps to add availability event pricing.

1. Add an availability event
2. Add pricing to the availability event
3. Preview the Customer booking experience

Start by creating an availability event for your product from the Availability tab in the Product Builder (Inventory > Product > edit or + new product). Learn more about creating availability events in our article Understanding product availability events.

You can also create a new availability event from the Pricing Table within the Pricing tab. You are then returned to the Availability tab once you have created the availability event.

From the Pricing tab of the Product Builder (Inventory > Product), select Availability from the Add Rate dropdown. 

This action opens the Add Availability Rates modal. From there, you can select the availability event.

The modal then refreshes, revealing the pricing options.

First, decide whether the price change is an amount ($), a percentage (%), or a custom rate.

For amount and percentage type rate changes, specify whether the change is a decrease or an increase, and by how much, e.g., an increase of 10%. Prefix the number with a negative (-) if the change is a decrease.

For those specifying a custom rate, you must first select custom as your rate type and save that selection.

The modal then closes, and you can specify the custom rate for that availability event in the Pricing Table field, e.g., $100.00 for Summer Kayak Rentals.

Repeat the process for any other availability event pricing that you need, e.g., Fall Kayak Rental Rates at $80.00 per hour.

What this looks like varies depending on your base rate configuration. Whether you are using product rates, guest rates, group pricing, or a combination of these rate types, our pricing features are very flexible!

How do I add custom availability rates? Look at adding custom availability rates in more detail with the following article: How do I add custom rates based on availability events?

Once you have saved your new rate, it appears in the Pricing Table next to any Base (Product and/or Guest Type) rates you have configured.

Finally, you can preview your pricing configuration from the Customer's perspective of the booking pages by clicking the Preview option. Notice that, during product configuration, the system labels the rates with the availability rate name where applicable.