Understanding product availability events – Checkfront

With this article, you can learn about availability events and where to create an event from the Availability tab of the Product Builder.

Learn more about the Availability tab here: Step 3: Determining the availability of your product.

New to the Product Builder? Read the first article in this series for an introduction to the Product feature.

Accessing the features mentioned in this article

Where can I find this feature using the top menu?

Inventory > Products > Products > Add Product/Add New Product/Edit Product > Availability

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.

Understanding availability events

Create Event

Availability events determine the dates and times your product is available or unavailable.

Your product cannot be activated until you create at least one availability event.

You can have multiple availability events to represent different product availability with or without pricing, e.g. standard availability, winter schedule or seasonal pricing.

There are two types of availability events - availability and closure.

Availability events determine when the product is available for booking, with the option to modify the base price of your product during those select periods.
Closure events determine when the product is unavailable for booking, allowing you to block the product from your booking calendar for a specified period, e.g. for an off-season or maintenance period. Learn more here

An event can only be associated with one product. Events associated with multiple products are not supported at this time.

If the guest type or the product has pricing disabled, the availability event does not affect it.

Overlapping events and timeslots
An event may not be created or updated if it overlaps another event. Events are considered overlapping if applied to the same date span and applicable days of the week.

While timeslots cannot be duplicated on the same day, you can create availability events that share the same date span and applicable days with timeslots if the timeslots overlap.

Warning: Overlapping timeslots share the same inventory.

Configuration options vary slightly, depending on how your product is booked - all day, nightly, via timeslots or using flextime.

With the next article in this series, we start by looking at creating an all day or nightly availability event.

< Determining how your product is booked | Creating availability events for your all day or nightly product >