How do I allocate product assets by Guest type?

With Guest allocation settings, you can allocate product assets (e.g., vehicles, equipment, spaces) based on Guest types (e.g., senior, adult, youth, child). You can customize asset allocation to optimize resource utilization, improve flexibility to meet Customer needs, and simplify resource management for you and your Staff. 

Read further to learn what Guest types are, using Guest types, and how to set up assets to be distributed by Guest type. 

Accessing the features mentioned in this article

Where can I find this feature using the top menu?

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

What more do I need to use this feature?

• Admin permissions to manage inventory or restricted permissions to View items, products, and assets, and Manage items, products, and assets. 
   

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

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

What is an asset? An asset is a resource that your activity relies on to supply experiences to your Guests, such as equipment, vehicles, or rooms.

Guest types are features that let you categorize the types of guests associated with your booking, for example: Adults, Youth, Children, and Seniors. 

You can assign pricing, quantity limitations, availability, and date restrictions to each guest type. They also allow for automatic inventory allocation.

This article uses the following use case to help you understand how Guest types can be applied to your business.

Use case example You need to set up a public bus tour. The bus has a capacity of 20 guests. You welcome bookings for adults, youth, children, and babies (Guest types), but babies shouldn't take up a seat on the bus. A parent can hold the baby on their lap. You need to configure your products so the system does not allocate seats to babies when booked.

Follow these steps to set up your Guest types:

1. Go to the Product Builder (Inventory > Products) to add a new product or edit an existing product.
2. Fill out the product details as needed.
3. Go to the Inventory tab of the Product Builder.
   
   
    
4. Using the Who is this product available to? setting, select which Guest types apply to this product. You can also add new Guest types via the + Create guest button. 
5. Select Assets as your Inventory type.
6. Click + Create asset to open the Create Assets modal. You can specify the asset's Name, Asset Category, Quantity, and Capacity from the modal.
   
   
   In the above example, we have created one tour bus with 30 available seats for the public to book for a bus tour product.
   
   You can now see the new assets listed under the Assets setting. 
   
   
    
7. Choose to assign the assets by Capacity so seats within the asset can be individually booked by the public (as opposed to booking by quantity, which results in the entire asset being booked with one booking, resulting in a private booking).
   
    
    
8. Open the Guest Allocation dropdown to view the Guest type settings. These are the Guest types, as added in step 4 above.
   
    
    
9. You can turn off any Guest type you do not want the system to allocate seats to when booking, e.g., Baby. A message displays confirming the change. 
10. Continue setting up your products, including setting prices for all Guest types.
11. Click the Save button to save your changes.

Learn more with these related articles Learn more about assets with the following series of in-depth articles: Establishing inventory on products Introduction to assets and the asset builder