Hotel & Campground Bookings (Booking by Type)

The reservation system started life booking boats into slips, where the guest cares deeply about which slip — #42, the one near their dock box. Hotels and campgrounds don't work that way. A guest books a Queen Lakeview or a 30-amp pull-through, fits a 40-foot rig. They do not care whether they get site 12 or site 14, and your front desk would rather decide that at check-in — or let the system decide — than commit a specific unit weeks in advance and then juggle it.

If you've been forcing campers to "pick a site" the way a marina picks a slip, you've felt the friction: you can't take a booking when the exact site they picked is taken, even though five identical sites are free. Booking by type fixes that.

When you'd use this

Turn on type-based booking when you sell a pool of interchangeable units: hotel rooms, cabins, tent sites, RV sites by hookup class, storage lockers of a size. The test is simple — would a guest be equally happy with any unit of the same kind? If yes, book the type.

Keep booking by specific unit (the marina default) when the unit genuinely matters: a named slip, a particular hangar, a boatyard cradle. The system supports both at once, which is the point — a marina that also runs a campground configures each asset type the way that vertical wants.

Setting it up

It's one screen. Go to Reservations → (setup) Asset Types, edit the type, and open the Hospitality inventory section:

• Bookable inventory — turn this on. It tells the system "sell this as a pool, not by name."
• How is inventory counted? The important choice — and it keeps things consistent with how slips already work:
  • Map slots — a site is a slot on your booking map, exactly like a slip. You draw a slot per campsite and the count of slots is your inventory. Best for campgrounds, RV parks, and marinas, where each spot has a real location.
  • Quantity — a flat number with no map ("80 identical Queen rooms"). Best for hotels where drawing 80 slots on a floor plan would be busywork.
• Guest can pick a specific unit (slots mode) —
  • Never — the system assigns the slot (most hotels).
  • Optional — the guest may choose, or let you assign (many campgrounds — some campers want site 7 by the creek, most don't care).
  • Required — a specific slot must be chosen (marina slips).
• Assign the unit — at booking (auto-assigns a best-fit free slot immediately), at check-in (holds the type; the front desk assigns a real site when the guest arrives), or manually (assign from the Tape Chart whenever).
• Search filters — optional. Use the Add a filter builder to describe the site for online search: hookups (electric/water/sewer), max rig length, ADA, pet-friendly. (No JSON — it's a simple form.) Different from the custom fields lower down, which describe the guest's own rig.

Drawing your sites (slots mode)

A campsite is a slot, exactly like a slip — so you set sites up the way you'd set up a marina:

1. Reservations → Availability → Booking Maps → upload your campground map.
2. Draw a slot for each campsite.
3. Tag each slot's Allowed Asset Types with the single matching type (e.g. just "Tent Site"). That one-type tag is what makes the slot count as a unit of that type's inventory.

The count of active, un-closed slots of a type is your availability — twelve "30-amp pull-through" slots means twelve sellable that night. Taking a site out of service? Use a slot closure (the same tool marinas use), not a deleted record.

Quantity mode skips all of this — you just type the number of units on the asset type; no map, no per-site record.

Picking a site — and splitting a stay across sites

At Step 4 of the booking wizard, a bookable-inventory booking shows your campground map instead of the asset picker. There's no boat or rig record to place — you're picking a site directly. Click one, or leave the dropdown on Assign automatically / at check-in and let the Tape Chart sort it out later.

Sites are colored by what they can actually take for the dates on the booking:

• Green — free the whole stay. Click to pin it.
• Teal — free when the guest arrives, but booked before they leave. Click it to split the stay.
• Red — already booked. Not clickable.
• Faint grey — a site of a different type.

Teal is the one worth understanding. Say a guest wants two weeks starting the 3rd. Site 14 is open the 3rd through the 10th and then a long-booked rally takes it; site 22 is free from the 9th onward. Nothing is free for the full fourteen nights, so the old behavior was to show every site red and leave you to work it out on paper — or turn the booking away.

Click teal site 14 and you get an itinerary instead:

Confirm it and both legs are booked as one reservation. The guest moves once, mid-stay, and each site's calendar is correct. The itinerary stays visible above the map until you clear it, and the sites involved show teal-solid.

This works for open-ended stays and fixed dates. For an open-ended booking the system checks as far ahead as the reservation type's lookahead allows and tells you the date it checked through — beyond that it can't promise anything, which is honest rather than optimistic.

Tell the guest. A split stay means a move on a specific morning. It's a perfectly normal thing to sell at a busy campground — "we can hold you, you'll shift from 14 to 22 on the Wednesday" — but only if they hear it at booking, not on arrival.

The Tape Chart

Once a type is bookable inventory, the Tape Chart (in the Reservations menu) becomes your home base. Rows are types; columns are nights. Each cell shows how many units are free that night — 9 of 12. Expand a type to see the individual units and who's in each. It's the hotel/campground equivalent of the Timeline, except it thinks in availability rather than in physical layout. Click a free unit cell and you drop straight into a booking pre-filled with that unit and date.

The Tape Chart is also where deferred assignment lives. If you set a type to assign at check-in, those bookings sit as "awaiting unit" — the Front Desk screen counts them, and the Tape Chart's worklist lets you drop each into a real site when the camper rolls in.

The Front Desk workspace

There's a workflow-first landing page — Front Desk — that surfaces what you need based on what you're doing right now: today's arrivals, departures, who's in-house, how many bookings are awaiting a unit, and how many online bookings need review. Everything else (full reservation grid, map, timeline, rate calendar) is one click away. It doesn't replace the tools you have; it just stops burying the three you use every morning.

Common mistakes

• Flagging slips as bookable inventory. If the guest picks the slip by name, leave the type as Required and don't turn on bookable inventory. Booking by type is for interchangeable units only.
• Zero units, full calendar. In slots mode, availability is the count of active slots tagged to the type; if a type shows "sold out" with nothing booked, you probably haven't drawn the slots yet, or none are tagged to that single type. In quantity mode, check that you set the number of units above zero.
• Assigning at booking when you wanted flexibility. At booking auto-commits a specific unit immediately, which can strand your one big pull-through on a small rig. If you'd rather decide later, choose at check-in and assign from the Tape Chart.
• Confusing facets with custom fields. Facets describe the site (hookups, max length) and power the public search filters. Custom fields describe the guest's asset. Don't duplicate one into the other.
• Reading a map full of red as "sold out." Check for teal before you turn the booking away — a teal site means the stay fits if the guest moves once. Red-only really is full.
• Booking a split and not saying so. The system will happily record the move; it won't tell the guest. Say it out loud at booking and note the move date on the reservation.

What's next

Once you're booking by type, set up date-based pricing in the Rate Calendar so weekends and peak season price themselves, and turn on online booking so guests can reserve a type from your website.