Your Operate Portal makes it easy for your members to book your meeting rooms online through the member portal, and non-members to search and book meeting rooms directly from your website; with no need to get in touch with your staff to do so. Here is how it works:
Ensure Meeting Room Availability
In order for your meeting rooms to be made available online, please ensure that the Can Book on Website checkbox is checked, within your meeting room setup.
IMPORTANT: In addition, please fill out the following fields on your meeting room page (even though they are not mandatory):
Number of People,
Style,
Meeting Room Type
Clearance Time - You may need this when booking the same room from within your Operate Calendar, however, the Portal does not take this into consideration. This is because it can reduce portal bookings even by 50%.
More information about setting up and editing your meeting rooms is available here.
Enable Meeting Room Bookings
First of all, you will need the Meeting Rooms Portal module installed within your Operate . If you go to Settings > General > Portal and you do not see a Meeting Rooms option, then you need to install the module. Otherwise, please skip this section and proceed to the Configure your Meeting Room Bookings section below.
Go to the Operate Settings > Integrations and select Portal on the left. Look for Meeting Rooms in the list and click Install on the right.
As soon as Meeting Rooms are installed, you will see two different buttons: Open and Uninstall. Please click Open to continue.
Configure your Meeting Room Bookings
Go to Settings > General > Portal > Meeting Rooms - if your module is already installed.
Step 1: Configure the Rules for Your Online Meeting Room Bookings
Please first select the Venue to which you would like to apply these settings. If you select "All" your configuration will apply to all of your Locations, otherwise they will only save for the Location you select here.
Choose how you want internal and external customers to book - either by using a calendar or an availability search tool. We recommend using the Calendar view for internal members so that they can see when time slots are unavailable. Use the availability search for external customers (coming from your website; who aren't already members of your portal).
Choose whether you want to restrict bookings to home centre, for internal customers. Select NO if members are allowed to book at all company locations. Select YES if you restrict booking to the home center only.
Enable or disable searching by region - Set to NO unless you have regions configured.
Select whether you want to return sites first in search results - Select YES if you want the home site to return results first.
Choose the latest time by which you will accept next day bookings and the earliest times when you will accept bookings. We recommend leaving allowing later/earlier bookings, so that you don’t miss any booking opportunities. The earliest booking start time (doesn’t apply to members who can book 24/7)
Add the latest time the location is open till (doesn’t apply to members who can book 24/7)
Select whether you want to allow weekend or same day bookings (members with 24/7 access will always be able to book on weekends)
If you have selected allow weekend booking as Yes, then add how much notice you require for a same day booking (in minutes) - This is a buffer time between when a member books and when they can actually use the room (e.g if it's 9am and this is set to 30 mins, the next available time slot is 9.30am). If this field is not set and left as blank, then it is defaulted to 60 minutes.
Choose how long you will hold a booking without payment (in minutes).
Select whether you want to hide the room layout selection - If you decide to do so, please note that the room style needs to be set to 'Boardroom' in order for your room to be available for booking.
Select whether you want to invoice Credit Card Bookings - You can set this to not generate an invoice; however, please note that invoicing will need to be done manually for portal bookings. If your portal is set up with a payment processor, you will need to ensure that this option is configured to always generate an invoice.. (set to Yes). Otherwise, neither the invoice nor the payment will be recorded in Operate even if the payment is taken by the processor.
Select the Client Types Which Can Book 24/7 in their Home Centre. This setting will override other settings around earliest and latest booking times and weekend availability for members within the selected Client Type.
Step 2: Add your Meeting Room Terms & Conditions.
Use the text editor to add Terms and Conditions that will be displayed on your Member Portal, when customers want to make a booking.
Once you enter your meeting room terms into the editor, a link will appear on the online booking page asking that the customer checks the box to agree to them – these can be opened and viewed in a new browser window, if the customer wants to read.
The booking will not move forward unless the customer checks the box stating that they agree to your terms and conditions.
Step 3: Add a Booking Widget to Your Website
Once you have completed the setup of your meeting rooms, you can copy the html code from the Meeting Room page, and send it to your webmaster to embed into your website or contact the Operate team if you require assistance.
When a customer books using the widget, they will be taken to your Portal to complete the booking.
The process will automatically walk them through selecting a room and making their booking, setting up a new account and making immediate payment for the booking.
Here is an example of how your widget may look like, after having been designed according to your website:
Troubleshooting
If your customers are having trouble booking the space you have made available, please ensure that your Availability app does not block the dates they want to book.
In addition, if "Hide room layout selection" has been enabled in the portal meeting room seetings (shown above), the meeting room style needs to be set to Boardroom otherwise the room will not be made avaiable.
Additional troubleshooting steps can be found here
Please note:
Making your meeting room available on the Portal will also enable it on the external booker you can use on your website (as shown above). For the moment, there is no option to enable the Portal or booker separately.