If you choose the By Resources option when you set your Experience Capacity Limits, you will discover a variety of settings designed to help you allocate, track, and manage your resources. For example, maybe you need each customer who books an experience to be assigned a life jacket and a canoe. As these resources are assigned, not only will you want to know how many canoes and life jackets are checked out vs. how many more are available for use, but you'll also want assurance that those items won't be overbooked. You can set these preferences and more with the By Resources capacity settings.
Prerequisites
In order for these capacity settings to work properly, you must first Assign Resource Usages.
When to Use the By Resources Capacity Setting
In the tabs below, you'll discover the purpose of each checkbox that lives within the By Resources capacity setting, as well as examples to illustrate those concepts in action.
Assign First Available
The Assign First Available Resource checkbox determines whether your customers are assigned one of each resource associated with an experience or simply the first available resource listed. For context, let's compare these two common scenarios:
Scenario 1 |
Scenario 2 |
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We want to assign each traveler on our kayaking tour one kayak and one life jacket, so we have set up our Resource Usages for this experience to include those two resources. Since every traveler will be assigned one of each, the order in which the resources are listed does not matter:
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Our hot air balloon resources include a 4-seat, 6-seat, and 10-seat balloon (one of each). We prefer that the balloons are filled in order from smallest (the 4-seater) to largest (the 10-seater). As such, we list these resources in that same order within our Resource Usages:
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If we were to select the Assign First Available Resource checkbox, we would be instructing the platform to only assign the first-listed resource (in our case, kayaks) until all the kayaks are checked out, then to move on to assigning life jackets until all of those are checked out as well. Instead, we deselect the checkbox to ensure that each traveler is assigned both resources, not just the first available. 
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We select the Assign First Available Resource checkbox, which tells the platform that once the first resource listed (the 4-seat balloon) has exceeded its max usage, it's time to stop assigning travelers to that resource and start assigning them to the next one (the 6-seater) — and so on. If we were to leave this checkbox deselected, each traveler would be assigned to all three balloons. |
Daily Resource Cutoff
The Daily Resource Cutoff option prevents your resources from being checked out or in use beyond a specified cutoff time. For instance, in the above example we have set our cutoff time for 7:00 p.m. because that is the time by which we want all of our kayaks and life jackets returned to us. With this 7:00 p.m. cutoff time, the platform will prevent travelers from booking, say, a 3-hour timeslot starting later than 4:00 p.m. or a 1-hour timeslot starting later than 6:00 p.m.
Best of all, you don't have to do any math or additional setup to ensure this happens. You simply have to select the Daily Resource Cutoff checkbox, then choose your cutoff time.
Max Resource Capacity
The Max Resource Capacity option sets a maximum number of tickets that can be sold for a timeslot. This option is useful when, for example, the number of resources available is greater than the number of travelers you want to host for an experience.
For instance, let's say you have 10 boats that support 10 people each, but your team is only equipped to accommodate a maximum of 25 travelers at once (as opposed to the 100 maximum the boats could hold). This is where the Max Resource Capacity checkbox comes in handy. Rather than having to adjust your resource settings, all you need to do is select this checkbox, then specify the maximum number of travelers you want to host for any given timeslot.
Beware of Booking Restrictions
If during checkout your team and/or customers are unable to select the maximum number of tickets defined by your capacity settings, there may be a contradictory booking restriction in place. To learn more, visit Why can't I add more tickets to a booking during checkout?