Occasions
Here’s the summary of what you can do with occasions:
First, a review. You are probably familiar with the spot in Livery Coach where you set the “Cancellation Policy”—the paragraph of text that appears at the bottom of a confirmation. (If not, this can be seen by going to Livery Coach Maintenance…Maintain…Owner List…select the owner you want to edit the policy, click Edit, and then select the Policy tab.)
But the space in this field, and at the bottom of the confirmation, is limited. And, different occasions might require different policies. For example, your standard policy might talk about a 2 hour cancellation policy…but for, say, a wedding or bachelor party, you might want 24 or 48 hours.
Also, it can be uncomfortable for your corporate travelers booking trips to the airport to read a cancellation policy that mentions “biological emissions” or whatever euphemism you might use for the messes drunk party people might make.
Luckily, Livery Coach can handle this with ease. Simply click on Maintain…Occasions…and enter your text in the absurdly large white box (the policy can be up to 4000 characters…so you can put a whole wedding agreement or prom promise, complete with signature line, in there).
- Have a separate cancellation policy at the bottom based on occasion
- Control what occasions show up on your website for booking
- Control whether occasion is required
- Control whether occasion is copied when you copy a trip
- Control whether occasion is copied when you make a return trip
- Set certain occasions to make chauffeur and vehicle info appear on confirmations
- Merge 2 occasions into one
- View the dispatch grid sorted by occasion
- Look up trips by occasion
- Run a report showing you trips by occasion
- And (we’ll cover the below in future tips):
- Automatically apply different hourly rates and gratuity based on occasion
- Restrict chauffeurs from driving trips marked with certain occasions
- Pay chauffeur differently based on occasion
First, a review. You are probably familiar with the spot in Livery Coach where you set the “Cancellation Policy”—the paragraph of text that appears at the bottom of a confirmation. (If not, this can be seen by going to Livery Coach Maintenance…Maintain…Owner List…select the owner you want to edit the policy, click Edit, and then select the Policy tab.)
But the space in this field, and at the bottom of the confirmation, is limited. And, different occasions might require different policies. For example, your standard policy might talk about a 2 hour cancellation policy…but for, say, a wedding or bachelor party, you might want 24 or 48 hours.
Also, it can be uncomfortable for your corporate travelers booking trips to the airport to read a cancellation policy that mentions “biological emissions” or whatever euphemism you might use for the messes drunk party people might make.
Luckily, Livery Coach can handle this with ease. Simply click on Maintain…Occasions…and enter your text in the absurdly large white box (the policy can be up to 4000 characters…so you can put a whole wedding agreement or prom promise, complete with signature line, in there).
A few more points…if you begin the Occasion name with a colon (the : character), then the confirmation to the customer will show the Chauffeur Name, Chauffeur Cell, Vehicle Tag, and Vehicle information…this can be helpful if your customer is booking a specific vehicle and/or chauffeur (for a wedding, for example, or even a Road Show).
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You can also pick which Occasions appear in your website Occasion list (that your customers can see), and which ones are “private” and can only be booked in the office. Note the checkmark in the screen shot above.
Occasion can be a required field, if you like. This is set in Livery Coach Maintenance…System Default Configuration…Default 1 tab.
Occasion can be a required field, if you like. This is set in Livery Coach Maintenance…System Default Configuration…Default 1 tab.
If you want to merge two occasions (say, for example, you used to have “Airport Departure” and “Airport Arrival”, and decided “Airport Transfer” was more appropriate), this is easy. Simply select the “Merge To” button in Maintain…Occasions, and click. You will a screen where you can select the “From” and the “To”, and then you can click the Merge button at the bottom. Note that if you are merging, say, Airport Departures and Airport Arrivals to Airport, you will need to create the Airport Occasion first, before the merge. |
Finally, if you want to run a report on your trips by Occasion, there are two: Occasion Statistics – Archived (for trips that have already been closed out), and Occasion Statistics – Pending (for current trips). When running this report, you can set the start and end date, and also group the trips within each occasion by vehicle type, if desired. It will also show you the total runs for each occasion, the total hours (measured by trip hours) , the average hours, the total revenue and average revenue, and the % of your gross (for the period for which you ran the report). So you can see how much revenue those weddings bring in compared to the airport runs.