Individual Guide Schedules
Your Guides can manage their own schedules and get assigned to trips based on the Guide Scheduling settings you choose. You can also jump into their individual schedules and add blocked dates to make them unavailable. Your Guides will also be able to go into their own schedules to add blocked dates for themselves.
How Guide Scheduling in Origin works:
Categories
When you invite Guides into your company, you will assign them the Categories of Listings you want them to be able to guide. Say, if a Guide has a "Beginner Instructor" Category, they will only be able to get booked for Listings with that same Category, and wouldn't be able to guide Listings with "Advanced Instructor" categories.
This helps you manage your team and all of their permissions and what they can/can't do. A Guide can have as many Categories as you want, and that will mean they can be assigned to any booked Listing that matches.
Origin also calculates your company's availability for your Listings based on how many Guides with matching categories are available at the given date/time. So, this means if a Guide is already booked or has a Block on their schedule, they won't be considered available and they will not be able to get assigned to any bookings during that time.
When a customer booked a trip with you, a Guide can be assigned to the trips in a few different ways, and the choice is up to you:
Guide Priority by Category (most popular)
Rank your guides based on their experience, knowledge, etc. for each Category you have. When you rank a guide, the system automatically assigns higher-ranked guides first and then goes down your list based on availability. So if a 1st priority Guide is booked or blocked, the system will assign the next Guide behind them.
Client-to-Guide Ratio (used with or without Priority)
This is a setting on Listings that can be used in addition to Max Seats. In other words, guide ratios define how many people one Guide can take on a booking. Then the system automatically calculates out how many seats are available based on how many available guides there are for that Listing's Category.
For example, if your Client-to-Guide ratio is 1:6, enter 6 in the field. If your Max Seats is 12 people per booking, Origin will calculate the number of available seats to display in the booking widget based on the availability of your guides. If 2 Guides are available, 12 Seats maximum will be available to book, but if only 1 guide is available, Origin adjusts the availability to only show 6 seats, so your ratio is maintained.
The Client-to-Guide ratio feature will work alongside your Priority settings, so when multiple Guides are needed, they will be assigned in their priority order based on who is available.
SMS Text Guide Notifications
If you'd like your Guides to claim newly booked trips on a first-come-first-served basis, then you can turn off Guide Priority. This will make it so when a trip is booked, a text will go out to your guides who have the same Category as the booked Listing, and will ask the guide/s if they want to take that trip. If they respond "Yes", Origin will assign them to the trip and it will show on their schedule.
If the guide doesn't want that trip, they can simply not respond. If someone responds "Yes" before someone else can get to it, the second guide trying to claim the trip will receive a message that the trip already has a Guide and is no longer available to claim.
These SMS Texts will only send to Guides who match the category of the Listing AND who are available on their individual schedules. If a Guide is blocked or booked, they will not receive a text if the new booking is at the same time as they are unavailable already.