FAQ Q153: How can I enter recurring reservations (e.g. every Friday between 9am and 10am) into planyo?

Customer-chosen recurring (multiple) dates

Recurring reservations can be entered by both administrators and customers but only if the shopping cart feature is enabled. You can enable both the shopping cart and the recurring reservations in Site settings / Active features.

The first possibility is Enable recurring reservations (this is not compatible with resources which can be rented only for entire days or nights). Once turned on, you need to go to Resource settings / Time-related settings for each resource that should use the recurring reservations and check the Enable recurring reservations option as well.
Once enabled, the customer, when making a reservation sees a dropdown just below the original date chosen called Repeat this rental ... more times weekly/daily. When the reservation is submitted, the desired dates are added to the shopping cart (e.g. 10 subsequent Tuesdays starting on ... or 5 subsequent days starting on ...). The customer then checks out to finalize the reservation. Please note that this feature also lets you specify the possible number of recurring time slots and the possible time intervals between successive rentals down to 15min. E.g. you could offer a package: rental for 1h, then 30min break, then another rental for 1h. You can also decide whether an error should be shown and reservation disallowed if at least one of the time slots in the series is not available or it should only be a warning and the reservation should be allowed.

Another option in Settings / Active features / Shopping cart is called Return trip. This is very similar to the recurring reservations described above but the customer can only choose one additional date/time: for the return trip. This is useful for transportation services such as shuttle buses, taxis, ships, etc. Additionally, this option allows you to specify a different resource used for the return trip. For example, you can have a shuttle covering the route A - B - C - D and then D - C - B - A with a different time schedule. In such case you'd create two resources (A - B - C - D and D - C - B - A) and set the other resource as the return trip resource for both these resources.

The last possibility called Allow customers to choose multiple dates on the reservation form allows the customer to add up to 9 further dates (for the total of 10 dates) by clicking on a link Add another date under the date selector. This way they can very quickly add a number of dates (each one chosen individually) using a single reservation form. As with the first 2 possibilites, all chosen dates will be added to the shopping cart.

Admin-entered vacations

If you don't want to use the shopping cart feature, you can allow for recurring reservations which can ONLY be entered by the administrators. In this option recurring reservations are entered in form of recurring vacations (vacations can be found here). In the comments field you can write which customer the given resource vacation (reservation in this case) is for. A vacation will work well because it will not allow other clients to reserve the same resource and can be set up as recurring periods (e.g. daily, weekly, monthly). At the same time the admins can see in the schedule tab what which client uses the resource.

Please note that you can also enter recurring reservations for a limited time period only, e.g. all fridays in January and February 2011. To do this, click limit this vacation to a specific period when adding the vacation.

Long-term reservations (e.g. courses)

Please note that if you are looking for a way to allow bookings for classes/courses (long-term), and you don't want your students to sign up for each individual lesson, see Q243 for set-up instructions.
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