Facility Rental or Facility Request?
The MyRec.com Facilities feature provides your department with a streamlined way to manage facility reservations, giving customers convenient access to book spaces online. There are two primary options for handling these reservations: allowing direct Public Reservations or enabling Public Requests that require staff approval. With flexible pricing tools like Renter Fees and Set Blocks, your department can tailor the reservation process to fit both operational needs and customer convenience.
How Can My Customers Reserve Facilities?
Public reservations allow your members to view facility availability and to make reservations directly from the public side without prior approval from your staff. Departments can use Rental Fees, Flexible Blocks, or Set Blocks for pricing. Members pay online at the time of reservation.
Rental Fees allow the facility to be reserved directly on the public side at an hourly rate using assigned Renter Types. A minimum and maximum number of hours allowed per reservation can be set. Rental Fees enable facilities to be reserved in increments of 30 minutes or longer. Billing is calculated in 15-minute increments.
PRO: Customers can easily have fees calculated and applied when creating a reservation.
CON: Any custom Renter Types (except Resident and Non-Resident defaults) will need to be manually assigned by staff on the management side before these fees can automatically be charged (to allow public side reservation at a daily rate, view the Set Blocks feature).
With Flexible Blocks, the start and stop times can be variable. For instance, if a high school basketball game is 90 minutes, you can set Flexible Blocks of 90 minutes on your gymnasium. A member can rent the gym at any time the facility is available, but it must be in a flexible block of 90 minutes. One member can rent the gym for a game at 3:30pm and another member can rent the gym for a game at 5:00pm or 8:00am, but both will have the gym rented for enough time to play an average high school basketball game. The next day, a member could start their gym rental at 4:00pm, which couldn't have happened the day prior because of another member's flexible block.
During setup, a text box will activate to enter the number of minutes for the block.
Departments first set up predetermined blocks of time with fees that customers from which customers can choose when making a reservation.
PRO: Allows for the public to easily choose the times and fees they want and to check out without needing to have the reservation approved beforehand.
CON: Using set blocks for a fee structure can present some limitations. For example, you can set a fee for the block 8:00 - 10:00am, but you cannot add “$10 more for each additional hour”.
Allowing Public Reservation Requests will make the facility/facility area available to the public to place a reservation request, which the management side must then review and process. This does not create a reservation, and the public member does not pay for anything until after the request is approved by the staff and the reservation is already scheduled.
Steps in the Facility Reservation Request Process:
- Customer views the facility availability online via the public side and submits a Facility Request
- Staff receives a notification in the Needs Attention box of the management side and has the choice of holding dates, declining the request, or booking the reservation
- If approved, the staff will finish booking details and process the invoice, which bills the customer, and the invoice is sent via email
- The customer pays their invoice online via the public side household account or by submitting cc/cash/check (if accepted) to the office, where the staff will apply the payment to the balance due within the household account
