TABLE OF CONTENTS
- Introduction
- Locating the Price Bands Option
- Creating Price Bands
- Assigning Price Bands to a Calendar
- Updating Online Booking Templates
- Check Online Calendar Price Bands
Introduction
Online ‘Price Bands’ are a simple way of assigning colours to specific days or date ranges on the calendar (date selector) used on any of your online booking templates. The aim is to provide a colourised calendar, with a ‘Key’, in order to improve the customer user experience when making an online booking. This is most usually used to indicate where ticket prices change on specified days / date ranges, e.g. green coloured dates may represent ‘Standard Prices and red coloured dates represent ‘Premium Prices’. Where these are required, ‘Price Bands’ must be set up for each ‘Booking Template’ they are needed on. For each ‘Booking Template’, you can create the required ‘Price Band’ names and colours, then assign them to the calendar used for that specific ‘Booking Template’. Please note the system also automatically generates a ‘Key’ for you to show your customers what each of these colours represents.
Please Note:
Online ‘Price Bands’ are nothing to do with the ‘Price Bands’ option in the Merac back office software. Online ‘Price Bands’ are a totally separate concept and are just used to apply colours to the calendar used by a specific online ‘Booking Template’.
Locating the Price Bands Option
Open the URL to your online ‘Admin Page’ and enter the required password and click ‘Login’.
N.B. if you have already purchased the online bookings module these details have already been provided.
If you do not have the URL, this can be accessed by clicking: Setup > Bookings > Booking Templates.
Then click the ‘Website Login’ button and the URL for the ‘Admin Page’ will open automatically.
A screen like the one below will now be showing.
To access the online ‘Price Bands’ functionality, click ‘Update Price Bands’.
Creating Price Bands
You will now see a screen like the one shown below.
Click on a template description in the ‘Please choose a template’ list selection box.
Click the ‘Add’ button.
In the ‘Price Band Name’ box, enter the required name for this ‘Price Band’.
In the ‘Description’ box, enter the required description. N.B. this description will be used in the ‘Key’ that is automatically created to show your customer what each of the price bands represent.
Click the ‘Colour’ box
Select the required colour from the colour selector, then click ‘Ok’.
Please note:
The appearance of this colour selector screen will vary depending on the internet browser you are using.
Next, click ‘Add’.
You will now see a message “New price band has been added”.
Click ‘Ok’.
To add a second price band, click on the template name again in ‘Please choose a template’ list.
Click ‘Add’.
Repeat the process to enter the ‘Price Band Name’, ‘Description’ and to select the ‘Colour’ as before.
Click ‘Add’ again.
As before, you will now see a message “New price band has been added”.
Repeat this process to add all the required ‘Price Bands’.
Assigning Price Bands to a Calendar
Now you need to apply the ‘Price Band’ colours to the required calendar dates for a specific template.
Ensure you click on the required ‘Booking Template’ from the ‘Please choose a template’ list of options.
You will now see the names of the ‘Price Bands’ you created here.
Click on the name of the first price band you want to apply to the calendar.
The name of the selected price band (and its colour) will now show here.
Click on a date to select it or click and drag to select a range of dates.
Repeat as required, until all the dates are showing in the colour for this price band.
Click ‘Apply’.
Now click on the next price band name here.
Once again, the name of the selected price band (and its colour) will now show here.
Click and drag to assign this colour to date(s) as before
Repeat as required until all dates are showing the correct colours in this specific year.
If you want to colourise next year’s calendar, then select the year here.
As before, click the required template name where shown and repeat the process for this calendar year.
Click ‘Apply’ once all the price bands have been assigned to this calendar.
If other ‘Booking Templates’ need price band colours creating and applying, repeat the process as required for each specific ‘Booking Template’ as detailed in the previous pages.
Once you have finished, click on the close button , at the top right corner of the screen.
Updating Online Booking Templates
To apply these changes to your online ‘Booking Templates’, they must be updated.
(N.B. please see Section 2 if you do not know how to access the ‘Admin Menu’ page shown below)
Click the ‘Update Templates’ option and wait for the update process to finish.
Next, scroll down to the bottom of this page and click the ‘Logout’ button.
Check Online Calendar Price Bands
In the Merac back office software, go into: Setup > Bookings > Booking Templates.
Click on the required ‘Template Name’ here, so it becomes highlighted yellow.
Click the ‘View’ button where shown.
Please also note that the URL for this template is shown in the ‘Website URL:’ box. *
Check the dates are showing with the correct colour for each ‘Booking Template’ for each date in each year the ‘Price Bands’ were set up on and that the ‘Key’ is showing correctly.
Once everything is correct, provide your own web designer the URL for this template (see above *).
They will then need to add this URL to the relevant buttons on your own web pages.