Bookings - Overview

Private request lessons are the most lucrative ski school product services whilst providing guests with the highest end experiences and instructors with their highest compensation. However, the sales process of these lessons is often the most cumbersome and clunky of any in the ski school's portfolio. There are tremendous opportunities for improving the experience, growing sales, and saving labor.

Purpose

This feature addresses the challenges and inefficiencies in booking private lessons with a specific instructor requested by guest. We generally refer to this as “Private Request Lessons”. These challenges include constraints on sales relating to instructors' availability, product inventory, complex and manual processes, and a lack of transparency in pricing and booking completion.

Solution

With the sophistication of flaik instructor and schedule management, our platform has the right assets to address the underlying problems of private request lesson booking. Our approach to this solution involves tight integration with source POS to ensure alignment of single source of truth of customer record and transaction history. We have designed this feature to be the most automated and efficient, while reducing impacts on operations.

Instructor-led Booking:

Utilizing instructors as a personal concierge for their existing guests, they can configure private request lesson bookings desired by their guest and send them digitally. A guest will be able to see the details of their lesson and checkout in an online commerce like experience. Our supervisor approval component of instructor booking will greatly improve the efficiency of logistics adjustments by pairing the booking request with the sales, inventory, ratios, and instructor schedules so that a decision can be made rapidly.

Basic Flow:

Basic flow of flaik sales Private Request Lesson booking

Customer Record:

Resorts are heavily dependent on customer data for a multitude of reasons. Therefore, this feature will utilize the resort's customer source of record for referencing guests in instructor bookings.

Transaction:

For the purposes of revenue recognition, sales reporting, bookkeeping and reconciliation, and customer transaction history, this featureuses the core mountain POS at the resort for instructor booking. This is in part due to the fact that we expect that bookings of private request lessons will continue to come in through the sales channels of ecommerce, in-person, and via email/phone. For this reason, the sales from this feature will affect inventory and instructor availability so that these other sales channels can continue with their current business practice and procedures. Once this feature has all business for a line of product or the entire school, we may be able to explore being the source of truth for transactions, reporting, and reconciliation.

Payment & Card Processing:

This feature uses your existing merchant providers to consolidate card processing volume and make it more efficient to reconcile sales in merchant processing and remittance to your bank. This is essential in being able to fully automate the process and to drastically improve the guest experience.

Instructor Schedule & Approval Rules:

There are controls on when an instructor is allowed to book a lesson with a guest. This feature introduces Approval Rules of Auto Approve, Require Approval, and Block that controls the behavior of task conflicts on an instructor schedule as it relates to bookings. These rules empower instructors to offer lessons when capacity is available with automation, but also can protect your school capacity when operations are more locked in.

Approval Rules:

• Auto-Approve

  Allows the task conflict to always be automatically approved, so that the former task is removed from instructors schedule and the private request lesson sale can continue automatically.

• Require Approval

  The default for task conflicts. Require Approval means that the booking offer does not get sent to the guest, if the instructor has a task conflicting with the lesson they are trying to sell. In this case, supervisors are notified of the lesson conflict and can determine if they can allow the instructor schedule change from their task. If approved, the booking is sent to guest.

• Block

  Blocks a task conflict from even being booked. In this setting an instructor cannot sell a lesson that conflicts with a task on their schedule. An example use case may be multi-week programs where continuity of the instructor is important.

See Admin Settings - Approval Rules & Task-override Rules for further documentation on best practices and usage.

Multiple Lessons:

Many private request lessons desired by guests are for multiple days or time blocks. This feature supports multiple lessons within a single booking offer to the guest. This provides a very flexible capability to provide multiple lessons to guests with ease. There are no limits to how complex the booking offer can be for multiple lessons. A common use-case might be consectutive 3 days of full day private lessons, but instructors could also offer combinations of lesson types, disciplines, times, and dates.