Temporary hold or quote warning?

Is there an easy way to hold dates for a specified amount of time?

For normal customers, my message says that I'll hold it for 12 hours, and I generally remember. But, I've been getting a bunch of check people, and "I need to check with my boss about vacation time" holds, which should be a few days.

If when generating a new quote, it gave a warning of an overlap, that would be sufficient for my needs, as well, I think.

The easy way to do this is to convert the quote into a booking, and then set the pending booking flag. Pending bookings hold time in the calendar so other people can't book, but are automatically canceled as of the pending until date if payment isn't received. This should automatically happen for a check booking.

If you're doing a credit card booking, the easiest way is to turn on payment verification for the quote. To do this:
- Before you send the quote, go to the Billing tab of the quote and select "Confirmation required but credit card will be verified" under "Online Bookings".
- This will change the checkout flow so that the guest still enters the credit card, but it's not charged until you manually collect the payment in the back end.
- A pending booking will be automatically created that will hold time in the calendar but automatically expire if you don't enter a payment by the auto cancellation date.
- When you're ready to confirm the booking, use the charge links to charge the card they entered initially.

You can also manually create a booking and set it pending, if you don't want the automatic checkout.
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To do this, create a booking, pick "Finalize an open quote" and pick the quote you want to block off.

Once you've got the booking created, go to the Info tab in the booking, hit Change Details, and set the pending until date at the bottom.

When the guest is ready to book, you'll need to send them the appropriate payment and legal links so they can make payment and sign the renters agreement. You'll also need to manually schedule a security deposit if you need that.

Found the pending booking flag, and that'll work fine for my people. Thanks!

I used the pending flag to hold dates for someone, but now they can't finalize their quote. If I give them the payment link, the only option for payment is 100%, but they should only be paying the 50% deposit...

If you create a pending booking by hand, you'll have to set up the payments by hand as well (as in my second method description above).

For now, the easiest way to fix this is to cancel/delete the pending booking and let them finalize their quote.

In future, I'd recommend using my first method above -- setting payment verification for the quote. When you go through those steps, it'll allow them to accept the quote immediately, enter in their payment info etc., but it won't be charged. Instead a pending booking will be automatically created by the system and hooked to the payment info they entered in checkout. Then, when you're ready to confirm the booking, use the links in the booking to charge the card they entered.

I set up the check payment method, so that looks like it'll work perfect to automatically go into the 'pending' mode, and save it for the week while the mail travels.

For people wanting to hold dates while they wait for vacation approval, I think I'll just have them put $5 down or something, so that I'll have the CC on file and can then set up payments or refund it, etc. I did end up canceling the booking, making the quote available for them to finalize again, but it took me a couple extra emails back and forth.

thanks,
-JJ

Hey Jacques, you don't need to use the check payment method to do what you're after. You can have them use a credit card (instead of check) and have the card available to charge later all at the same time. It won't charge them until you confirm it later on.

Just select "credit card confirmation required" on the quote. That does all the following:

- pending booking is created
- credit card is confirmed with a 0$ transaction so that you know the guest is legit
- credit card is stored against their booking so you can use it for payments later

When you're ready to make the booking final, go to the pending page and click finalize. It will remove the pending flag, take the first payment and set up the scheduled payment/secdep all at once.

Perfect, thanks!

Is there any way to have a choice to block calendar dates when you send out a quote??

Not currently, quotes are first come first served. It is on our list.

Has this process changed? I am trying to adjust the rules within a specific quote, to allow the guest to make a pending booking with no payment required until a set date. Even though I've selected "Card will not be charged at checkout but will be kept on file." the quote still shows that the balance is due at the time of booking.

I have had this in the past and ended up changing the First Payment to $10 just to get it booked. Then I give them an "offline" option for the payment (like Venmo or a Check) so they are allowed to book but don't actually have to send me any money.

Would definitely be nice to be able to allow zero now. And I think OR has said they are working on their payment options to give us more flexibility.

Would really like this feature. Been searching for a way to put dates on hold until a guest completes a quote.

This is now finished and out live. Quotes can now hold dates. Read the announcement here:

https://www.ownerreservations.com/blog/refundable-security-deposits-quotes-can-hold-dates-batch-update-for-qb-sync