Best Practice: Calendar & Amenity Reservations

Summary: This article will highlight some of the best practices to take when working with a client on Calendar & Amenity Reservations, Enabling Portal Calendar Reservations, and describing Reservation Calendar benefits.

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Calendar & Amenity Reservations are a new feature of the Modern Portal that maximizes the organization of an associations limited resources. The Reservation feature can be used to reserve association amenity's that are limited to use by one party, like pickleball or tennis courts, or an event space like a lawn, clubhouse, theater room, or other event area. This feature can help more complex reservations such as a move in/out and the coordination of different event tasks. It will be important to ask the client what amenities they have that may require a reservation.

To use Calendar & Amenity Reservations, the portal must be in modern view. For instruction see here: Switch Portal from Classic to Modern View.

Why?

Using the calendar & Amenity Reservation feature on the portal will speed up the reservation process. The portal calendar is live, and can be set so that when a reservation is requested a tentative placeholder will be placed on the calendar at that date and time, blocking double bookings while waiting for approval. While a clubhouse may require reservation approval, a pickle ball or tennis court may not. These items can be automatically approved to change the calendar reservation from tentative to booked. The example below will show how to set up an automatic reservation. 

How? 

When a Reservation is created in the Homeowner Portal, it creates an Action Item in Vantaca. To review Action Item Creation with Calendar Events, visit here: Enabling Calendar Reservations for your Portal.

Tennis court Reservation Without Approval Example: 

Imagine in this association when a Homeowner wants to make a tennis court reservation, they log onto the portal, look at the tennis reservation calendar, put in a request and can have that court reserved immediately and seamlessly without management interference. Here is what that action item may look like in Vantaca:

Step one Reservation Request Received, is set to step automatically to Reservation Confirmed. Step two is a closing step AND is set to create a visible calendar reservation immediately on the portal. Do this with the "display calendar event" drop down.

Now we have the court reservation action item, lets add multiple courts.

First: Navigate to Settings > Amenity Categories and make sure your Tennis Courts are set up. Tie it to the action item you just created.

Now, navigate to Association > Amenity Calendar Settings and add each court as an amenity by selecting + New Amenity. In our example there are 3 courts.  

Category: Tennis Courts (what we just created and tied to the court reservation action item)

Name: Court #

Description: BEST PRACTICE, the description will not show up on the homeowner portal. It would be best practice to edit the body content of the reservation portal page to reflect any pertinent information like charge amounts/ closures/ amenity rules/ instructions. Do this on Association > Portal Pages.

Fill out the rest per association limits. It would be a best practice to have all courts be represented as the same color. Continue duplicating this amenity process for as many courts as the association has.

Below is how this will appear on the Homeowner Portal:

Additional options: Is there a fee associated with that reservation? Create an Action Item Charge on the Assessments screen and attach it to the reservation received step on your Action Item! For more information on this, review our How to Set Up Action Item Charge Type Rules article.

BEST PRACTICE on Amenity Closures due to holiday/construction/weather etc. 

To limit reservations for a period of time it would be best practice to add a description to the body of the portal page by navigating to Association > Portal Pages. To block the reservations quickly, edit the Available Days on the Edit Amenity screen to reflect the days of closure.

NOTE: This will put a stop to all future reservations currently being made on those days of the week. Additionally, please note that currently there is no way to limit an amenity to be only booked once per day.

Another option would be to mimic a board member portal and to reserve/book out all the construction dates in advance to prevent any other homeowners from booking them.

Q: Can reservation ability be put on pause from certain homeowners? If they abuse an amenity and are banned from using it? 

A: No, this feature cannot be turned off on a homeowner by homeowner basis.