Listing Description

When you create a new listing or edit an existing listing, the Description tab will be where you enter into Xola some important details that will be presented to your customer throughout the booking process.

Note: If you need to duplicate an existing listing you can easily do this by hovering over the listing you want to duplicate on the main Products> Listing page and click Duplicate. This can only be performed by Xola Admins. 

What's covered in this article:

• Listing title
• Price
• Schedules
• Per Booking Min and Max
• Per Outing Min and Max
• CRM
• Customer Facing Duration
• Equipment Duration
• Early Cutoff
• Future Cutoff
• Early Equipment Return
• Business Hours

• Booking Validity

• Excerpt/Description
• Checklist
• Cancellation Policy
• Other Considerations 
• Attachments
• Email Footer
• Activity/Meeting Location
• Delete a Listing

Listing title

This is the name of the experience you offer customers to book online. This could be anything from the name of a walking tour to a canoe rental to the name of an escape room. It will appear during customer checkout, on the Xola back end, and in all email correspondence with a customer. 

Your customers will see this name when they click on this listing's Book Now button on your website.

Price

In the Price field, enter in the cost of this experience. This can be on a Per Person or Per Outing basis.

• Per Person: Guests are charged individually for the experience.
  Want to charge per person, but limit your listing to one booking per time slot? Check out Private Groups with Per-Person Pricing.
• Per Outing: There is one price for the experience regardless of the number of guests.
  Per Outing pricing is private by default as it only allows for one booking per timeslot.

Schedules

Per Booking Min and Max

The Per Booking Minimum is the minimum number of people who must book a timeslot at once (ie, in one transaction). 
The Per Booking Maximum is the maximum number of people who can book a timeslot at once (ie, in one transaction). 
Examples

• A chocolate factory tour sells tickets for a minimum of one guest at a time.

• A bike tour company rents out tandem bikes, so two people must reserve at a time.

• The chocolate factory tour accommodates up to 30 guests, but only a maximum of 20 people can book together in one transaction.

Per Outing Min and Max

The Per Outing Minimum sets the rule for the number of people who must book in order for a timeslot to be confirmed.
The Per Outing Maximum is the maximum number of people who can book into one timeslot of a listing.

Note: This only appears if you have schedules associated with your listing. 

Example:

• PopSpots can take a maximum of 15 people on any given timeslot of a Bob Dylan walking tour. 

• Al's Boats rents out 100 two-person kayaks. The Per Outing Maximum is 100.

Al's Boats offers Speedboat Tours. Al's speedboat can fit up to 10 guests, but he will only confirm the trip if a minimum of 5 guests book. He wants to know at least 5 days prior to a tour whether the minimum has been met or not.

Al's Per Outing setup would look as follows:

Let's say four guests book a 12pm Speedboat Tour - They need one more person to book to hit the Per Outing Minimum of 5.

• Guests 1-4 will not receive a confirmation email nor see their cards charged until the fifth guest books. 
• Guests 1-4 will receive a Booking Request Received email and their bookings will remain pending in Xola until the fifth guest books.
• If an event does reach the Per Outing Minimum, all pending bookings for this event will be automatically accepted (unless Auto-Accept is turned off in your Settings). Credit cards will be charged and confirmation emails will be sent out to those customers.
• If an event does not meet the Per Outing Minimum by the designated time, Xola will notify the seller via email. At that point, the seller can reach out to the customer to reschedule or manually accept the bookings.

CRM

When making a booking you can choose to have the customer's name field be: 

Required: Name has to be filled out in order to make a booking

Optional (with confirmation): You can choose if you want to have the name and Xola will prompt you to confirm before completing the booking 

Optional (no confirmation): You can choose if you want have the name and Xola will not prompt you to confirm before completing the booking 

Not required: Customer name is not required for you to make a booking

Customer Facing Duration

The amount of time your customer spends on the event. This can be displayed in your checkout. To learn more on how to display this, click here. 

Note: This only appears if you have schedules associated with your listing. 

Equipment Duration

The Equipment Duration tells Xola how long a listing is. It is not customer-facing - it mainly exists for Inventory purposes.

Duration tells Xola for how long to hold a piece of equipment (ie rooms, boats, and more) or a guide, and it may or may not correspond to the actual length of your listing.

Please note that if you use Equipment on your Xola account, the Equipment Duration is extremely important to ensure that you do not receive double bookings!

Note: This only appears if you have schedules associated with your listing. 

Early Cutoff

The Early Cutoff prevents bookings from being made via checkout within a specified period of time before an event is scheduled to start.

For example, if you need to know how many people are booked for an event at least a day in advance in order to prepare for the experience, you might set an Early Cutoff of 24 hours. This would prevent someone from visiting your website 1 hour before the event starts and placing a booking that you are not prepared to accommodate.

Additionally, you have the option to allow bookings until a secondary cutoff time is reached for events that already have at least one confirmed booking. This setting allows you to continue accepting new customers for events that are already scheduled to occur. 

1. Enter a value for how far in advance of start time you would like to prevent bookings for this listing. 
2. If you'd like to allow bookings to occur within a different cut off time for events that already have one or more confirmed bookings, check the second box in this section.
3. Enter a value for how in advance of the start time you would like to prevent bookings for this event if there is already at least one confirmed booking.

Note: This only appears if you have schedules associated with your listing. 

Future Cutoff

The Future Cutoff allows you to prevent bookings with a start time that is too far in the future. This is a useful setting if your schedules do not have a set end date. For example, you may not want to allow customers to place a booking that is set to take place one calendar year from now, in case something changes for your business operationally between now and then (i.e. your schedule or product offerings).

1. Enable by checking the box in the section labeled Future Cutoff
2. Enter a value for how far in the future you would like to prevent bookings from being made via the checkout. 

Note: This only appears if you have schedules associated with your listing. 

Early Equipment Return

Your inventory understands the listing duration to be the amount of time for which to hold one piece of inventory. For example, if your Kayak Rental listing is set to a 4-hour duration and a customer books a kayak at 10 am, that kayak will not be free to rent again until 2 pm. 

But what about if that customer returns at 1 pm?

Xola's Early Inventory Return feature allows you to figure that piece of inventory back into stock to rent out to other customers.

Early Return Process

1. When a customer arrives for their booking, click the green checkmark in the roster view to check them in. When you do this, Xola will hold inventory for the total number of people in that party.
2. When the customer returns early, click on the roster view for their trip. Next to the green checkmark by the customer's name, click the green return arrow.
3. Clicking the green return arrow will free up inventory for the total number of guests in that party.

Note: This only appears if you have schedules associated with your listing. 

Business Hour

Put in the text box, the hours of your business. This text will show in the email communications to your customer. 

Booking Validity

This defines how many days the booking is valid for, and the guest can check-in after booking the experience. This field is not required when setting up your listings.

• All guests must check-in within XX day(s) from arrival date: Set this to have customer use the experience they purchased with in a certain amount of days from arrival date. 
  • For Example, if this is set to 30 days, and the customer choose an arrival date of December 1st, they will  30 days of that arrival date to use the experience 
• All guests must check-in within XX day(s) from first check-in: Set this to have all guest use the experience within a certain time frame from when the first guest checks in. 
  •  For Example, if this is set to 1 day, and a customer checks in, each guest, with that booking, will only have 1 day after this to check in for the experience.

When the customer checkouts online, they will go through the same steps as normal. On the payment page, they will see, based on your settings, how long the experience is valid. 

In the example above, the Booking Validity is for 30 days after the arrival date. The customer's booking is for an arrival of March 1, so the booking is valid until April 1, 30 days after the arrival date. 

Note: This field is used in conjunction with Xola's Ticket Redemption App: to learn more about Ticket Redemption, click here. 

Excerpt/Description  

• Excerpt: This is the text that will appear to your customers when they are checking out online.
• Description: This text is used when participating in Xola's optional distribution channels, meaning it will not be displayed to your customers when making a normal booking through a Xola checkout window. This text is also able to be used with Xola's Wordpress plugin, in which case your customers will read the description. 

Checklist

Here you can provide your customers who book with a list of items they can expect to be provided and inform them of items that they need to bring.

Cancellation Policy

Include your cancellation policy here to keep your customers informed ahead of time on company policy.

Other Considerations 

Use this space to include any and all important details that are not covered in their own field that you would like to relay to the customer after they book.

Attachments

Here you can upload file attachments to be sent in your confirmation email, like a PDF or waiver for example.

Email Footer

Here, you can choose to override your global footer by checking the checkbox

Use the text editor tool to create a footer section that will appear at the bottom of your emails sent through Xola that pertain to this specific listing (for example, booking confirmation and reminders, booking modification, or emails sent via the communication subtab).

Here's what the above footer would look like when used in a booking confirmation or reminder email:

Activity/Meeting Location

You must drop a pin on the map in order to save the listing.

• Activity Location: This is the location that your this listing's activity will take place. You can drop a pin or use the tool to look up and pin your activity address.
• Meeting Location*: This is the location that you would like your customers to meet you before departing. This may be the same as the Activity Location.

Delete a Listing