What is the External Bookings feature?
External bookings is a feature we've created to allow you to make rooms available to book externally by non-members. This is important because it opens up another revenue stream for your space and allows unused time by members to be booked & paid for by guests.
Setup
Before you allow guests to book your conference rooms, you need to go through the campus setup process.
Firstly, you'll need to set up your campus preferences:
Hours of Operation: These are in your campus settings and indicate when your rooms are available to book. You can set them by editing your campus settings.
Campus Address and Phone Number: This will be shown to the guest in their booking email so they know where the campus is located. You can edit this by editing your campus settings.
Here's an example of a confirmation email a guest would receive.
Reply-to email address: This is the email address that will receive the email communication from the guests if they reply to the confirmation emails.
Manager Notifications: By default, all staff will receive dashboard and email notifications for external bookings. You can turn off notifications for receiving emails for external bookings by going to your preferences.
Terms of Service: Since money is being exchanged, we wanted to make sure guests explicitly agree to your terms of service. If you would like that legal coverage, please update your terms of service in your community's legal settings.
Billing Setup
Note: This only applies to communities with a Stripe account connected.
Passing Credit Card Fees
If you have decided to pass credit card or bank account fees onto your members in the past, you will have a new separate option to pass the credit card fees for external bookings (members can't pay for external bookings using bank accounts). By default, this is turned off. If you would like to enable this, head over to your billing settings.
Automatic Invoice Fees
If you have automatic invoice fees enabled for your community, those will automatically be passed on to your guests. We opted for this behavior because those are usually used for state or nationally mandated taxes. Let us know if this is behavior you would like to change!
Room Setup
Now that you've determined when your rooms are available, you will need to decide which rooms are available to book.
Go to your rooms and find the conference room you want to make public. Edit the room and turn on the "Publicly Bookable" toggle. You will also need to indicate an hourly rate for the room.
Once you've made a room public, you will see it is available by the indicator on the room.
How to view your External Bookings Room List
Once you've set up your campus and your rooms, head to your website forms page. Find your external bookings link among the other forms provided by Coworks.
Now you should see that room listed publicly on your External Bookings page.
Creating an External Booking
Your guests (and members if they want to pay) will be able to create external bookings from your External Booking page.
Editing an External Booking
Sometimes, you may need to make adjustments to external bookings. To do so, just select the booking from the Calendar tab in the admin dashboard, and click the "Edit" button.
From there, you can adjust the external booking details such as start and end date, start and end time, and location.
If you adjust the duration of an external booking, you'll receive the following warning message before saving your changes.
Similarly, if you change the room for an external booking, you'll receive the following warning message before saving your changes.
As shown in both warning messages above, Coworks will not create a new invoice for any changes to the external booking. You will need to manually handle any billing updates resulting from those changes.
Canceling an External Booking
When you cancel an external booking, you will be given the option to also issue a refund for that booking. You can also choose to refund that invoice later.
Note: When you cancel an external booking, the guest will be notified (regardless of your selection on refunds). This is so the guest has full transparency to their reservations.
Happy Coworking!