Purpose
Whether you like to allocate your vehicles up front, allocate them at the last minute, or use a combination of the two, Rental Car Manager (RCM) offers an Availability Engine which optimises your fleet availability and answers the critical question; do I have a vehicle available? This availability check can be made at any point where a quote or a booking can be created. For example, inside RCM, via the Web Booking Module, or the Agent API.
The Availability engine will look at your Allocated and Unallocated bookings, taking into account Maintenance bookings and any bookings flagged as 'Do Not Move' and present you with an optimised 'virtual' view. This optimisation allows for an increased utilisation rate as it is always running in the background, re-shuffling the bookings, to ensure that you have the smallest gaps between bookings, and therefore allowing you to take more bookings. As the Availability Engine will only re-shuffle unallocated bookings, to obtain the best optimisation, we recommend running as unallocated until as close as you can before pickup.
The Availability Engine Settings allow you to configure how you want the optimisation to deal with allocations, turnaround hours and location sharing. It also allows for you to control any seasonal migrations of vehicles. These settings are discussed in more detail below.
The Availability Booking Sheet is a visual representation of the behaviour of the Availability Engine. This allows interested customers to better visualise how the Availability Engine is suggesting the best fit allocations to optimise your fleet, maximise bookings and save time when managing bookings and allocations. This is also described in more detail below.
There is a monthly cost associated with the Availability Engine, contact RCM Support (
support@rentalcarmanager.com) for more information about this. If you are interested in having a look at how the Availability Engine works by
installing it in your RCM system as a trial, you can also contact RCM Support to talk about this.Availability Engine Booking Sheet
The Availability Booking Sheet is a visual representation of the behaviour of our Availability Engine. This allows interested customers to better visualise how the Availability Engine is suggesting the best fit allocations to optimise your fleet, maximise bookings and save time when managing bookings and allocations.
Note that this is a read-only virtual view - NO vehicle changes have actually been made to any allocated or unallocated bookings. It is designed solely to give you an overview of actual/potential availability.
Availability Engine Settings
The Availability Engine Settings page allows you to configure how you want to tune your engine.
- Vehicle Sharing Between Locations includes the following settings:
- Vehicle sharing between locations
- Temporary sharing between locations- for seasonal migrations
- Overriding the location restrictions
- Turnaround Gaps - includes the following settings:
- Turnaround hours by location and vehicle category
- Staff availability for turnarounds
- Include holidays/do not rent days in turnaround calculations
- Availability Settings - these settings include setting up the following:
- Contingency or overbooking
- On Request for long bookings
- Placeholders bookings after cancellation of one-way bookings
- Integrations - allows you to set where the Availability Engine is used when creating quotes/bookings.
Availability Engine Utilisation Rules
You are able to control how availability is determined by the Availability Engine according to how heavily utilised your fleet is. This is done through the Availability Engine Utilisation Rules page.
This page can set up Utilization Rules for a large range of circumstances, for example:
- If you want more control over accepting bookings when things are looking tight, return bookings as "On Request" once a category is 90% utilised
- If you know you can service a popular category with upgrades to another vehicle, allow overbooking of that category by up to 110%
- If you are approaching a busy period where you know you can fill bookings via your website, allow your website to book up to 100%, but restrict agencies (or certain groupings of agencies) to only book up to 80% for that busy period.
Availability Conflict
The Availability Engine keeps track of all vehicles and bookings, both unallocated and allocated. It also records any unallocated bookings for which there are no available vehicles within that location. When these bookings occur, they are marked with an alert, and they appear in the Availability Conflict Report.
These conflicts are caused when the only vehicles in the category that are located in the pickup location, already have bookings against them in this time frame. As such the booking is marked with a yellow Alert on the Availability Engine Booking sheet.
Placeholder Bookings
Placeholder Bookings are an Availability Engine feature that "hold" a place in the schedule, indicating that a move is required between locations, without the creation of an actual maintenance or revenue booking.
They are used to indicate when a vehicle needs to be relocated between locations, and they stop the time period from being booked over by bookings that prevent this. If you try to make a booking over the top of a placeholder that conflicts with this relocation, you will be told that the vehicle is not available during this time. However, placeholders can be replaced by revenue bookings that have the same pickup and drop-off locations and have a date range that overlaps with the placeholder. Placeholder Bookings can only be viewed and created from the Availability Engine Sheet (rather than the standard Reservation Sheet) and the Placeholder Bookings Report. RCM Allows for the following actions:
- Making a Placeholder booking manually
- Making a placeholder booking automatically
- Allocating and de-allocating a placeholder booking
- Replacing a placeholder booking
- Placeholder bookings report
- Vehicle Relocation Report (the Availability Engine version)
Placeholder bookings are discussed in more detail in the following Knowledge base article
Placeholder Bookings.