By default, the Availability Engine (AE) will search for any available gaps on any vehicle for a particular request, and if it finds one it will return the "available" status. However, Contingency and Overbooking slots allow you to modify how this search for available vehicles works. It allows you to hold back some contingency slots in reserve (e.g. for unforeseen maintenance/late returns), or to overbook a category by a certain number (e.g. if you anticipate some cancellations, or if you know you can move these bookings to another category).

To add a new Contingency/Overbooking Rule, click on the button indicated below:

This will open up the following screen. Once you have entered all the required information, click 'Save'. This new rule will now be displayed in the list on the Availability Engine Contingency/Overbooking page.

If you have a location where there are often cancellations or if you have a category whose bookings can be fulfilled by vehicles in different categories, you can set up Overbooking. This means that the AE will create 'imaginary' vehicles that bookings can be assigned against. For example, if you set up Small Cars to be Overbooked by 2 and this category has 10 vehicles, the AE will allow your customers to create 12 bookings during the same period. The last two bookings will not be assigned to any vehicle when they are made, but it is assumed that before their pickup time, other bookings will be moved or cancelled and these booking will be reassigned to a vehicle.

Alternatively, you may want to keep vehicles in reserve in case of unforeseen maintenance or late bookings, and in this case, you can create Contingency slots. This means that the AE will not assign any bookings to a set number of vehicles, so they will remain free for emergencies. For example, if you set up Large Cars to have 2 Contingency slots and this category has 10 vehicles, the AE will only allow you customers to create 8 booking during the same period, and 2 vehicles will be left un-booked. This means that if there is a booking that is late being dropped off and there is another booking due to be picked up, then there are available vehicles that this booking can be moved to.

Please note: These rules only apply when making new bookings. Maintenance bookings or extended hires that are made through RCM by your operators will function normally. 

The "Number of Hours to Ignore" setting means that for last-minute bookings, the rules are ignored. For example, if this is set to 10 hours, and a booking is made for 9 hours in the future: