Availability Engine Settings

Availability Engine Settings

Purpose

The Availability Engine (AE) settings page allows you to configure how you want to tune your engine using location sharing rules, turnaround hours settings and others. 

Note that the Availability Engine function and menu item will only appear if you have been granted access to this feature by RCM Support.
If you have access to the Availability Engine and cannot see this set up table, please contact support@rentalcarmanager.com

More detailed information about the Availability Engine can be found here Availability Engine Overview.

Accessing the Availability Engine Settings 

The Availability Engine configuration form can be found by accessing:
System Setup >> Availability Engine Settings.



The Setup form has 4 sections:
  1. Vehicle Sharing Between Locations
  2. Turnaround Gaps
  3. Availability Settings
  4. Integrations
Each section is outlined below.

Vehicle Sharing Between Locations

This section determines how the engine will deal with sharing vehicles between locations.
  1. In the first section you can set up links between locations that always share vehicles.  This can be done if you have two locations close together or in the same city (e.g. an Airport location and a CBD location).
  2. The second section lets you set up temporary vehicle sharing rules.  This may be useful if you have seasonal migration patterns where your vehicles are required in certain locations at certain times of the year.
  3. The third section allows you to accept a booking at a different location to where a vehicle is usually located, but only if it is far enough in the future.  This allows you essentially accept a booking for any location, knowing that you will be able to shift vehicles in order to service this requirement.  It is advised to leave this as 0 if you are geographically-dispersed, unless you are willing to shift vehicles between any of your locations.

Turnaround Gaps

This section controls the turnaround gaps needed between bookings.
  1. The first section provides links to the areas of the system that affect the turnaround times between different locations and within the same location for different category or vehicles.
  2. The second section allows you to set staff availability, such that turnarounds are delayed when no staff are available.
  3. The third section allows you to include or exclude holidays and 'Do Not Rent' days from turnaround calculations.



Availability Settings

This section controls how the Availability Engine deals with availability:
  1. The first section allows you to place a limit on how far in advance a booking can be made. So, if you set this to a value of 365, then bookings with a pickup date that is more than a year from today will not be available. This is useful if your prices often change and you do not know what the rates will be too far in the future. 
  2. The second section controls whether you wish to hold some contingency spots for categories that may have last minute availability problems or maintenance. It also allows you to overbook a certain category. if there are often cancelations or upgrades to other categories.
  3. The third section controls whether bookings over a certain length are returned as On Request, even if there are no vehicle available, as you may be able to find ways of working these longer bookings into your schedule.
  4. The fourth section controls whether cancelled one-ways bookings are converted into Placeholders, to indicate when manual relocations by staff are required.



Integrations

This section controls the use of live Availability Engine data.
  1. The first two sections let you can choose if you want to get the live availability data from the Engine for booking requests through your Website (Web API Integration) and booking requests from your Agents (Agent API Integration). 
  2. If the third section is set to "Yes", the Availability Engine data will be used for new bookings and updates within RCM.  In most cases, the operator will get a warning if there may be a conflict as a result of the booking or update.
  3. The fourth section will only appear if RCM Integration is set to "Yes". It either prevents or allows non-management operators to update and create booking that result in conflicts.


Updating the Settings 

When a setting has been updated, the following window will displayed. Selecting 'OK' will save the change.


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