Before any vehicles can be shared between locations, you must first set up Turnaround Gaps. This specifies the length of time after a vehicle has been dropped-off before it can be hired out again. Even if you are not sharing vehicles between locations, you need to establish the Turnaround Hours required between two bookings at the same locations. Turnaround Hours for the Availability Engine work similarly to those used in RCM, but the system parameters do not apply. To control the Availability Engine Turnaround Hour rules, go to System Setup >> Availability Engine Settings >> Turnaround Gaps.

The three sections shown above control how the Availability Engine deals with Turnaround Hours, they are described in more detail below.

The first section is where you actually set the length of the Turnaround hours according to the vehicle's category and the pickup and drop-off locations. This uses the same records as the rest of RCM, so the link will take you to the Turnaround Hours page shown below, where you can add new records or update existing ones. For each record you can set the Turnaround time in hours for each specific Vehicle Category and Category Type, as well as Last Drop-off and Next Pickup Location.

The second section allows you to set days which are excluded from Turnaround Hour calculations, if for example, you have a limited number of staff available on a certain day of the week. The link here will take you to the Location Hours page, and to exclude a day from the calculations, create a record and set "Turnaround Staff Available" to No. If there is already a record for the location and the day of the week, simply update it to have a value of No for this "Turnaround Staff Available" flag. For more information on this page, please see the Location Hours article.

The third and final section allows you to set whether public holidays or Do Not Rent Days should be included in the Turnaround Hour calculations. If this is set to No, Do Not Rent Days will be ignored, and if it is set to Yes, then any day marked as Do Not Rent will add another day to the Turnaround time.

The simplest way to allow vehicle sharing between locations, is to group then according to an Availability Master Location. This is useful if you have multiple locations in close proximity and want there to be a free exchange of vehicles between them. For example, if Locations A, B and C are all in the same city, you can set Location A as the Availability Master Location of Locations B and C, and the Availability Engine will consider this as one location. However, this vehicle sharing will still be affected by the Turnaround Hours setup between these locations, and you will still need to manually create records for when vehicles need to be transfered between these locations.

Please Note: DO NOT group two locations under an Availability Master Location if they are not in close enough proximity to easily and constantly share vehicles.

To access the Availability Master Locations, go to System Setup >> Availability Engine Settings >> Vehicle Sharing Between Locations. 

Clicking on this link will take you to the Web Locations page, where you are able to set Availability Master Locations for any location record. Please see the Web Locations article on this page.

You may need to share vehicles between locations that are not grouped by an Availability Master Location as they are not in close enough proximity to do so. This can be controlled by the other two settings in this section, "Temporary Vehicle Sharing Between Locations" and "Override the Location Restriction".

Using a combination these settings, you are able to use 3 strategies to control vehicle movement. In order of increasing control by the Availability Engine, they are:

For more information about each of these options including things to take into account before choosing which one to use, read the following article Options to Share Vehicles Between Locations