Multiple Locations - overview
This article may be interesting if you do business in multiple locations. This may be the case for a couple of reasons:
- Multiple Shops - you own a chain or more than one shop
- Tour operators - you are a tour operator and hence your reservations may take place in a variety of physical locations.
1. Multiple Shops
there are two ways of handling businesses with multiple shops / stores:- independent - each shop is completely independent, pointing to its own virtual shop (version of BRM). You have a login for each person who works in that shop. Each virtual shop has its own fleet of bikes, and bikes cannot (easily) be shared between shops.
- amalgamated - you only have one virtual shop (within BRM). This shop has just one fleet. However you will also add in the names of each of your shops. Each asset can be tagged to be in a location, and each reservation can be tagged to start and end at a specific location.
2. Tour Operators
tour operators can enter in each of the locations in which they operate, and hence track each reservastions start and end location, as well as the location of each asset within that reservation.In addition tour operators might well like to use the ReservationTypes feature to customise how the different types of reservation will look within the planning window etc.
Here are some PROs and CON's of each configuration
one BRM - multi-site functionality
- PROS
- great if you really share your bikes pretty dynamically
- only one store to manage / login / get stats etc
- one fleet to manage - with sub-locations
- CONS
- can be challenging for online booking
- BRM will check availability per bike per date.
- BRM won't check availability per bike per location - you need to manage that with longer lead times etc.
many BRM versions - one per location
- PROS
- great if the locations are pretty autonomous / truly independent
- you can have multiple accounts so you can be logged into many at same time
- independent fleets - so online booking just works; availability across bike / date & location
- CONS
- not easy to 'share bikes' between stores
related articles
running multiple 'locations' within one BRM / RSM