Additional information is available to FareHarbor employees.
Resources help you manage the people, equipment, vehicles, seats, or other assets required to operate your activities. By assigning resources to your bookings, FareHarbor can track availability, prevent scheduling conflicts, and help ensure you don't exceed the capacity of the assets your business depends on.
Resources work together with resource requirements, bookings, and availability settings to automatically allocate capacity throughout the booking lifecycle. If your operation uses assigned seating, resources can also be connected to seat maps to manage seat-specific availability.
Overview
Resources represent anything with limited availability that needs to be scheduled or tracked for your activities. Common examples include:
- Guides or crew members
- Vehicles or boats
- Equipment, such as kayaks or bicycles
- Rooms or facilities
- Seats within a vehicle or venue
After you create resources, you assign them to activities through resource requirements. When a booking meets those requirements, FareHarbor creates resource uses to reserve the required capacity for the appropriate date and time. Resource capacity is then monitored automatically so you can identify shortages or overuse before they affect your operation.
Imagine you offer guided kayak tours. You might create resources for your kayaks, guides, and shuttle vans. When a customer books a tour, FareHarbor automatically reserves the required resources based on the resource requirements you've configured. This helps prevent the same kayak, guide, or vehicle from being assigned to multiple bookings at the same time.
When to use resources
Resources are useful when your operation needs to:
- Limit bookings based on available equipment, staff, vehicles, or other assets.
- Reserve specific assets for each booking.
- Track resource availability throughout the day.
- Monitor resource allocation across multiple bookings.
- Manage assigned seating with seat maps.
- Temporarily adjust available capacity using resource overrides.
If your activities don't rely on limited operational assets, you may not need to configure resources.
How resources work with bookings & capacity
Resources become part of your booking workflow after they are assigned through resource requirements.
At a high level, the workflow is:
- You create one or more resources.
- You configure resource requirements in resource requirement groups, then assign those groups to availabilities.
- When customers make bookings that meet those requirements, FareHarbor creates resource uses.
- Resource uses reserve capacity for the required time period.
- Resource availability is reflected throughout the Dashboard, including resource views, booking views, and the Manifest.
Depending on your configuration, FareHarbor can also:
- Apply temporary capacity changes using resource overrides.
- Associate resources with seat maps for assigned seating.
- Reapply resource assignments after requirement changes.
- Support integrations and APIs that interact with resource assignments.
The bigger picture
Resources are one part of a broader capacity management system.
The following features work together with resources:
- Resource requirements determine when a resource should be assigned.
- Bookings create and update resource uses as customers book, modify, or cancel reservations.
- Resource overrides temporarily adjust available capacity for specific dates or time periods.
- Seat maps (when enabled) connect resources to assigned seating.
- The Manifest provides an operational view of resource assignments for a given date.
Some resource assignments are managed automatically. For example, resources driven by custom field values are now managed through the associated custom field rather than directly from the booking overlay, ensuring resource allocations stay synchronized with the booking information that controls them.
Next steps
Continue with the help page that matches what you want to accomplish:
- Set up resource requirements for an item to configure when resources should be assigned.
- Create & manage resources to create resources and configure their settings.
- Monitor resource usage to review resource availability and assignments.
- Make bookings with resources to understand how resources are assigned during booking creation.
- Manage resource overrides to temporarily adjust resource capacity.
- Manage resources on existing bookings to update resource assignments after bookings are created.
- Archive resources to remove unused resources while preserving historical data.
- Resources: Frequently asked questions for answers to common questions.