Participatory bookings: opening a time slot to participation

Book a time slot on behalf of the organization — training camp, tournament, lesson, group class — and let your users join it themselves, with or without online payment. You set the capacity, the access criteria and the deadlines, and you keep track of the participant list.

Choosing who builds the participant list

Any booking with a label can receive participants. What changes from one time slot to another is who builds the list — you, or the users themselves.

You build the list

Book the time slot with its label and designate the participants, without enabling Participatory booking. Users cannot join by themselves: the list is yours.

That does not make it final. Reopen the booking from the calendar at any time to add or remove people in the Labels tab, where the participants already signed up appear pre-selected.

This is how a training session works when you call up the group yourself, or a team lined up for a match, or a class whose participants are settled in advance.

Users join by themselves

Enable Participatory booking and the time slot opens up: it shows a places counter on the calendar, and everyone comes and takes their own place from their account.

This is how a holiday training camp works, or an internal tournament, or an activity open to anyone.

Once the option is active, managing the list moves from the booking form to the time slot details, where you have Add participants and Delete.

Switching from one to the other

The two modes are not mutually exclusive, and the choice is never final. You can build a list first, then enable Participatory booking later to open up the remaining places: the people already designated stay signed up.

The reverse works too — see closing participation, at the end of the page.

Opening a time slot to participation

1. On the calendar, click the time slot you want to book.
2. Open the Labels tab of the booking form.
3. Choose the label — training camp, tournament, lesson, training — and add a comment if you wish.
4. Enable Participatory booking, then click Configure to open the settings.
5. Optionally select the people to sign up straight away, then confirm.

Use the Repetition to cover every session of a training camp or a weekly class in a single operation: you will then choose whether joining applies to one session or to the whole series.

On the calendar, the time slot then shows the number of participants against the capacity, together with an invitation to join as long as places remain. A click leads to the time slot details, where the list and the participation button are located.

To revisit your settings later, open the time slot and use Configure in the Participants block.

Setting the capacity and the scope of a participation

Participants (max) sets the number of places. Once it is reached, the time slot shows Full and the participation button disappears.

Participants (min) does not block anyone from joining: this number only serves as the quorum for the automatic cancellation described further down. Its minimum value is 1. To keep the session going whatever the number of participants, leave this field alone and simply leave Automatically Cancel disabled.

The Scope of a participation is the most structural setting, and the one to decide on first:

• This booking only — people join a single session. This is what you need for a weekly training session people attend when they can, or for a one-off activity.
• This booking and its recurrences — people join the whole set. A single participation places the person on every session of the series, and a single withdrawal removes them everywhere. This is what you need for a five-day training camp or a cycle of consecutive classes. A series stays open as long as it has one session left to come: a training camp that has already started can therefore still be joined.

Choosing who can join

With no settings, the time slot is open to all the users of your organization.

The Eligibility criteria restrict that openness. They reuse the filters of your user list, across five families: profiles, subscriptions, age categories, groups and rankings, to which sex is added.

A user who does not match still sees the button, but their click tells them that their profile does not match the criteria of this time slot. The same applies to the other refusals: time slot full, participation not open yet, product unavailable. Each case has its own message — no one is ever left in front of a silent button.

A few common uses: restricting a training camp to one age category, opening a group class only to holders of a given subscription, limiting an internal tournament to a team group.

Charging for participation

Enable Payments & Billing in the time slot settings, then choose the product to be paid for. The list offers the active products in your catalogue of the training camp, lesson and tournament types.

The participant pays online at the moment they join. Their place is only held once the payment has been collected: as long as the order remains pending, the time slot shows "Complete payment" and the place stays available for someone else.

Two settings fine-tune the price without touching your catalogue:

• "Customise the amount" applies an Unit Price specific to this time slot. Without it, everyone pays the price resulting from the pricing rules configured in the selected product.
• The description entered here is displayed under the participation button, for the participant's attention.

This option only appears if your organization uses online billing. From a kiosk, a paid time slot shows a message inviting the user to pay from their account: online payment cannot be made on the kiosk.

Tracking and managing participants

The Participants block of the time slot details lists the participants and shows the remaining places. You always see the full list there, even if you have hidden it from users.

Add participants lets you sign up several people at once, Delete lets you remove someone. Both actions apply to the whole scope defined above.

On a paid time slot, adding someone makes you choose how to handle the amount:

1. Comp the participation — the person is signed up and no order is created. This is the default choice, the one for invitations and goodwill gestures.
2. Checkout immediately — an order is created and the cash register opens right away so you can collect the payment on the spot.
3. Collect payment later — an order is created and the purchase order is sent by e-mail. The person will pay later.

The same choice is offered when you sign people up while creating the time slot.

For each participant, the list recalls the payment status: Free if the participation was made free for them, otherwise the associated order, with the means to Checkout it or to resend the invoice by e-mail.

Guests are not accepted on this type of time slot: each place corresponds to an identified user.

Framing participation in time

Three deadlines, all optional, all expressed relative to the start of the time slot.

The Opening lead time delays the opening of participation. With 48 hours, a Monday 10 a.m. time slot opens its places on the preceding Saturday at 10 a.m. This is what prevents a training camp published three months ahead from being full on the very day it is published.

Limit unregistration closes the exit door once a certain deadline has passed. Beyond it, the participant can no longer withdraw on their own — it is up to you to do it if necessary. Without this setting, they can withdraw from the time slot right up to its start.

Automatically Cancel cancels the booking if Participants (min) is not reached by the chosen deadline. The participants and the creator of the time slot are notified by e-mail. A booking created when its deadline has already started is never cancelled automatically — you can therefore open a time slot at the last minute without any risk.

On a paid time slot, this cancellation also cancels the orders left pending payment: no one can pay any longer for a session that will not take place. Participations already collected, on the other hand, are kept and are not refunded — it is up to you to handle them.

Counting participations against quotas, or not

By default, joining a time slot consumes nothing: neither the quota of simultaneous bookings, nor the limits per period, nor consecutive time slots. A user can join a training camp without losing the option of booking a court on the same day.

Count towards the users' quota and limits reverses this behaviour: each participation is then counted like an ordinary booking, and a person who has reached their quota can no longer join.

Enable this option when participation should have a cost for the user — a group class included in their subscription, for example. Leave it inactive for anything that comes on top of their usual activity without replacing it.

Sending e-mail notifications

The participant always receives a confirmation when they join, and an e-mail if the time slot is cancelled automatically. These messages cannot be turned off.

Enable Notifications concerns the creator of the time slot: they receive an alert for each participation, each withdrawal from the time slot, and when the last place is taken. Turn this option off on a busy time slot if you do not want to follow every movement.

Each person's notification preferences are respected: a user who has turned their notifications off will receive nothing.

Display the list of participants determines what users see. Enabled, everyone knows who has joined. Disabled, only the counter and the remaining places are public.

Reusing a configuration

Setting a dozen options for every training camp would be tedious. Two mechanisms avoid it.

Save as template saves the time slot settings under the Model Name you choose. Apply a template then applies them to any other time slot, in a single selection.

A time slot stays linked to the template it comes from. If you change its settings afterwards, you will be asked how far the change should reach: this booking only, this booking and its recurrences, or Everywhere — that is, all the time slots that share this template.

Closing participation

Disabling Participatory booking on a time slot that already has participants is possible and harmless for them: the participants stay in place and the orders issued remain valid. Only participation and withdrawal from the time slot stop, and the participants block disappears on the user side.

Refunding a participation or removing someone afterwards remains your own action: closing participation does not do it for you.