Making use of sites when the annual leaser is away

When an annual leaser or seasonal camper is not present on his site, you may want to maximize income by using that site for transient customers.  Of course Campground Master would normally not allow double booking, so you need to be able to temporarily remove the long-term reservation from the site or otherwise get around this restriction.

There are a few ways to handle this....

You could use "Guest" reservations for the transient renters, since Guests can be on top of a normal reservation. (On the Rack, you can right-click and use "Add a guest reservation".)  This is more of a quick-and-dirty method, which is OK if it's a rare occurrence.  You can't see guest reservations on the Rack, but they do appear on the other reports and tab views.  You might also need to adjust your Rate definitions to handle Guest reservation types, and of course being a different reservation type could affect other functions and filtering.

You could also "split" the seasonal reservation and adjust the first night of the new part for when they're returning, essentially creating a gap in the original reservation that can be used for transients.  This is a fairly clean method (it results in 2 linked reservations), but it can cause problems with rate auto-calculations since the reservation is no longer continuous.

Usually a best way is to use the "Owner" reservation type for the annual reservations.  This type of reservation is designed for site owners or annual leasers that may not be present the whole time -- the Owner reservation doesn't actually "occupy" the site, e.g. it's still considered "available" for normal reservations, but allows tracking of the rent and other fees for them.

When using an Owner reservation, you should also make a "Normal" (or perhaps "Free Stay") reservation for the same person for the time that they are actually there.  While this does mean more work to track when the leaser is on-site (which is actually useful sometimes), it also allows the site to be used normally for transients when the site isn't actually occupied by the leaser.

For more details about owners, see the previous newsletter article here:

http://campgroundmaster.com/news/ownerscantbecheckedin.html