Video Transcript
Hi, everybody, my name is John. I'm the head of support at Palisis, and this is a quick introduction to Bundles.
Now, bundles offer many advantages in using. One of them is building and selling more complex products, simplifying the booking process, automating operational time constraints, and automating operational capacity constraints. And last but not least, keep your reporting on point regarding VAT, external costs, and others.
A bundle is nothing but the grouping of multiple prize plans into a single product. An example of this could be if you have them up on top after and you know the local Zoo is a supplier of yours, you could bundle a twenty-four-hour hop on up off, take it together with a Zoo ticket of some sort and sell this as one. Therefore, you can keep total control in your reporting of all interesting values, like VAT rates or external costs.
Now, let's take a quick look at the setup procedure of bundles in Palisis. It's important to know that bundles' setup logic is slightly different from the usual transport products in Palisis. There you have a tree-structure, operation line, routes, and price plan. While in bundles, we use a folder structure. First, click on all Bundles groups, new group, and give your bundle a name, let's say HoHo 24 plus Zoo. We could add a description here & an additional description. About the primary route: Please forget about this right now - this is a legacy setting - and leave it at "no Route set." We can add an image or multiple images, and down here, you can add a description in various languages. If you have multiple languages on your Webshops, you can add a description for each language here. So that's very practical. And last but not least, click on "Safe".
Now we can create the new bundle within the new bundle group folder. We click on "New Bundle," and here, it's usually best to use your first passenger category. So I choose adult. And the code ADU. If you uncheck the bundle price shared on ticket-box, it will show the full bundle price on every item-ticket or voucher so that the customer won't see the individual items' price. Again, we can add a description, and this is important: Version one or version of two of the bundle.
I quickly jump back to PowerPoint to showcase what this means. Historically seen the V1 bundle was the first bundle version we created. It has its own price plan, but it is not capable of dealing with a promotional code. So, upon request from some customers, we created the V2 bundle. It has no price plan by itself, but its price is the sum of the item prices. But in return, it is capable of dealing with the promotional code.
So for demonstration purposes, we select the V2 bundle in this example. We then add the various items or the various price plans to the bundle. We then select the corresponding operation line, the price plan, and the adult passenger category. Here we can choose if we want an item of the bundle to be discounted or not. For my own product here, I select yes - I wanted to be discountable - and then we add one of those items to the bundle itself. We click here on the little arrow, and we have added it.
Ok, next step: Now, we select the Zoo ticket. Again, also for an adult. But in this case, we have a very tight margin on this product, we chose not to be discountable, but we also want one item in the bundle. And we added here now with a discount like 10 percent would be applied to this bundle, only 10 percent of the sum of all discounted items will be deducted. In this case, 10% of 20 would equal 2 Swiss francs. Again, we could add descriptions here, but I think that's not too important on the single bundle level. And last but not least, we click on "Safe."
I quickly jumped over to this product's Webshop page; as you can see, Hop-on/Hop-off 24 plus Zoo with the picture we just added. If we click on "book," we are requested to add the passenger categories and the number of such. Let's select one. And we're already on the payment page, so we just have to select one product to buy actually two of your products. So that's very convenient. But as you probably noticed, we were not asked for a date or time to select. So that's the next thing we're going to look at in the bundle's configuration page.
Back in the bundle settings, we find for each item an exciting setting called "timetable offset min." If we click on it, we get this pop-up window with a Date Time option. Here we can select if the event selection is none (no event selected), if the event selection is Date or if the event selection is DateTime. As this is a HoHo type of product - which runs all day - I select Date. Additionally, we now see here the setting "select event manually," and if we turn this on, the customer has to choose, as it says, this event manually. Back in the webshop, we see that changing the setting to "select event manually" leads to this: The customer now has to select his travel date.
Now, here we have another interesting setting called "timetable offset min(utes)." Due to historical events in 2020, products have become more time-constrained and more capacity-managed. Let's quickly assume that the products that I just set up are now limited in time and limited in capacity. It's evident that with a bundle containing multiple items, those can't start simultaneously. That's what the timetable offset is for. If we set the timetable offset, this new entry slot will be set to the next event after the timetable offset has ended.
To set this up, I head to the "timetable offset" of the first item. As we discussed, time is now of the issue. Therefore, we choose "DateTime," and we click on "Save." Then we go to the second timetable offset, we too select "DateTime." We also select that the customer has to choose the event manually. We don't have to if we don't do the next event after the timetable of that would be selected automatically. But if we do, let's say the tour, the first tour takes a hundred and twenty minutes plus 30 minutes transfer. So let's say we create the timetable offset of one hundred and fifty minutes and click on "Save." We save down here as well so that the setting is adapted to the whole bundle. Let's have another look at the webshop and see what the change of those settings looks like.
We go to "book," we choose an adult, next, and now we have to select the first event, the first item for the twenty-eighth, and we decide to travel at 10 o'clock. And now, if I'm correct, the next event shouldn't be possible before noon. Let's check my thesis. Again, we choose the twenty-eight, and as you can see, the first departure is possible at one, so it worked.
Now, here's a little known fact about the timetable offset of the first item: If we set a time here, like, let's say one hundred and twenty, this then acts as a blackout period from now until the next possible event, meaning that now, if it's eight o'clock, the first possible bookable event would be 10 o'clock same day. I tried to showcase this timetable of such behavior.
This graphic shows that the timetable offset of item number one acts as a blackout period between now and the first item, the Zurich City Tour. The second timetable offset of item two - the zoo entry slot - acts as a delay between event number one or city tour and event number two, the zoo entry slot.
Another little known fact about the bundle is that we have here an area that looks a little bit ruffled. This area allows us to sort the specific bundles and bundle-groups. We can pull the child down here and pull it back up. This way, you can sort this on your own. Keep that in mind to improve the sales process for yourselves, people.
Now, with bundles, we can build exciting stuff in regards to capacity: Let's just assume for a moment that we are an operator offering different day-tours to mount Titlis, to Grindelwald, and St.Gotthard.
But our product is a little bit more complicated; it's not always a single bus from Zurich to Mount Titlis (and the other two), but we have a big bus driving from Zurich to Interlaken. It then gets split into various smaller buses, one to Mount Titlis, one to Grindelwald, and one to the Gotthard Pass.
Regarding capacity, it's common that we have in one of those legs a limited capacity. But all the tours play into that shared capacity: I.e., here we have in the first leg a capacity of 80 people and a total of 120 capacity in the following legs. That means that the full booking of the Mount Titlis and the Grindelwald tour would fill the maximum capacity of the first leg, Zürich to Interlaken. Operationally this would also equal missing capacity for the St. Gotthard tour and therefore take it off sale.
Ok, let's take a look at how we configured this setup within Palisis. I already created the Zurich to Mt.Titlis bundle-group. I create a new bundle for the adult. You now know how this works. Then description and the version - we go here now for one version of the bundle - just because we are much more interested in the full bundle price. And then down here, I add the various items. I add Zurich to Interlaken, the first item or leg, the one price plan, and adult. That's fine. And we notice now that we can't assign the promo code capability because we remember that V1 cannot deal with such. Ok, we add one item. Click on the little arrow, and we have added it.
Good, let's go for the second item. This one is Interlaken to Mt.Titlis, one priceplan, adult as well. Once added, we take a quick look at the timetable offset in the first item. We want the customer to select a date and time manually. We don't need the blackout period. So that's fine. And for the second item, we know now that DateTime is essential, but we don't want the customer to manually select the event. We want it to be selected automatically. But we know that the first item of this bundle takes at least one hundred minutes to get from Zurich to Interlaken. So just to be sure, I add here one hundred and twenty. "Save" this, and this setting should now automatically select the next event after the first leg. The first bundle is complete, so we click on Save.
To save us some time, I quickly configured the bundles for the other two bundle groups, and as you can see, Zürich to Interlaken is always the first item of this bundle.
So let's quickly take a look at one thing that is important here. As you certainly do remember, we want the bundles to have their own price plan, and that needs to be configured first. So we'll head over here to the priceplan section of the bundles. We can see the three new bundles I just created. I click on the first one, new (priceplan), and this is a screen that some of you should already be familiar with. It's just a little bit different. Up here to the left is the sales date-range - from when to when - can this priceplan be sold. Sell on-site, which defines if this price plan is sellable on handheld devices and here to the right the ticket layout. I would abstain from using this because usually, when you're selling bundles, vouchers and tickets for each bundle item are printed separately. And that makes a lot of sense. And down here, we can add pricing. So let's say for this product we add two hundred to all the fields. You might notice that one price field is missing, the one for external costs, because external costs are calculated still on the base of their transport price plan costs that we have entered. As usual, I click on Save to save this price plan, and I'll repeat this process now for the other two price plans.
Ok, to test us, I quickly went into the webshop and sold out Zurich to Mt.Titlis and Zurich to Grindelwald. As it can notice here, the first item (or leg), Zürich to Interlaken, has therefore been fully booked as well. So if my thesis is right and I shouldn't be able to buy the Zurich to St.Gotthard tour for one adult. On the 30th of December, like the others, the noon's capacity should be already fully taken and not be sold anymore. It works fine, if I click for a later date, that's working fine, and if we click for the earlier event, that's working fine as well. So the whole capacity management that we wanted to achieve seems to work fine.
As I mentioned earlier in this video, the bundle functionality is also exciting regarding reporting because it allows us very well to deal with the financial complexity of certain bundled products where we have different VAT rates or external costs. Now, to demonstrate bundles' reporting, I quickly made a booking of the HoHo 24 + Zoo bundle for an adult, a child, and an infant. Let's take a look. I extracted the report from Excel. This is what you would see in the reporting.
You immediately notice two booking entries for the adult, for a child, and an infant. As you can see, the booking ID for all six booking entries is the same. But they have different ticket IDs. The gross revenue per item is entered correctly. We see that the external costs are added correctly for the Zoo tickets, giving us the correct gross net revenue per booking per item. We also can see that for each item, the correct VAT rate is applied and calculated. You can imagine that your reporting staff and your bookkeeping staff will be happy to see this capability.
Ok, with that, we're at the finish of this video. Thank you very much for watching. If you have any follow up questions, please direct them to your key account manager or support@palisis.com.
Thank you very much for your time. Have a lovely day. Stay safe. Bye-bye.