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Managing bookings and boosting occupancy is quicker and easier with Xplor Education’s Booking Manager

Jason Roberts

Oct 21, 2024

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According to IBIS World (2023), early childhood education (ECE) services must maintain at least a 70% occupancy rate to remain viable. As such, booking management and occupancy are always a top concern for all early childhood education (ECE) service admins and owners.

It’s not uncommon for ECE admins to struggle with accommodating waitlists and occupancy management. Jumping back and forth between open tabs while trying to get a clear picture of occupancy and accommodate booking requests is a nightmare, nevermind trying to accommodate the multiple ad-hoc bookings scattered across different sources, including your software, notepads and Post-It notes. But it doesn’t have to be that way, thanks to the brand-new Booking Manager in Office.

In April of this year, Xplor Education spoke to several sector experts involved in running ECE services during a workshop session. The complaints outlined above, among others, were just some of the hurdles the experts faced when trying to maximise occupancy and accommodate booking requests and waitlists.

The almost 5-hour workshop not only identified the problems faced by services but also brainstormed ways to improve the experience. The result—the Booking Manager tab in Xplor Education’s admin platform, Office.

“Our collaboration with Xplor Education has allowed us valuable opportunities to provide direct feedback, including through face-to-face sessions and meetings. This partnership is reflected in their latest Booking Manager feature release, which demonstrates how our input translates into meaningful improvements that positively impact our administrators.” Aleisha Lensink—Head of Operational Efficiency Catholic Early EdCare

Visualise your daily occupancy to get a clearer picture

The Booking Manager tab opens to a dashboard with a visual representation of your occupancy. You can see your rooms, confirmed bookings and absent/holiday requests, making it easy to view your daily occupancy and availability at a glance. You have everything you need in one convenient place to quickly and easily see which rooms have openings. With booking requests in the same place, you can quickly action booking requests while enjoying a more holistic view of what is happening at your service, including confirmed bookings.

This new tool helps make it easier to maintain high occupancy while tracking bookings, absences and daily waitlists. With the ability to filter by room or your whole centre while viewing all confirmed bookings made via Xplor Education’s family app, Home, you have all the information you need at your fingertips.

Save time tracking and actioning requests

One of the complaints often raised with ECE booking management is that admins need to go to a different tab or screen to action the request. That problem is solved with this new tool. Now, the booking requests you approve from the dashboard are seamlessly added to the Master Roll in Office. With booking requests sorted in the order received, it’s easy to see who’s next on your waitlist.

Admins can also manage bookings in the future. This enables you to maximise occupancy while giving families advanced notice you've accepted their booking. You can also say “goodbye” to booking requests scrawled on scraps of paper when parents/guardians request a booking over the phone. With the newly added “Add+” button, admins can add booking requests on behalf of families. No more lost booking requests or pulling them from various sources.

There’s no need to navigate to a different tab/screen to edit or delete bookings either. Simply click on the three-dot menu in each booking tile. You can then edit, delete or mark a holiday or absence.

ECE booking management and occupancy your way

The real-time view of absences and waitlists helps ensure spots are filled so you can maximise occupancy and revenue. The ability to view and action all booking and waitlist information in one place that automatically updates your Master Roll means you’ll always be referring to a single source of truth. You also have the option to automate the process or handle things manually, based on your preferences.

Automate ECE booking management for maximum time savings

For services using Office that have enabled instant bookings/cancellations/absences, the ECE booking management process is fully automated. When parents/guardians make/cancel bookings or submit an absence, the Booking Manager dashboard will update automatically. If you have Instant Bookings enabled in the Home app, waitlist entries will only appear on the Booking Manager dashboard if rooms/your service are at capacity. If space is available, you'll have the opportunity to approve requests so they become confirmed bookings or reject them.

Take control with a more hands-on approach

For services that haven’t enabled instant booking and prefer to manage occupancy and bookings themselves, the Booking Manager dashboard streamlines the process. Having all the necessary information on one convenient screen means you have all the info you need to quickly approve booking requests for waitlisted children. You can also easily action requests and notify families if their request has been accepted. You have all the tools you need to maximise occupancy on one simple dashboard.

The Booking Manager is just the latest improvement to ECE booking management

Earlier this year, Xplor Education made other improvements to Office to streamline booking and occupancy management. One of the first improvements enabled services to set booking rules related to:

Daily room & session capacity.
Booking cut-off times.
Cancellation notice periods.

This feature better enables families to manage their own care plans while reducing admin for services. Families can also:

Create recurring bookings.
Add multiple ad-hoc bookings.
Redeem promo codes.
Cancel bookings.

Families can carry out all these actions directly from the convenience of the Home app on their mobile devices. With the reports in Office, service admins can better identify booking patterns and adjust strategies based on data rather than hunches. All these features work to maximise occupancy and revenue for your ECE service.

Please contact Xplor Education for a demo of the new Booking Manager to further maximise occupancy with less admin.

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