You can set up specific booking rules for individual items to differentiate their availability from other items.
Please note:
It is generally recommended to set up as much as possible on a global level (via the opening times and picker settings) and do as little as possible on item level.
This is because settings on an item level are easy to miss and can be difficult to maintain (for example when setting up a new season).
Availability settings should only be made on item level, if one item should for example have a bigger minimum booking duration than others.
To set up specific rules for an item, you need to go into that item via the Inventory.
Within that item you will find the box "Availability".
Here you will always have the "base availability" and can click on the button "Add availability rule" to add a second set of rules.
The general behaviour should be set up in the base availability.
Any further availability rules should be used to reflect seasonal changes.
So you might for example want so say that generally the item has a booking duration of minimum 2 and maximum 7 days.
But in a high season (let's say July and August) the minimum duration should be 7 days and the maximum duration 21 days.
For that you can add a new availability rule, set its "Date" to 01.07. - 31.08 and its minimum duration to 7 and maximum duration to 21 days.
Aside from the minimum and maximum duration you can set up many more things.
Let's go through those:
Start days:
Let's you select specific days of the week on which a booking containing this item can start.
If left unchecked, it will simply follow your opening times.
Start time period:
Let's you select a specific hour range within a day during which a booking containing this item can start.
If left unchecked, it will simply follow your opening times.
End days / End time period:
Same as above, but for the end time of a booking.
Start and end time period:
Same as Start time period and end time period, but combined into one setting.
Break:
Let's you block an item for a specific duration after the end of a booking.
This setting is generally used if you want to ensure a time buffer between bookings.
Let's say you rent out a car and you need some time to prepare it between bookings (handle the return, clean the car, fill it up, etc.), then you may want to give it a 2 hour break.
This way when you have a booking ending on a Wednesday at 12:00, the next booking can start at the earliest on Wednesday at 14:00.
Lead time:
Defines how far in advance a customer has to book the item.
If you set the lead time to 2 days, then a customer wanting to book for a Wednesday needs to do so on the Monday of the same week at the latest.
If he tries to book on a Tuesday, the earliest available date will be Thursday.
Available for:
With this setting you can say, that the item should only appear / be bookable, if certain other items are already in the cart.
This setting should not be used on "main items", aka items appearing in your first booking step.
It is intended only for extra items.
It is used to separate extra items for different main items.
You can select either the specific item, for which the item you're currently editing should be available, or a whole category.
The item you're editing will then only show up, when either the specific item or an item from the given category had been previously added to the cart.
Add automatically to:
Similar to "Available for", but instead of just becoming available, it will automatically add itself to the cart, when certain items are added.
One common example of this would be a deposit.
When creating a deposit item, you want to set its "Add automatically to" to the item, or the category for which the deposit applies.
If for example you have a car rental you may want to say that all BMWs get a deposit of 1000€ and all Porsches get a deposit of 2000€.
For that you would create a deposit item "Deposit 1000€" and set its "Add automatically to" to the category "BMW" and then create a second deposit item "Deposit 2000€" and connect it to the category "Porsche".
Add automatically for first item:
Same as above, but with the difference, that it only applies itself once.
In the example above if a customer was to add 2 Porsches to his cart, he would also get 2 deposits. With this setting your item would only add itself for the first Porsche, but would not add itself again for the second one.
You might want to use this setting if you have a specific fee you want to add once per booking, like a service fee, which is not dependant on the amount of items booked.