Even though you can start fresh with the Experiences app, sometimes you may want to import your bookings from your previous system. We advise you to be careful with that as you could end up notifying your customers from two different systems of their upcoming experiences unless your previous system doesn't do that.
We have not yet developed a way to automate the importing of pre-existing bookings you might have from another system. However, here is how we recommend that you do it:
Step 1
Make your new experience Free and turn off the new order notifications for that experience so the customer doesn't get notified of their booking again (unless you want them to get notified).
Step 2
Go to the storefront for that experience and enter each one of your future bookings from the other system by hand (yes, I heard your big sigh and I understand). This way you don't have to enter credit card information but the customer gets assigned to the proper time slot and inventory is adjusted correctly.
Step 3
Then you change the experience from Free to Pre-paid and turn the notifications back on. You do this by editing the experience and choosing which payment setting you want.
At this point, all your previous bookings are now in the Experiences system, and will be notified 24 hours before their scheduled time as well as be informed of changes to their booking.
If you need some help with this, please reach out to us and we can get you some low-cost help. After all, not everyone loves mind-numbing data entry.
An alternative method of moving to Experiences
If you don't want to do an import, another method is to create your new bookable schedule in Experiences and adjust what's available to book based on your pre-existing bookings.
Create your new experience
Make sure that you have created the same time slots that have remaining bookings from your old system into Experiences. For example: If you had 5 bookable slots remaining for an upcoming experience (but 10 were already booked in your old system), for that day and time, you'd make sure you only have 5 available. This way you'd have all 15 slots filled if the remaining 5 were booked, but you wouldn't oversell the time slot.
Until all your customers that booked with your old system show up, keep using its check-in features or an export of who's supposed to arrive to keep things running smooth. When all your previously booked days and times have passed, retire the old system.