Getting an experience live

A vendor has something to sell. This covers the steps between setup and guest booking.

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Outcome

An experience that a guest can find, choose a date for, and pay for on the vendor's own booking page, and through a hotel partner if enabled.

Who is involved

The vendor, doing all the setting up. Delta, if help is needed. Nobody else until a guest arrives.

Prerequisites

The vendor has an account and a company set up, and has decided how they take money. Both live under Settings in the dashboard.

The steps

1. Create the experience. Name, description, photos, where it is, how long it lasts.
2. Add options. The choices a guest makes, such as number of people or a meal choice. One of them is marked as the pricing reference: the option that decides the price.
3. Add extras, if any. Each has its own price and its own capacity.
4. Set a rate. What it costs, and the period the rate covers.
5. Set when it runs, and how many can come. Choose one of four kinds of capacity, no limit, a limit on bookings, a limit on people, or every booking needs the vendor's approval. See When things are bookable.
6. Set the policies, cancellation, refunds, payment timing.
7. Choose how the booking page looks. Branding and appearance, under Settings.
8. Publish it.
9. Decide whether partners may sell it, one partner at a time. Publishing to your own page does not offer it to anyone else. See Who owns what across systems.

1. Experience record
2. Pricing reference and options
3. Publish state

Before it can go live

Three checks make it bookable:

What is needed	What counts	Where
A photo	At least one photo marked as the main image. Other photos do not count.	product photos
A rate	A rate that is not deleted, not stale, and whose end date is today or later. An expired rate fails.	rates
Availability	At least one active availability rule.	availability

The rate check is the one that catches people. A rate whose end date has passed fails the check, even though the rate is still there and looks fine on screen. An experience that was live last season will quietly fail this at the start of the next one.

What state it must reach

Only Published experiences can be bought.

Expected result

Where	What to expect
Vendor dashboard	The experience shows as published, with its options and extras counted
The vendor's booking page	It appears, with bookable dates and the right price
Checkout	The chosen options change the price; extras can be added
Partner screens	It appears only if that partner was given it explicitly
After a booking	It arrives in the booking list, marked with where it came from

Common problems

What someone reports	Likely cause	Where to look
"I published it but guests cannot see it"	One of the three readiness checks is failing, most often an expired rate	Before it can go live, above
"It appears but there are no dates"	Every slot is full, or below the minimum party size, or there is no availability rule	a booking counts differently depending on the kind (AVL-002), a seat-limited slot hides itself once it cannot fit a minimum party (AVL-003)
"I can see dates but the guest cannot"	The dashboard shows every slot; the booking page filters them	the dashboard sees slots guests cannot (AVL-004)
"The price on the booking page is wrong"	The pricing reference option is not the one they think it is, or the rate period has changed	Step 2, and Prices and fees
"Tax looks wrong"	Tax is inside the price, not added on top	tax is inside the price (PRC-001)
"Our partner cannot see it"	Publishing to the vendor's own page does not offer it to partners. It has to be given to each one.	the vendor chooses what a partner may sell, experience by experience (OWN-004)
"Bookings arrive already confirmed and we wanted to approve them"	Approval is set per availability slot, not per experience	approval is decided per slot, and any one slot infects the booking (AVL-005)
"It let someone book a full slot"	Availability is not enforced when a booking is created	availability is not actually enforced when a booking is created (AVL-006)