Create the experience once: age and waiver requirements, adult and child prices, capacity, location and assigned guides. Publish it as a recurring series and the sessions fill the calendar on their own. Guests book from your website, a ticket is issued when the order settles, and the waiver is collected on the ticket page.
What does an experience actually hold?
An experience is the thing you sell: a guided paddle, a naturalist walk, a haunted hayride, a pool pass. It carries the age and waiver requirements, whether it's public or staying guests only, and its price tiers. The photos and description guests read before they commit live there too.
Sessions sit under it. A session is one dated occurrence with its own capacity, location and assigned guides. Say 12 seats and two guides on the 9 a.m. Saturday paddle. Sell 12 and the thirteenth person sees a waitlist instead of a booking button.
How do you schedule eight Saturdays without entering eight dates?
Set the pattern once. Daily and weekly are there, and so are the awkward ones: the third Saturday of every month, or the last. Specific dates can be excluded for a holiday when the park is closed.
The calendar fills itself from the pattern. Each generated session keeps its own seat count and guide assignment, so cancelling one rainy Saturday leaves the other seven alone.
Who is allowed to book it?
Availability is a choice per experience: public, or staying guests only. Public sessions show on the calendar your website links to, with type filters, prices and remaining seats. Staying-guests-only sessions stay off the public calendar and show in the guest's Stay Pass during their trip.
Each experience can also get its own public detail page with a gallery, a what to bring list, FAQs and arrival instructions. Mark it featured and it appears on your marketing site, with a page of its own to share.
What happens when a session sells out?
A sold-out session offers a waitlist that captures consent to contact by email or text. It holds no seat. When capacity is released, the offers go out in order. Each one is rechecked at the moment it's claimed, so two people racing for the same freed seat can't both get it.
The pattern most parks reach for second: a naturalist walk on the first Sunday of every month, except December. Set the recurrence, exclude the one date, and the year is on the calendar.
Tickets are minted when the order settles or a staffer tenders it. The ticket page carries the admission details and collects the waiver, so the signature happens before arrival rather than on a clipboard at the dock.
Worth checking.
- Whether each experience is public or staying guests only
- Capacity per session, which is separate from how many guides you assign
- Whether the waiver is required, since it is collected on the ticket page
- Which sessions you want featured on the marketing site