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Reservation Restrictions can be defined with a variety of conditions, allowing some custom validation of reservation entry, either preventing certain combinations outright, showing a warning, or only allowing operators with a high enough access level to bypass them. The "Restrictions" functionality can also be used to simply show a custom Reminder pop-up message when making and changing reservations when they meet certain criteria.
These can be simple rules such as requiring 3-day minimum stays on holiday weekends or not allowing "Monthly" reservations on Tent sites, or they can be more complex conditions such as requiring a given customer to be out for 7 days between stays, not allowing more than 4 future stays, or limiting a cabin reservation to 3 days if they have more than 4 people and using a discount. (Any numeric values mentioned in these examples are completely configurable of course.)
Note that these are separate and above the standard validation checks, such as checking for double booking, reserving a site when it's marked Unavailable, requiring a site to be assigned, etc.
Restrictions vs. Reminders
This "Restrictions" functionality was primarily designed to allow blocking or warning about making reservations with given conditions. However there may be times when you don't really want to block the reservation, but want to show a reminder to the operator -- whether it's a reminder every time to "Inform the customer about cancellation policies", or a notice only for reservations that meet certain conditions, such as during a special event. A special "Reminder" flag was added to allow this while maintaining all of the rest of the same functionality for setting the conditions under which the message is shown. The only difference in creating these is whether the "Use as reminder only" box is checked. Therefore to avoid being overly complicated, trying to say "restriction or reminder" every time, the remainder of the documentation here will simply use the wording as if it's a restriction, except where specifically necessary to mention the difference.
Caveats and Limitations
These restrictions are intended to be used as reminders to the reservationist, to prevent accidentally making reservations under the wrong circumstances. They could even be used to make sure a special message is shown whenever a reservation is made during a special event, for instance. However, anyone with sufficient access and knowledge of the system could find ways to bypass them (for instance by disabling them), so they are not meant to be an absolute preventative measure. In addition, certain situations will not check every possible condition -- for instance if making date changes to a reservation with Guests, if date changes are required for the Guests to keep them within the host time frame, the changes to the Guests are not validated against the restrictions. Likewise when synchronized reservations are changed, only the one initially selected for the change is validated, not each of the linked ones. Hopefully it would be extremely rare that this kind of thing would cause a problem, but be aware that the restrictions are primarily for checking new reservations before they're created, and changes to the primary reservations only.
Another thing that can affect certain restrictions is splitting a reservation. For instance, if you have a 3-day minimum stay restriction for a holiday weekend, but they have to move sites so the reservation is split with 2 days on one site an 1 day on another, then both parts of the split (which are technically separate "Reservations" in the system) will be considered violating the restriction. Therefore it's good to always have an Access Level setting for allowing the restriction with a warning prompt.
Restrictions (and reminders) will not apply to reservations which are canceled, inquiries, or on the waiting list. They will also exclude reservations with the "Owner" type, since those are by definition background reservations, not necessarily occupying the site.
Restriction conditions will not count the "Block-to" dates as part of the restriction checking -- only from the First Night to the Last Night.
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