In order to maximize harbor usage and revenues, some of our clients assign boaters to temporarily available berths in their harbor. Sometimes the client shares revenues from the boaters who are temporarily assigned to berths with the boaters who temporarily vacated their berths, as a way to incent people to notify the harbor administrators when they are going to be away. This is all handled by Online Mooring in an an automated way.
Temporary Absences
Boaters have two ways to notify their harbor that they will temporarily vacate their berth:
1) They can use Online Mooring to provide info about their plans. They can go to their "My Applications" page, and next to one of their approved applications, they can click the More button and then choose the Temporary Absence option. Then, they can enter the date when they are vacating the berth, and the date when they plan to start using it again. This will add a "Temporary Absence" action to the application, showing the specified dates.
Note: The "Temporary Absence" option can be turned on and off. If it doesn't appear for your site, let us know that you'd like to enable that feature and we'll turn it on for you.
2) They can contact their harbor official directly, and they can use Online Mooring to record the Temporary Absence action and can enter the departure/return dates on the action.
Either way, the status of the berth will change from "Occupied" to "Available" during that timeframe.
Temporary Assignments
The next step in the process is to assign one or more people to use that berth while it is available.
There are a couple of ways this can be done:
1) Assign from Wait List
With this approach, you can go through your wait list in order, offering a temporarily available berth to boaters with appropriately sized vessels, until someone accepts the offer. Then you would link their application to the available berth, and then would add a "Temporary Assignment" action, specifying the dates when they will be allowed to use the berth.
If there is a fee associated with the assignment, Online Mooring can calculate the fee and collect it from the temporary boater.
2) Make berth available for Transient use
With this approach, the space becomes available for use by transient boaters. When a transient boater requests a berth during a particular timeframe, and the berth is temporarily available during that time, the boater will see that there is space available, and will be able to book that space.
Revenue Sharing (optional)
To incent boaters with longer-term access to a berth to notify the harbor when they are vacating the berth, some harbors give the vacating boater a cut of the revenues collected while they are away.
If a harbor wants to do this, they would first provide us with their rules about how to calculate how much revenue should be shared with the "vacating" boater. This calculation could be a percentage, or a fixed amount, or any calculation based on the information on the application.
When a "temporary" boaters pays fees to the harbor, we will create a credit on the "vacating" boater's application indicating how much money has been shared with them. That credit can be used during upcoming renewal period(s) to reduce or eliminate the amount owed.
Note: It is possible that we may not issue the credit to the vacating boater as soon as the temporary boater pays. In some situations, we may not know at the time of payment what berth they are being assigned to. In that case, we would issue the credit as soon as the application is linked to the berth and approved.