Placeholder Providers
Occasionally as you are building Masters, or Custom Tours, you may not yet know who your preferred Accommodation or Meal Provider is going to be.
It's always a good idea to have "something" in place, to remind you that a provider needs to be found.
To solve this, we recommend that you create a "Placeholder" provider for each Trail (Category/Country).
A Placeholder provider can help by outlining the number of providers required on a Master, and also for use when clients have booked their own accommodation.
To create a Placeholder Provider
- Create the new Placeholder provider by going to the Main Menu | Providers and clicking + New
- Give your new Placeholder provider a name
- our recommendations are that you
- precede the name with a first character being one that we can search for easily in the Provider a-b-c view, such as a full stop
- and include a letter at the beginning to represent the Country or Trail it belongs to
- and use some *'s in the name to make it stand out
- so for example, if this is an Accommodation placeholder for the Alps to Ocean Trail, call it something like .A Accom * Placeholder *
- From the Type drop down list, select whether this is for Accommodation, Activity, etc.
- On the Address tab, be sure to tick the Trail/Trails on which this Placeholder is going to be used
Adding a Placeholder provider to a Tour (or Master)
- On the Tour | Providers tab, click + Accommodation
- Search for and add this provider to your Tour (or Master) as you would normally search and add any other Provider.
- in the screen shot below, we clicked on the fullstop ( . ) button at the beginning of the 1-2-3 ... a-b-c list, to find the .Accommodation Placeholder
- The Accommodation Placeholder then shows up in your Tour list, highlighted to remind you to find a suitable provider
- When you are ready to swap the Placeholder provider out with a real provider, just click on the Placeholder provider record, and click the Change button, to swap it out with the new provider.
