How-to: Automate Your Cabin Allocation With Custom Deck Plans/Room Maps

🚢 Who are Custom Deck Plans for?

Any agent or operator who books out an entire boat or cruise and resells the cabins as part of a tour hosted on YouLi.
This feature means your Travelers select their cabin, so you don't have to manually allocate rooms, and Travelers have a sense of urgency to book in before their preferred room is booked out.

"The YouLi team has done an amazing job of helping streamline our business. They enhanced their platform to include our small ship deck plans allowing our guests to select their own cabin, build a profile and make payment.

Plus we can easily push tasks and optional tours out to our booked guests saving us a tremendous amount of man hours. Not only did YouLi significantly reduce our costs they also helped increase our revenues. The Youli team has been fantastic to work with."

- Chris Parker, Preferred Travel Partners/Rockstar Adventures

⛴️ YouLi offers two options to integrate a Custom Deck Plan to automate your cabin allocation

1. Fully integrated

Features

Real-time allocation - let your Travelers pick their room - YouLi will ensure your cabins are not double booked
Rooming inventory by cabin number (not just category)
Filter and zoom based on the category of a room
Provide a custom image of any ship
Install once per boat and use across multiple trips & departure dates

NOTE: Per deck setup, fees apply.

Setup

👉 Click here to request your deck plan setups and pay for them. 👈

Note that this can NOT be done once Travelers are already booked onto a TRIP, so be sure to request this BEFORE you launch the Trip.

2. External Integration

Already have a tool that displays your cabin allocation visually but you want to take bookings via YouLi?
We can integrate with a third party; here's an example of how it works.

NOTE: Custom Development fees apply.

🙋 Frequently Asked Questions

1. How many rooms can my Deck Plan have?

The limitation is really about user experience. We recommend boats with no more than 200 rooms, but we can support any number and the traveler just has to scroll.

2. Can I reuse my Deck Plan?

Yes! Once installed, simply copy your trip or make it a template to reuse for all your departure dates.

If you duplicate a trip that has a deck plan already, the deck plan on the new trip will be the same as the old deck plan on the old trip.

TIP:

You may also want to leverage the 🗓️ Tour Series 🗓️ feature IF -- you're offering the exact same trip on multiple dates in a year.

You may also want to leverage the📚 Content Library 📚feature -- where you'd simply click a few buttons to add Itineraries to the Library then import/add them back to a new trip you want to make. For the ones you don't want on the existing trip, simply hide them all.

If the trips are too different and you need the deck plan installed on a brand new trip, just open a support ticket with the original trip that has the deck plan and which trip you want it copied to.

3. What if I need to make changes to my Deck Plan after it's done?

We usually make changes to the svg file (drawing the changes), then apply changes to the database to make changes to room/price package already installed on YouLi.

For this we offer hour-based pricing (this would be considered 'Custom Feature Setup') based pricing (this would be considered 'Custom Feature Setup'), so that we can evaluate the hours needed based on how big the change is. Simply submit a ticket request and we will send you a quote.

4. How can I direct people to my website from my Deck Plan?

By default, the highlights of the trip are shown from the share trip link, but if you want to direct people to pick their cabin first, follow the instructions below.

From your trip that has the deck plan configured, get the public link from SHARE TRIP LINK
When adding that to your website, add this to the end of the link
1. ```
#roomingmap
```
  Remember to add this BEFORE you add any UTM tracking parameters, for example
```
https://youli.io/mystic-adventures/venice-cruise#roomingmap?utm_source=facebook
```

5. If someone selects a room, is it held for them?

Not until they make a payment, either the deposit or the full amount.

Registered people will see their selected cabin the next time they come back to the trip page, but if someone else has booked it in the meantime, then it will show them an error and require they pick another cabin.

👍 Ready to get started?