Scheduling is all about scheduling stops, vans and seats and adding travelers to the created van and seats on a packaged tour.
There are a few steps to be followed as shown below in Figure 1, before we can utimately arrive at assigning seats for a traveler in a motor coach van scheduled for a tour.
Figure 1: Scheduling Menu Options.
Let us start with adding a section to a tour and assign the number of passengers to it.
Go to Section Management, where Centaur brings the Search Tour Dialog. Select the tour name or enter the tour id and click on search to list the appropriate tour in the search results screen. Once you have selected the tour that you want from the results, you are now transported to the Section management screen as seen below in Figure 2.
Figure 2: Section Management
If you look at the above screen, you see a list of travelers who are already part of the tour. On the top right corner, you can see the list of total unassigned passengers. This mean each traveler reservation may comprise of one or more passengers. If you haven’t created a section yet, you will see a new section screen when you click on the New Section tab. This can also be verified when you click on the Add travelers to section button, when there are no sections as yet.
Let us see the next logical step of creating a new section for this tour. As you can see in Figure 3 below, the only mandatory input required for creating a new section is the number of seats in that section.
Figure 3: Creating a new Section
Once the section is created, it appears in the Section Summary tab list as seen below in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Section Summary showing the newly created section
Now is the best time to add travelers to this section (unless you think otherwise). So when you click now on the Add travelers to section button, a new screen pops up that lists the travelers on the left window pane and a right pane that would contain the travelers you would assign to this section.
How do we do this?
Select a traveler by clicking with the mouse in the left pane, and click on the >> arrow keys in the right pane. If you need to move a whole block of travelers with out wasting much time, you can keep CTRL (Control) key pressed on the keyboard while you click on these travelers in the left pane. Once you have selected the ones you wanted, you can then click on the >> arrow key in the right pane.
If you need to move out one traveler out of this section, you can click on the traveler in the right pane and click on the << button to move him back. Once you are satisfied with the assignment, you can now click on the SAVE button. The screen below in Figure 5 is what you get when you try clicking on SAVE. Centaur asks for your confirmation if you need to do Van assignment now. Why don’t we say Yes to confirm that continues our smooth flow so far.
Figure 5: Confirmation Screen upon saving traveler assignments
This brings us to the Van Assignment Screen as shown below.
Figure 6: The Van Assigment Screen
Click on the Tour Id shown in the list above, to proceed for Van Assignment. The screen below shows how to proceed with 1) Stop creation and 2) Assigning created stops to a van in that order.
Figure 7: Van assignment
The next step is to add stops one at a time from the stops dropdown. If you see a blank stop dropdown, it would be good time to add stops globally by going to the Motor Coach Stop Add option in the Scheduling Menu as shown below in Figure 8.
Figure 8: Adding Motor Coach Stops
Once you have done a bit of adding possible stops that you might require for your popular tours you can come back here.
Coming to adding stops, this can be achieved by clicking on the Add stop button. Once all the stop are defined, one can click on SAVE. The below screen shows the list of stops added.
Figure 9: Adding Stops
The next step would be to add a van to these stops. To do this, one must click on the stop and add a van to it using the Add Van option. The system would ask if this van is used for pickup or dropoff. In our case, we can select each stop and add a van to it. In our case, we can add 2 vans, one for pickup and one to drop off, though it need not be the case in a live scenario.
Figure 10: Adding Vans to Stops
Ok. So we go and click on each stop and click on Add Van. For the 2 stops that are here currently, we added the same van and designed the trip as PICKUP. Thus we end up with assigning vans to stops as can be verified in the below screen.
Figure 11: Van Details linked to stops.
Now it is time to look at the other tabs on the Van assignment screen. There are 2 tabs for traveler and they are for assigning vans to pickup and the other tab is to assign vans to dropoff travelers. Let us look at one of them. that should be good enough for you to do the other one. Click on each traveler and assigning the trip number and the time zone.
Figure 12: Assigning Van by Trip No.
Finally we come to the last leg our our scheduling tour by coming to Motor Coach Seat Assignment.
Imagine a scenario where we assign the seats to the travelers based on their preferences if any, or go about filling the seats on a first come first served basis. To achieve this, let us go to the last option in the scheduling menu which is Motor Coach Seat assignment.
Figure 13:The Motor Coach Seat Assignment screen.
Click on the Tour ID after selecting the tour using the Tour search dialog and you will be presented the coach seating arrangement. In our case, if we need to assign row 4 and seat 40 to a traveler on that tour, you need to double click on the Seat 40 in the row 4 whereupon a list of travelers on that tour pops up and you need to select the appropriate traveler for example CATHE who asked for that seat. Select CATHE by clicking on the right radio button against her name, and then click on the ASSIGN button. This is best explained in the following 2 consecutive screens, Figure 14 and 15. With this, we have finished all the options under scheduling, though it looked daunting at first.
Figure 14: The Coach Seating Arrangement
Figure 15: Selecting a Traveler for a Seat
Now that you have completed scheduling, it would be worthwhile to schedule yourself a well deserved stop break.
