Hello, fellow bubblersā¦ I am seeking a top-level bubble expert to help me with a booking /scheduling feature. Iāve had several meetings with the top bubble coaches; however, after explaining what I needed, they all bowed out of the challenge. Please message me if you think you can execute what I need.
So here it isā¦
I own a water sports business. My business offers over 20 activities, all of which require resources. Hereās an example: I rent jet skis for 15 minutes, 30 minutes, or 60 minutes. I also use jet skis for tubing, wakeboarding, water skiing, etc. I also have activities that use up to 5 resources. For example, I sell an all-day action pass that offers 30 minutes of each activity: jet ski, flyboarding, paddleboarding, kayaking, and a two-hour snorkel set rental. This is a total of 4 hours; however, the activities can be done in any order as long as they all get completed in the four hours and do not overlap with each other.
I have 10 jet skis, 8 paddleboards, 6 kayaks, 2 flyboards and 50 snorkel sets. If I have an action pass booked for 10am and all 10 jet skis are rented from 10-11. I can still do an action pass, as I can have the customer kayak and paddleboard in the first hour and then have their jet ski go out at 11am then flyboard at 11:30 followed the 2 hour snrokel set rental.
Essentially, I need software that can search for availability based on the quantity of each resource and the current bookings and avoid conflicts.
I am sure it must be possible to create this in Bubble, but I need some help to do so.
If you think you can solve this please send me a message, iād love to work with you.
My team and I can definitely help you with this oneā¦
Our team consists of 4 highly skilled developers, talented branding and UX/UI specialists, and a passionate social media manager. We excel in no-code development, particularly with Bubble, and can bring your vision to life.
Weād love to discuss your project and collaborate to exceed your expectations in functionality and design. If youāre interested in exploring this partnership, please reach out to me at info@nocodecreations.com.au or visit us at https://no-code-creations.com.
Iād create a serverless function that takes your booking info for a given day and calculate (if possible) an optimal pathwayā¦ canāt promise itād be efficient but would set it up so you only pay once weāve proven it works
People have tapped out because to effectively automate all of your bookings you need an algorithm which requires coding and this is a no code community. Even programmers without a CS degree or unfamiliar with data structures and algorithms would not be able to solve this problem effectively.
Youāre not simply booking set time slots for a meeting and avoiding conflicts when a slot is filled. You have various types of activities like action passes(20 total) and regular bookings. Your bookings can all be dependent on other bookings or independent and activities have to check the status of all bookings, inventory and it has to ensure there is enough time to fulfill the activity in a set time frame. On top of all that, a unique schedule of activities has to be generated for every user.
Iām not sure of the extent of how you want to use bubble for instance if you were building an app to let people book on their own or just for your internal team but that also requires connecting bubble to this algorithm on a serverless cloud with an api or a custom plugin and would have to be well designed. You also canāt just have two people trying to book at the same time because one could book a jet ski and immediately render an action pass unavailable while someone else is booking it so you also need to setup a proper queue. You also need a way to cancel bookings or remove inventory.
Iām assuming your doing this all manually at the moment, in which case even without a fully automated system with an algorithm, you could still benefit by building a more efficient method in bubble with limited manual input that puts less strain on your team at a more affordable rate. I would be happy to go over your project some more and understand your budget to help you find a solution. Feel free to reach out at londonoengineering@gmail.com
I have definitely done complicated formulas like this before. I guess I you didnāt book with me yet because my schedule is full at the moment. My brain is already figuring out ways to solve this within Bubble and not using outside coding. If you can do it in code, you should be able to do it in Bubble. You might save some WUs if you do it in code, but I donāt think itās necessary.
Anyways, if you canāt find someone to do it for you, let us know so we can assist. We have experience with very complicated workflows like this and Iām confident, with enough time, we would be able to ācrack the codeā.
Asking a group of people to line up alphabetically by height is not a challenging task. Those numbers were the quantity of each resource, not customers using each resource simultaneously. We would not sell 50 action passes. Weād be maxed out based on the most limited resourceās time slots, which would be flyboarding. We could flyboard four people per hour with two flyboards at 30 minutes each.
Thanks for your input, I did use AI, and I have already built a similar structured database. It did build help me build a great foundation. I even used it to try and take it further, but was unable to get the right info as it generally refers to code and not specific bubble functions even when telling it Iām using bubble.
Iāve done most of the set up work, itās just building this right functionality and workflows to finish it up.
I donāt think you understood the point I was makingā¦
You replied: āAsking a group of people to line up alphabetically by height is not a challenging task.ā
If you have 50 people paying to use your service and you ask them to line up by height alphabetically, Iām sure after some thought and calculations they could do it.
But, why would they pay money and have to jump through hoops like that?
Customers arenāt going to pay money out of their pocket to do something that is a lot of work on their part when all they really want to do is have a fun and relaxing day.
I just find your business model confusing.
But, itās your business and you can obviously do what you want.
When an service is created, if thereās more than one resource, they can add the amount of time for each resource.
The flow goes like this, a person selects a service, thatās stored to a state, they select the date on the calendar, the thereās a list of available times using date&time tool kit based on that dayās availability rules in increments of the services duration (15, 30, 45, 60 min increments for simplicity)
They can select quantity and a select date button. The select date button is where the check needs to happen to say sold out if sold out.
The search needs to check:
for each resource in the service.
for each resource in the service it needs to check all possible times slots that are within the services duration
minus list of created time slots for that resource type from the total possibilities
if theres more resource of that type than the minus list of created time slots, there should be availabilityā¦
minus list of each resource scheduled so they donāt overlap.
I do think if the concept was to be streamlined, Bubble could easily handle it.
Iāve seen so many times where a business owner has a problem with their process. It can be a totally janky crazy process but they want help to make it work.
Sometimes, it just takes telling them they need to reexamine the process and make changes.
Iām not saying the person who posted this is necessarily in that situation.
I was just giving my observation based on what I read.
Iām sorry youāre confusedā¦ Iām not here for business advice, this is a forum for programming with bubble.
Based on your consultation, you probably cost yourself some consulting businessā¦
One person buys an action pass which has 5 activities bundled together to build value for the customer and upsell them a better experienceā¦
Just because I own 10 jet skis, that doesnāt mean I should limit myself to 10 snorkel sets. Each activity has different demands. As mentioned I offer over 20 different activities. The resources are used across multiple activities. Another example is snorkeling gear can be rented alone, or used on a jet ski snorkel adventure or used on a boat snorkel tour.
Handling the bookings is not an issue or confusing, but again, Iām looking for a more streamlined booking system.
This particular business of mine is ranked #1 on trip advisor and does over half a million a yearā¦
@jeffandrade1 - this sounds like a great opportunity to run a hackathon.
Maybe consider inviting seasoned bubble devs to a 2 to 4 hour challenge with the clear objectives of (a) defining the right data structure, (b) figuring out the booking flow and (c) determining how to tell what inventory is available at any time.
Also, record it and share it with the community. This would be fun and I will gladly participate.
So Iāve built a few similar apps in Bubble most recently a party rental app which had to find groups of tables, table cloths, overlays, chairs and cutlery that āmatchedā each other for a certain date based on availability.
It definitely can be done in Bubble without any code although a coded algorithm may be incrementally faster.
I agree with your basic structure with one tweak: have a record for each resource and time slot. I know this isnāt technically best practices and will trouble some devs, but it helps a lot for these kind of queries in Bubbles (to avoid the minus lists etc).
Finally, the challenging part, which gets my mind racing, is the ability to rearrange existing activity pass reservations to make a new reservation.
For example in the OP example, imagine this instead: someone wants to book a jet ski from 10-11am and all 10 jet skis are rented from 10-11.
If any of those jet ski reservations are part of a action pass, can such action passes be rearranged so that they open up the jet skis for this time period and allow the jet ski to be booked from 10-11 without ābreakingā the action pass? (Iām assuming when one books a action pass the schedule for the activities isnāt set and can be changed up until the user begins the first activity)
My brain is already figuring out ways to solve this within Bubble and not using outside coding. If you can do it in code, you should be able to do it in Bubble. You might save some WUs if you do it in code, but I donāt think itās necessary.
