Select multiple rooms at once when booking a meeting within an Event. | Voters

Select multiple rooms at once when booking a meeting within an Event.

in progress

Shawn Long

We often have large events that book most or all of our building. I'd like to be able to select a 'Primary Room' and additional rooms for the same meeting, rather than creating a new meeting for each room.

November 11, 2019

Justin Wenig

marked this post as

in progress

Justin Wenig

Vivian Skinner Krystal Wilson @joseph-kultys Trevor King Susan Hritzak Laura Chapman Rosemarie Woodward Molly Karanikolas Shawn Long would love to get your input here as we begin to build this feature. If you don't mind, just ping in answers to the following questions:
1) What is the primary reason(s) you supported this feature? (i.e. to save time, easier to understand if everything is one place)
2) What is the HIGHEST number of rooms you would need to book for an event? (i.e. 20)
3) Would cloning an event then changing the room/times ad hoc provide a reasonable work around for this in the interim? Why or why not?

Vivian Skinner

Justin Wenig: We frequently host conferences, and reserve space for plenaries, breakouts, meals, etc. It would save time AND be easier to track if everything is in one place (i.e., an event module?) The highest number of rooms? Possibly 100, though that would be rare. A more typical number would be 10 - 15. I think cloning an event might work.

Southeastern Events

Justin Wenig: Thanks for asking for our input. Primary reason is easier to understand for our Facilities team. 95% of the conferences we host include more than one room, our largest one with around 20 or so rooms. Having all rooms on one request would make our lives and the lives of our facilities team (who will set up each room) a lot easier. I think the issue in cloning the event is that the rooms would appear as separate events under the same event name. Thanks again for asking Justin!

Shawn Long

Justin Wenig: I appreciate you reaching out for our input because this seems to be a popular request.
1) The primary reason I suggested this feature is to save time, but it would make everything easier to understand as well. We have 2 pairs of rooms in my building that we almost always book together. They are separate rooms, and they are bookable on their own, which is why we have them listed that way. As such, I am constantly duplicating the start date, start time, end date, end time, setup time and breakdown time for these pairs of rooms. That is 6 pieces of information that I have to enter twice just to book the 2 rooms for the same event.
2) The highest number of rooms that I could personally book at one time for a single day would be 25, but that would be rare. More commonly, I could book 5-10 rooms per day for a typical large event in my building, not to mention those 2 pairs of rooms mentioned above. That being said, I know that Molly Karanikolas could book well over 100 rooms for certain events.
3) I don't think cloning would be a viable alternative because we would still be editing the dates/times/setup/teardown information (as needed), which is the most time consuming part of the process. I don't think it would save much time, and then there would be multiple Coursedog reservations for the same event, and it could get confusing for service teams.

Shawn Long

The UI could function the same way the Select Room menu functions for the Allowed Rooms fields in under the Resource Settings menu or the Meetings & Location card in the form editor. Once the rooms are selected, then the software could automatically create individual meetings for each room, in the same way that it does when events are booked using a recurrence pattern. From there, we could then add resources individually to meetings, as needed.