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Online Reservation System Mapping Feature
Pinellas County
 Pinellas County initially purchased Outbound Software for their Heritage Village and County Extension. The system made an immediate impact by streamlining the reservation process internally and allowing visibility to all staff members on upcoming events. Now, many reservations are made online (self-service) and this has been a great win for both entities to keep staff costs down.
After seeing the success of the system, county management began to look at other services that were being offered to the community and how these could be streamlined to possibly bringing in more money. They quickly focused on their free daily rental park-shelters. With 14 locations and 150 shelters that could be reserved for the day, the county saw a great way to charge a nominal fee for a daily rental rather than offering them for free. Pinellas contacted Outbound to see if we could offer a self-service online reservation system for customers to handle the very popular rental item. Outbound created a complete graphical mapping system for the entire park system and the result has been phenomenal. After the first month of service, the system paid for itself and the revenue stream has been great success for the County. To see the system in action, check out the Pinellas County Park Shelter Reservation Site and poke around.
The Mapping Feature
The mapping system is now available as an option for all customers of Outbound Software. With this new technology, Outbound can take any graphic (jpg/gif) that the customer provides and overlay any type of icons on that graphic to show availability for a specific date or a date/time combination. The mapping process on our web-server updates these maps in real-time so online customers always have the latest view of what is booked. The mapping system is great for theatre seating, parks, marinas (boat slips) and really any type of graphic based availability system you can think of. When adding the mapping system to your website, you may offer your online customers the following flow of pages:
- A homepage may be created with a global map of all of the items that you provide.
- Next, a custom page of general information for a specific area can be viewed.
- To make a reservation for a specific area on the map/graphic, you may then drag the mouse over any of the icons to view an image or set of images of that item and then click on that icon.
- Your selection is then pre-selected in the list. You are given the option to select other activities/items for that date/time as well.
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