School Booking 2022

This page documents the school booking experience the calendar year 2022 in Galaxy webstores to then order entry if necessary. Each calendar year will be reviewed and compared below to display the reasoning behind any changes in this booking process. Unique or custom functionality will also be covered.

Please review event configuration basics if necessary.

Overview

The original Galaxy involved school booking 2022 process was to utulize the Drupal school booking forms to have users redirect to the school admission webstores. This would then allow field trip coordinators to book and upload necessary field trip agreements and documents to be sent to the NHM team and then book their admission and add-ons as well as fill out roster questions related to their group/party for their desired field trip experience on the webstores using Galaxy. Once they have booked their tickets, GR staff will finalize their order in Galaxy Order Entry and a confirmation email will be sent with their final tickets and dates.

However, the booking process ultimately reverted back to not using Galaxy webstores at all and just the Drupal webforms as an order submission method due to the limitations of Galaxy roster questions, therefore creating a complicated user experience that in turn created many ordering issues and order errors.

Booking Process 1: Drupal Forms and Galaxy Webstores

The 4 components for the first 2022 school booking process included:

1. Drupal Webforms
2. Galaxy Webstores
3. School Order Reports
4. Galaxy Order Entry

The Drupal webforms consisted of asking minimal information for field trip coordinators to such as their name, email, organization type, organization name, agreeing to NHM Covid compliance checkboxes, and uploading their organizations vaccine appendix. When the field trip coordinator would submit their information and upon submission be redirected to the Galaxy Webstores to book their field trip tickets and dates.

The Galaxy Webstores were configured as follows:

- Created school PLUs and Events 
- Created Roster questions to attach to only the General Admission event
- Created a School Booking Sales Channel with the correct PLUs listed

Reasoning for Process 1 Change

When field trip coordinators would book their tickets, the roster questions would need to be filled in with the amount of general admission tickets selected. For example, if a user selects 20 general admission tickets they would have to fill out the roster form 20 times. Due to schools booking large groups, this process is inefficient and difficult therefore the amount able to be selected for general admission was limited to 1 ticket only. Unfortunately, selecting 1 general admission ticket would not reflect the true size of the group but ensuring roster questions would be filled once for their group therefore resolving the issue of repeatedly filling out rosters.

Field trip coordinators would also need to select any add-on events they may be interested in for their trip. Due to webstore configurations, the same date selection of add-ons could not be enforced placing responsibility on users to select add-ons on the same date as their general admission event date. This caused issues due to users sometimes not selecting the same date for all of their events, putting extra work on the Call Center to reach out to users to question their final date for their trip.

After a user books their school trip they receive another confirmation email with their order number telling them to wait a few days for their finalized order email. From here Call Center staff must look at orders placed in the SSRS report and rebook with a users finalized group numbers listed on their associated roster questions. To rebook with the correct numbers, Call Center must first set the online capacity of an event to 0% to ensure users do not book into the event the user selected. When the order is placed the Call Center staff must the event capacity back to 100% and send the final confirmation email along with the placed order. This process leaves the possibility for someone to overbook on an event leaving 0 capacity left for the group they are booking as well as creating a double order in the system that could potentially cause issues at check-in with groups.

School Programs and GR staff came to the conclusion that this method for booking tickets invoked too much room for user error, was too time consuming for GR staff, and caused a lot of confusion for users and staff.

Booking Process 2: Acuity and Order Entry

The 2 components for the second 2022 school booking process included:

1. Acuity Calendar
2. Galaxy Order Entry

Due to the issues with Booking Process 1, School Programs was interested in using a combination of Acuity (a calender booking website they have used for various events) and Order Entry as it’s school booking process. In the research phase of Acuity use, several problems surfaced with making this the final booking process.

Reasoning for Process 2 Change

- Schools still being unable to track live capacity in Galaxy
- Booking into an event would cause the event to be reserved even if the event capacity wasn't met
- Group events could not be booked with capacity due to a user not being able to book for others in their group

These issues concluded that this booking process would not suffice as a solution.

Booking Process 3: Drupal Forms and Order Entry

The 2 components for the third 2022 school booking process included:

1. Drupal Forms
2. Galaxy Order Entry

This final process was decided upon by the Digital Strategies team, School Programs and Guest Relations in response to both booking process 1 and booking process 2 being less efficient than the 2021 booking process.

Bookin Process 3 emulates the School Booking Process for 2021 using the combined components of Drupal webforms and Galaxy’s Order Entry. The key differences between the 2022 and 2021 processes are as follows:

- The 2021 Drupal webform is an all encompassing webform for both NHM and LBTP submission whereas the 2022 Drupal webforms have separate NHM and LBTP webforms for submission
- The 2021 Drupal webform contains functionality to autpopulate school names and addresses as a dropdown choice for user selection and the 2022 Drupal webforms have simple textarea inputs for those categories

Once a user completes the form, they receive a submission confirmation email and Call Center can work on inputting their order into order entry. When Call Center finalizes a user’s order, the user receives teir last confirmation email with their visit information and tickets.