Introduction
A charter flight is a flight that is not part of an airline’s published schedule. Instead, charter flights are typically operated for specific unscheduled itineraries. This functionality allows you to add charter flights to the Resvoyage.
Charter companies will be displayed and as such, available for booking along with the flights from all other air providers.
Note: If you're interested in this feature activation, please, conntact Thomalex support team.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Setup
Upon the feature activation on the website backend, the new field "Charter Flights" tab will be displayed in the administration menu.
Image 1: Charter Flights Tab
Accessing the Charter Flights tab, the system takes the administrator to the charter functionality setup.
Note: The administrator will also be able to see the list of all charter companies that have already been added to the system.
Step 1: Create the Charter Company
The first step in the process is to set up the charter company. This can be actioned by accessing the "Add Charter Company" button on the following screen:
Image 2: Create Charter Company
When the administrator accesses the "Add Charter Company" button, the following screen with the Company information will appear:
Image 3: Company Information
Here, the administrator needs to populate all the required information.
| Charter Name | Name of the Charter Company. This field is mandatory. |
| Charter ID | Charter ID number. This field is mandatory. |
| Baggage Policy | Baggage Policy. Here you can set the "Free Baggage" conditions. |
| Baggage Condition URL | Baggage Condition URL. This field is not mandatory. |
Table 1: Company Information
Once all the necessary information is populated, the company can be saved. The administrator can add as many companies as needed following the same procedure.
Step 2: Inventory
The second step in the process is to create the inventory for the Charter Company. This can be done through the inventory tab. The process can be done manually through the platform, or the administrator can download the .xlsx file, populate it, and then upload it to the system. This is also the place where all the inventory for a charter company can be seen.
Image 4: Inventory Tab
Note: The example .xlsx file can be downloaded from the Inventory window by accessing the "Choose File" download button marked in red in the screenshot above. Once the sheet is populated, it can be uploaded to the system by accessing the "Choose File" and "Upload" buttons marked in black in the screenshot above.
The set of required information is the same for both scenarios:
| Origin Airport | Origin Airport Information. This field is mandatory. |
| Destination Airport | Destination Airport Information. This field is mandatory. |
| Departure | Departure Time Information. This field is mandatory. |
| Arrival | Arrival Time Information. This field is mandatory. |
| Check In Ahead | Check In Ahead Time Information. This field is mandatory. |
| Secured Seats | Number of secured seats. This field is mandatory. Unless the "Sell Without Seats" option is selected, after every booking, the number of available seats will decrease depending on the number of seats sold. Once the inventory reaches "0" the flight will no longer be visible in the search. |
| Flight Number | Flight Number Information. This field is mandatory. |
| Gate Number | Gate Number Information. This field is not mandatory. |
| Aircraft | Aircraft Information. This field is not mandatory. |
| Sell Without Seats | Option to sell the flight without seats. This field is not mandatory |
| Need Confirmation |
Table 2: Inventory Information
To have a roundtrip option for a charter flight, it's necessary to create the inventory for both directions, as in the example below:
Image 4: Inventory for the roundtrip
To see the information about the inventory for all of the charter companies available, go to the "All Inventories" tab:
Image 5: All Inventories
To edit the inventory for a certain charter company, navigate to the charter company, hit the "Edit" button, go to the inventory entry, and hit the "Edit" button on the entry.
Image 6: Edit Inventory option
Once the inventory is in place, we can move to the next and final step in the charter flight settings.
Step 3: Charter Routes
The third and final step in the process is to set up the charter routes.
Each flight in the inventory needs to have a route associated to be displayed in the search results.
All created routes will be displayed in the list in the "Charter routes" tab.
Within the "Charter Routes" tab, the admin needs to hit the "Add Charter Route" button as per the screenshot below:
Image 7: Add Charter Route
Within the General Route information tab, it's necessary to populate fields with the appropriate information.
Image 8: Charter Route information
The list of the required information can be found in the table below:
| Name | Route Name. This field is not mandatory |
| Charter Company | A dropdown list from which you can choose the appropriate charter company for the route. The system will display all charter companies added to the system. This field is mandatory. |
| Origin Airport | Origin airport information. This field is mandatory. |
| Destination Airport | Destination airport information. This field is mandatory. |
| Start Date | The first available date. By default, the system gives the option to set it from "Today" moving forward. The Start Date can't be set in the past. This field is mandatory. |
| End Date | The last available date. This field is mandatory. |
| Rate Conditions URL | Rate conditions URL. This field is not mandatory. |
Table 3: Charter Route Information
Charter routes can be easily enabled or disabled by flicking the switch next to the route.
Image 9: Enable/Disable Charter Route
The next action is to create the charter route rules by editing the charter route created. A new option called "Route Rules" will be available. To create a new rule, hit the "Add Rule" button.
Image 10: Create Charter Rules
In the pop-up module, relevant information must be populated.
Image 11: Add Rule Information
The list of rule information can be found in the table below:
| Rule Name | Rule name. | |||
| Outbound Departure | Outbound departure. Here, you can either set a date range or days. If you select days as an option, the departures will be available that day every week. | |||
| Dates | Days | Flight Number | ||
| Inbound Departure | Inbound departure. Here, you can either set a date range or days. If you select days as an option, the departures will be available that day every week. | |||
| Dates | Days | Flight Number | Day Gap | |
| Pricing details | Pricing details for outbound price and round trip price. You can set the price per adult, child and infant. | |||
| Outbound Price | Roundtrip Price | |||
Table 4: Add Rule Information
Examples
After adding all of the relevant information, we will now see how these Charter Flights look like on the Booking Engine itself.
The first thing we can see after searching for our Charter Flights is that we can see our flight being shown with the information we have added in the Charter Flight options.
Image 12: Charter Flight shown on Booking Engine
We can either select the flight from here, or we can scroll down and filter out to only show the Charter flights:
Image 13: Filtering to show only Charter Flights
After choosing the Charter Flights Only, our page will refresh, and we will be able to see every flight we have added in the Charter Flight Tab.
Image 14: Charter Flights Results