Check Real-Time Availability

The Check Real-Time Availability setting determines how POS retrieves booking options, such as date, time, pricing, and capacity, when staff select an Admission or Event product.

This setting is found in:

POS Settings → Sales → Check real-time availability

This configuration directly affects:

• How fast the booking process is
• When pricing appears
• Whether capacity is displayed
• Whether timeslots are auto-selected
• Whether staff may encounter sold-out errors at checkout
  

When Check Real-Time Availability Is ON

With this setting enabled, POS fetches live availability from the Expian backend every time a product is selected.

Key behaviours

• No cached booking options are used.
• Pricing does not display immediately.
• The system pre-selects the next available date, but does not choose a timeslot.
• Staff must manually select a timeslot.
• Capacity is shown for each timeslot, helping staff choose an option with enough availability.
• The overall flow is slightly longer, but availability is always up to date.

What staff will see

• No prices displayed when the product loads
• “Select time slot” highlighted in red
• Capacity shown per timeslot (e.g., “42 available”)
• No automatic timeslot selection

Recommended for

• High-volume attractions
• Timed events with rapidly decreasing capacity
• Organisations requiring maximum accuracy

When Check Real-Time Availability Is OFF

With this setting disabled, POS uses cached booking options stored on the device.

This provides a faster experience, but pricing and availability may not reflect the very latest data.

Key behaviours (when Check Real-Time Availability is OFF)

• Pricing is shown immediately using cached booking data.
• The system automatically selects the first available timeslot based on cached booking options.
• Capacity is not displayed, as cached options do not include real-time availability.
• The flow is faster and requires fewer manual steps, as both date and timeslot may be pre-selected.

Important behaviour for end-of-month availability

• Expian stores and uses booking options for the current month only when real-time availability is OFF.
• This means:
• If today is 29/11 and both 29/11 and 30/11 have no available timeslots, POS will not automatically jump to 01/12.
• Instead, POS will show the message:
• “No available dates for this month.”
• However, if 30/11does have available timeslots, POS will:
• Automatically select 30/11, and
• Pre-select the first available timeslot for that date.
• This behaviour ensures POS uses only valid cached data within the current month.

Handling Sold-Out Timeslots (When OFF)

Since cached data may not be perfectly up to date, a staff member may reach checkout and discover that the pre-selected timeslot has sold out.

If this happens:

1. Staff proceeds to checkout
2. POS displays a Timeslot Sold Out error
3. POS automatically fetches new real-time booking options from the backend
4. Sold-out timeslots are removed from the list
5. The next valid timeslot and date are used on retry

This ensures accuracy even when beginning from cached options.

Summary of Differences

Risk of sold-out error

Yes

None

No

Yes

Slightly slower

Behaviour

Booking speed

No

Cached booking options

Capacity displayed

Yes

Pricing shown immediately

No

Data source

Pre-selected timeslot

Yes

Auto-refresh if sold out

Real-Time Availability ON

Faster

Pre-selected date

Possible

Live backend

Yes

Real-Time Availability OFF

Yes

Not needed