Tutorial: Setting up daily lottery deciding which customers get access to next day's event using Zapier and waiting lists (4 / 4)

Tutorial Table of Contents

part 1: Configuring the event resource in Planyo
part 2: Configuring the daily scheduler in Zapier
part 3: Customers add their reservations to the waiting list
part 4: Daily lottery randomly selects sign-ups and upgrades them to valid reservations

After the scheduled event in Zapier takes place, you can check the Zapier logs and see if everything was done correctly. You can click on each item in the Zapier zap to check the exact input/output data for each of the three steps of the process.

Now, in Planyo you can see that 10 reservations have been randomly selected and correctly upgraded to valid (confirmed) reservations. These customers receive the Reservation confirmed email notification where they are informed that their reservation is confirmed. In case of other required steps (such as online payment), you could decide to only attribute the reserved status to the reservations, send the payment link in the email notification and have the online payment actually confirm the reservations (in such case you might also want to configure automatic cancellations in case the reservations are not confirmed at a specific time).

There are also a few items in our example which didn't get chosen because the event was over-subscribed.

You can also go to the schedule page to see the details for each day. This will show all the successful reservations as well as the vacations present on each day. As you can see below, we have our permanent vacation (10 units) and the forced availability added by the Zapier's scheduled zap (-10 units) and the listing of successful reservations.

When the lottery takes place, the admin receives an email notification informing them of the reservation IDs that got promoted to valid reservations.

Optionally, in the Notifications page you can configure an extra email notification sent only to the waiting list items that did NOT get promoted to reservations (the lottery losers). Make sure to correctly set the time difference option to make sure this notification is sent AFTER the lottery takes place (otherwise all customers would receive it) and make sure the required status is set to waiting list so that only the unsuccessful customers get this notification.

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