Managing your Secret Gardens account

Setting the days of the week that your garden will be open for visits is an important first step as this controls the ‘Search by Date’ function on the EXPLORE page. If there is no ‘open days’ information entered for your listing, then your garden won’t show up on the EXPLORE page.

By setting ‘open days’ you are specifying the days of the week that your garden will be open for visits (setting the times comes later). You’ll need to repeat this step for each day of the week that you are open.

1. Go to My Listings under your account menu
2. Click the edit icon on your garden
3. Scroll to the open dates section under Tour Info
4. Put the first date that your garden is open in the from field
5. Put the same date into the to field
6.  Tick recurring
7. Set the recurrence information – e.g. if your garden is open on that day every week, then put 1 in “Repeat every” and tick “Week(s)”.
8. Put an end date in. If you don’t have any close down period foreseeable then put a date far in the future
9. Click “Add a date” if you have other days that your garden is open and repeat steps 4 – 8
10. Scroll to the bottom and click “Save changes”. Your changes will be reviewed and approved by us.

Note that when your end date passes, if there is no other future date set, then your listing won’t show up on the explore page, so it’s important to always have a future date in there in order to show up when users are browsing.

1. Go to My Listings under your account menu
2. Click the edit icon on your garden
3. Under Tour Info fill out duration, price, minimum and maximum group size and parking and access information.
4. Scroll down and click “Save changes”

Here you can set your tour session times, and also block out dates where you may not be open for bookings. Ensure ‘set open days’ is also completed (see above) and that the days you’ve entered match what you are entering below.

Setting availability

1. Go to Manage Availability and Bookings under your account menu
2. Click the down arrow beside your email address and choose “My Profile”
3. Click on Opening Hours
4. Click the + icon beside the day you want to set hours for
5. Click into the time boxes and set the start and end time for your tours on that day. Visitors will be able to book a time slot at any time between these start and finish times.
6. You can enter multiple time slots if you wish (e.g. you could add 9 – 12 and 2 – 5), or you can select breaks to add break times into your day that cannot be booked.
7. Push save changes once you are finished

Days off

You can block out individual dates or blocks of dates using the Days Off tab.

1. Click on Days Off
2. Click into the date field and set the start and end date for your day off (if it’s just one day you’ll just click the same date twice)
3. If you are setting a longer period that you are not running tours (e.g. 3 months over winter) then ensure that you also amend your open days on your listing (See “Set open days” above)

Special days

You can add additional one-off days where you may have different hours using the special days tab. This could be if you decide to run a tour on a public holiday when you may not usually be open that day of the week.

Non-weekly tours

The system is currently setup to work with weekly tours. If your tours run sporadically, fortnightly or monthly then you can either add days off to block the days that you’re not running tours, or skip setting the daily availability as described above and use special days for the days that you are running tours.

Workshops are set up as one-off events. They are not affected by the availability that you set in the “Managing your availability” section. So, for example, you may not be open for gardens tours in August but you can still schedule in workshops over this time. Workshops will confirm automatically as long as the minimum group size has been met -they don’t require ‘approval’ by the host.

1. Under your account menu, click “Add a workshop“
2. Fill out all the fields on the form then click preview, or skip preview and submit
3. The Secret Gardens Administrator will review and ‘approve’ the information you provide, and add a photograph to the listing. Once it is approved your workshop listing will show on the EXPLORE page, and will immediately be open for bookings.

1. Go to My Listings under your account menu
2. Click the edit icon on your garden
3. Scroll to the Latest News section
4. Enter your updates into the seasonal highlights, garden shop or workshops sections. When you update this information, also set the “last updated” date for that section so that visitors know that your information is current.
5. Scroll down and click “Save changes”

When you receive a new tour booking you will receive both an email and an SMS (text) message. Log in to your account to review and approve the booking request.

1. Go to Manage Availability and Bookings under your account menu. Upcoming bookings for tours will show under the Tours tab
2. New bookings will show as pending (orange circle icon). Click the edit icon on the booking to approve it. If it falls under your minimum numbers, the time slot will stay as pending until you approve another booking for that time slot to meet the minimum numbers.
3. Visitors will be notified that their booking is approved, as long as you leave the “notify the customers” box ticked. Note that if there is already an approved booking in that time slot, and you approve a subsequent booking, it is only the booking that you’ve just approved that will be notified

Note that if multiple groups or individuals book into the same time slot, they are all aggregated into that time slot under the Tour bookings tab.

1. Go to Manage availability and Bookings under your account menu. Upcoming bookings for tours will show under the Tour bookings tab.
2. Click edit on the time slot that contains the booking you need to cancel.
3. Set the visitor status to cancelled (red circle) or the whole group status to cancelled if you are cancelling the entire tour.
4. Get in touch with us as we will need to process refunds for the affected customers.

If people wish to add additional people to their booking, they will need to make a new booking for that same day/time using a different email address.

If people wish to reduce their group numbers, you can edit the numbers on their booking, but you will need to get in touch with with us to process a refund to the visitor.

When you receive a new workshop booking you will receive both an email and an SMS (text) message. Log in to your account to view the booking.

1. Go to Manage Availability and Bookings under your account menu. Upcoming bookings for workshops will show under the Workshops tab.
2. Click to view the bookings and attendee information.

Workshop bookings differ from tour bookings in that they don’t need to be approved and the same visitor can book in more than once if needed. Workshop availability is not affected by the availability you have set using the steps under “Managing your availability”.

You can remove an attendee from a workshop but if you need to cancel the whole workshop, please get in touch with us.

1. Go to Manage Availability and Bookings under your account menu.
2. Click on the Workshops tab
3. Click the person icon on the workshop that you need to remove the attendee from
4. Select the attendee and click the “remove attendee” button
5. Get in touch with us to process a refund