Consumption QR Codes

This document is DRAFT

This is a planning document and the feature described is not currently released to production.

Introduction

It is a requirement of some Suppliers/Operators that they be able to validate that an individual or group have a valid right of entry to an experience by first validating their booking and then marking it as consumed to prevent multiple traveller groups from entering via the same booking.

This can be achieved by linking a QR code to each BookingAvailability such that scanning the code will open a public page on the relevant extranet site where details of the booking and any previous consumption can be validated. The same page will allow the viewer to update the state of any unconsumed portion of the booking to consumers and thus prevent double use.

Per Pax Products

Most bookings are made on a per pax basis such that if a looking for a given experience was for three adults and two children there will be a total of five person records created.

In this case, the system supports individually marking the consumption of each pax record. This allows for the use case where one of the adults and all of the children arrive together but the second adult is delayed and may arrive later.

For convenience, an action will exist that allows all pax to be marked as consumed at once.

Exclusive group products and Passes

In some cases however, this is not the case ie where an exclusive tour has been booked and it is up to the lead passenger to go alone or take others with them up to the maximum number of persons allowed.

An example of this is in booking an exclusive boat tour. The price charged will be the same regardless of the number of persons but the total number allowed will be the capacity of the boat.

In cases like this, there are no person records created and it is the whole booking availability that will be marked as consumed.

Presentation Layers

The functionality to mark validate and mark consumption is available via the API and the Extranet.

The API supports changing the consumption state between consumers and not consumed. This allows for correction of errors where a caller incorecly marked all persons as consumed and then discovers that one or more of the traveller group are not present.

It appears reasonable that the UX also allow this however there is a challenge in that a consumer in possession of the QR code could themselves visit the URL and mark a previously consumed availability as no linger consumed.

This could be mitigated by requiring a well-known pin number to access the page or to reverse a consumption but may add to the complexity of roll-out.

API

The BookingAvailability and BookingAvailabilityPerson types both support flags that indicate the current state of consumption.

Extranet

The extranet supports an unauthenticated URL, typically accessed via scanning a QR code, that presents details of the BookingAvailability and any related BookingAvailabilityPerson records and actions allowing all or any of the records to be marked as consumed.