What is an "Accessible Sub-block"? (Video)

Accessible sub-blocks are blocks with inventory that can be accessed and utilized by another sub-block. This feature essentially creates a passageway for a sub-block to use another block's inventory just as if it were its own.

For example, say you had a large pool of rooms and multiple groups of people showing up to an event, and want those groups to remain in separate blocks but don't want to specifically allocate inventory to each and every one of them. With accessible sub-blocks, you'd be able to continue to provide your sub-blocks a unique URL or group code, but configure them so when a guest in a sub-block books a room, it uses inventory from the main block to complete the booking but still books the room in the sub-block.

How to create an accessible sub-block

To create the accessible sub-block, you need to start with a previously-made sub-block, as the inventory controls won't show up until you do so.

When your sub-block is saved, click the "Inventory" section to begin.

As you can see from the image above, this "Barr" sub-block doesn't have any inventory created for it yet. If we used the sub-block URL to get to the Front-End and made a reservation, no hotels would show up in the Hotel Selection screen.

However, through accessible sub-blocks, we can set up this sub-block to have the same availability as if we were booking into the main-block.

This is accomplished by clicking the "Sub-block" drop-down, and selecting "Main Block", and clicking "Add Block".

Checking the inventory table below, we can see that our sub-block now has access to the main-block's inventory!

One thing to note as that the inventory that's being accessed doesn't get allocated to the accessing block until a booking is made. Take a look at the inventory page below, which belongs to a sub-block that is accessing the inventory of another (or the main block).

Notice that the "Available" row where rooms would be allocated is full of zeroes! This is because the accessibility set up with the main block doesn't actually allocate rooms to this block. Instead, what happens is when a room is booked here in the "LOC" sub-block, the appropriate room nights are then transferred to this sub-block and are deducted from the main block.

Should the room be cancelled in this sub-block, because the inventory was accessed from the main block, the room nights will be returned to the main block.