Documentation

Creating and Managing Timetables

Timetables contain the information of all the tours offered by an operator.

After reading the “Stations, Routes and Other Basics” chapter, you can now learn how to actually set up timetables.

Free vs. Premium

Day templates and tour calendars are only available in the “Premium“ version. In the “Free“ version, you can manage your schedule on the Administration area›Sale›Tours page.

Creating timetables and tours

Tours in Tixys are not recurring. This means, you don’t create a tour and define recurrency rules like “each Monday at 6 am”. Instead, each tour stands for its own, even if your timetable follows a strict pattern.

This makes variations in your schedule very easy to manage – just create every tour at the time of its actual departure, without caring about rules and patterns of the timetable.

Use day templates (see below) to create timetables with recurring patterns.

Timetables

Before you can create timetables, you need to create a timetable object in Administration area›Operations›Timetables. Note that, as long as the status of the timetable is “inactive”, none of its tours are used for calculating connections.

After creating a timetable, go back to the list view and click “Manage tours”.

Calendar view

The calendar view is for bulk-editing a timetable.

Apply day template: The selected day template will be copied into the selected days.Delete tours: All tours on the selected days will be deleted. This cannot be undone. Note that if there are tickets booked on some of the tours, the system will refuse to delete the tours. In this case, you will first have to re-book the tickets to different tours.Select day: Click the checkbox on a calendar day to select this day. When the day is selected, its background turns green.Open day details: Clicking the white area beneath the checkbox will open the day and its tours in a new view.Number of tours: The number in the top right corner of each calendar day indicates the current number of tours on that day. If the number is zero, the corner is gray, if there is at least one tour, the corner will be dark blue.Select by week: Click the week number to select all days in this week.Select by weekday: Click the weekday to select all days of this weekday in the month.

When you have created tours, it will take a few minutes to add them the connection database.

Single day view

Clicking a calendar day (see “open day details” above), you get to the single day view. It shows all tours of one day of a timetable.

Tour ID: Every tour has a unique identifier which is assigned by the system.Departure time: The local departure time at the first station of the route. Note: Tixys will calculate all other departure and arrival times automatically.Route: The route of this tour.Operated by: You can select one of your partner companies to indicate on tickets that this tour is operated by a subcontractor.Vehicle type: The vehicle type used on this tour. It’s important that the selected vehicle type has the correct amount of seats you want to sell for this tour.overbookable: Even if the capacity limit is reached, tickets can be booked. This is useful if you’re able to provide bigger or additional vehicles on demand.lead time: Indicates how many minutes before the tour’s departure tickets can be booked by customers.save: Makes changes permanent.delete: Removes the tour entirely. This works only if there are no tickets booked on this tour and cannot be undone.Tickets: Opens the page Administration area›Bookings›Tickets with a list of all tickets booked on this tour.Add tour: Create new tour entry and add it to the list.

Day templates

As already mentioned, Tixys does not store patterns for recurring tours. But of course, there are tools to create a set of uniform tours.

A day template is a set of tour “prototypes” that represent a typical day. They can be applied to a larger number of days in the timetable calendar view.

Applying means that they are copied into the selected days. If you modify a day template after applying it, the already created tours in the timetable will not be updated!

It is not mandatory to use day templates, but it will usually save you a lot of work.

Creating and modifying day templates

If, for example, you have the same set of 10 tours on almost each Sunday of the year, go to Administration area›Operations›Day templates and create a new day template:

Tour list: Each row represents one tour. When the day template is applied to a timetable day, all theses tours will be created as specified. For the meanings of the columns, see above (calendar single day view).Add a tour: Add a tour to the list by clicking add tour.Remove tour: Remove a tour from the day template list by clicking the little cross symbol.

You can delete old day templates if you don’t need them anymore. This will have no influence on the timetable.

Applying day templates

After you have created the timetable, you can apply a day template to one or more days in a timetable.

  • Go to Administration area›Operations›Timetables and switch to the calendar view of the desired timetable.
  • Select the days to which the tours from the day template are to be copied (see above, “calendar view”).
  • Select a day template to be applied and click apply.
  • Tixys will calculate how many days are affected and how many tours will be created, and will ask you to confirm that the tours should be created.
  • After confirming, the tours will be created and can be booked a few minutes later.