Managing Entitlements

Entitlements are the foundation for all of your access products in SnowCloud. They are the building blocks that define what your customers can access and when. In this section, we’ll walk you through the steps to create an entitlement in SnowCloud.

What are Entitlements?

Entitlements are the specific rights or permissions that you grant to your customers. They define what your customers can access and when. For example, a customer purchasing a single day lift ticket to a ski resort would be granted an entitlement that allows them to access the lifts for one day. Similarly, a customer purchasing a season pass would be granted an entitlement that allows them to access the lifts for the entire season.

Creating an Entitlement

Let’s get started by creating a simple entitlement for a single day lift ticket. When attached to a product, any customer purchasing that product will be granted access to the lifts for one day.

1. Start by logging into your SnowCloud account.

2. On the left side menu, click on Setup, then under the Access Products section, click on Access Entitlements.

3. From within this screen, you’ll see a list of any existing entitlements. To create a new access entitlement, click on the plus icon at the top right of the screen.

4. First, we’ll need to set a season that this entitlement will be valid for. Since we’re creating a basic lift ticket entitlement, we can save time next season by making it valid for any season.

   To do this, click on the Season dropdown and select Any.

5. Next, we’ll want to select the activity that this entitlement will grant access to. For this example, we’ll enter click on the Activities box and select Skiing.

   This field supports multiple selections, allowing a single entitlement to grant access to multiple activities. For example, you could create an entitlement that grants access to both skiing and snow tubing.

6. Depending on the size of your resort, number of activities, and/or complexity of your offerings, the number of entitlements can grow exponentially. To help with distinguishing between them, use the Name field to give your entitlement a descriptive name. For this example, we’ll enter Single Day Lift Ticket.

7. Since many resorts have multi-day tickets, SnowCloud makes it easy to entitle customers to multiple uses. In this example, we’ll enter 1 into the Included Uses field to limit the number of uses to a single day.

8. Optionally, you can use the Description field to provide a more detailed description of the entitlement. This is useful for internal purposes only, and will not be visible to customers.

9. Finally, click on the Save and Add Rules button to save your new entitlement and proceed to the next section where we’ll add rules to our new entitlement.

Adding Rules to an Entitlement

Once you’ve created an entitlement, you can add rules to it. Rules are the specific conditions that must be met for the entitlement to be valid. For example, you may want to limit the entitlement to a specific date range or restrict it to certain locations.

Some of the rules you can add to an entitlement include:

• Require available inventory.
• Restrict to a specific date, time, or during certain periods.
• Valid only on the date used.
• Restrict to a specific location.
• Expire after a specified period of time.

Later in this guide, we’ll be using the Inventory Calendar to manage this product’s availability. Let’s go ahead and add a simple rule now to account for that:

1. Start by accessing your entitlement. If you just completed the section above, you should already be on this screen. If not, go back to your list of entitlements, then click on the pencil icon next to the one you just created.
2. On this screen, locate the Entitlement Rules section and click on the plus icon to add a new rule.
3. Next, we’ll use the Rule Type dropdown to select the type of rule we want to add. Since we want to restrict the product to available inventory on the date it will be used, while allowing the selection of future dates during purchase, we’ll select Valid on an inventory date.
4. Finally, click on the Save button to save your new rule.

Taking Entitlement Rules a Step Further

In our example above, we created a simple entitlement that grants access to the lifts for one day. However, let’s take it one step further and restrict it to certain days of the week:

1. Start by using the plus icon to add a new rule.
2. Next, use the Rule Type dropdown to select the type of rule you want to add. For this example, we want to restrict the entitlement to certain days of the week, so we’ll select Valid for a list of specified days.
3. Once you’ve selected a rule type, additional fields will appear. Since we selected a rule type that restricts the entitlement to certain days of the week, we’ll see a list of days that we can choose from.
4. Finally, click on the Save button to save your new rule.

Using the same steps, you can create as many entitlement rules as you need.

Next Steps

Now that you’ve created an entitlement, you’re ready to create a product that uses it. In the next section, we’ll walk you through the steps to create an access product that enables the new entitlement.