Selling an Open Water course that runs over four days

How should I model a four-day course?

As one event with four sessions, not as four events. The event is the course a diver enrols on; the sessions are the days it runs, each carrying its own capacity, its own door list and its own attendance record. The console generates a series from a cadence rather than making you type each date, which matters when the same course runs every fortnight through the season.

Per-day capacity is the reason this shape is worth the effort. Four divers in the pool and six on the boat is a real constraint for most centres, and modelling it as capacity rather than as a note in the description means the platform refuses the fifth booking instead of your instructor discovering it at seven in the morning.

What does a diver actually buy?

A place on the course as you published it. The per-diver questions — date of birth, certification level, emergency contact, the medical questionnaire, the waiver signature, wetsuit and boot size — are asked for each place on the booking, so a diver booking for two answers twice.

The certification level answer is a request, not a decision. Your roster shows what each diver claimed, and an instructor assigns the group they will actually dive in; the assignment is stored separately from the claim and is what the roster and the door read. It is audit-logged, so "who moved this diver into the advanced group" has an answer.

Where does the hosted checkout stop today?

At one session per order. The public checkout page sells a place on a session; the multi-line booking that puts several sessions into a single order is available on the JSON API, and the console can take one on a diver’s behalf. This is a real limit and it is documented in the platform’s own capability ledger rather than glossed over.

In practice most centres publish the course as the unit a diver buys — the four-day Open Water course, with its dates in the title and the description — and use the sessions for capacity and attendance. If your model genuinely depends on divers picking their own days from an agenda, check the current state with us before you commit, because the hosted page is where most of your bookings will come from.

What happens when a diver misses a day?

Operationally, whatever you decide; in bindro, they are simply not checked in for that session. Attendance is per session, so the record shows which days they were on and which they were not, and a completion certificate can only be issued to a diver who was actually checked in.

What the platform will not do is move them. There is no deferral in this vertical, so you cannot transfer a place from Saturday’s session to next month’s course — a make-up day is a new booking, and a comp place is the usual way to do it without charging twice. Comp places consume capacity and check in normally while writing no revenue, so your reporting stays honest.

Can I sell a season of dives rather than a course?

Yes, as a pack. A pack is published with its number of dives, its price and a validity period; a diver buys it once and redeems a credit each time they book. The price has to divide exactly by the number of dives, so a credit is always worth an exact figure when it is redeemed.

The accounting is the part worth understanding. Pack money is held as a liability rather than credited to you at the point of sale, and it becomes your revenue as each dive is redeemed. That is deliberate: an unredeemed pack is a dive you still owe, and treating it as revenue on day one would pay you for something you have not delivered.