From setup to your first booking

The short version, in order. Each step links to the detail, but if you follow these five you go from an empty portal to divers booked on a real departure.

The order matters: a service with no season never reaches the calendar, and if there is nothing on the calendar there is nothing to book anyone into. That is the single thing people get stuck on.

1. Create your dive center

Everything hangs off a center: the catalogue, the calendar, the clients and the numbering of your receipts. If you run several locations, each one is its own center and you switch between them from the top bar.

→ Create a dive center

2. Create a season

Offerings › Seasons › + New Season. A name and two dates — "Summer 2026-2027, 1 November to 30 March".

Do this before the services, not after. The season belongs to the center and every service points at it, so writing it once now saves correcting it in ten places later.

Running the same thing all year? You can skip ahead and pick Always — no season when you build the service. Do not invent a season that covers the whole calendar.

→ Seasons and schedules

3. Create your services

Offerings › Services › + New Service. Title, category, price, and then the part that matters: link it to the season you just made and give it days, departure times and a capacity.

That link is what fills the calendar. A service saved without it is a price on a list and nothing else.

→ Create a service

4. Add your rentals

Offerings › Rentals › + New Rental. Full equipment, wetsuits, torches — a price and what each one is made of.

Rentals never appear on the calendar, so this step can wait if you are in a hurry. But loading them now means that when you book a diver in you can say what gear they need in the same gesture, instead of chasing it later.

→ Rentals

5. Book divers in

Open Plans & Bookings and your departures are already there — the portal generated them from the schedules you set in step 3, out to a rolling 12-month horizon. You did not have to create a single one by hand.

Pick a departure, add the divers, set their gear. From there you have a roster for the boat and, when they pay, a receipt.

→ How the calendar works

If the calendar is empty

Almost always one of these three, in this order of likelihood:

1. The service has no schedule — it was never linked to a season, or the link has no days on it yet.
2. The service is inactive.
3. The dates are outside the season you are looking at, or beyond the 12-month horizon.

→ Troubleshooting

What comes after

• Clients — records, medical forms and linking divers to their Blue Trails account
• Team — give your staff the access they need
• Quotes — price a group trip before it is booked