Locations explained: create a location, Staff presence, and where stations went

"What is the difference between the station and the location?" used to be the most-asked concept question in support, and most "the setting isn't there" tickets turn out to be someone editing the right setting at the wrong level. This article is the map: what a location is, how to create one, what Staff presence decides, and which screen owns which setting.

How accounts, locations, locks and products fit together

Level	Where you find it	There is one per…
Account	Settings in the menu	company
Location	Locations in the menu	physical place you rent from
Lock	the location's Locks tab	padlock, locker door or access point
Product	Products in the menu	thing a customer can book

Read it as ownership:

The account owns your users, your Stripe connection, your subscription and your defaults (booking languages, customer flow, emails).
A location owns an address, a timezone, contact details, open dates and opening hours, its products and its booking page.
A lock belongs to one location. It carries at most one product and has its own active/inactive state.
A product belongs to one location.

The rule that catches everybody: at a self-service (Unmanned) location, availability comes from locks, not from products. Three kayaks means three active locks, each carrying the kayak product. A product that no active lock carries is not shown to customers at all, and the number you type as inventory on the product does not decide how many can be booked there. At a Manned location it is the other way round: there are no locks, and the product's own number of units is what customers can book.

What happened to stations

Older versions had a separate Stations page, and a station was a group of locks inside a location. That page is gone. Locks now live directly on the location, in the Locks tab (the second tab, right after Location settings).

If you open an old Stations address or bookmark, you land on Locations with the notice The Stations page has moved: "Your locks are now under the Locks tab on each location. Open a location to add, sync and manage its locks." If your account has only one location, the notice has a Go to locks button (not for a manned location without locks, which has no Locks tab).
If you used Stations before the move, the menu keeps an entry called Stations with a Moved tag, in its old place, until you close that notice on the Locations list. Closing it removes the menu entry.
On the Locks tab, locks are listed by type, for example Igloo locks and Manual locks. In Booking Management the timeline rows are grouped the same way, with the location name in front, for example "Beach · Igloo locks".
You no longer name or create stations. A few places still use the word: the legacy box hardware is called Gokaya 8E station, and the Replace lock list groups locks under This station, This location and Other locations.

So you no longer have to choose between "one station or two" for boxes at the same place. Put all their locks on the same location. If the second place has its own address, opening hours or phone number, make it a separate location. Everything about adding, syncing, moving and replacing locks is in the lock guide.

Manned or Unmanned: choosing Staff presence

Staff presence is the most important choice you make for a location, because it decides how the location books. When you create a location, Rentalbuddy asks it as a question, "How do customers get what they rent?", with two cards:

Customers let themselves in (shown as Unmanned elsewhere): "Customers book online and open a smart lock with their own code. No staff needed on site." Customers book through locks, get PIN codes (or an unlock button, depending on the lock), and a product is only bookable while an active lock at this location carries it.
Staff hand it over (shown as Manned): "Your staff give out and take back what is rented. No locks are used at this location." The location takes no locks at all. Products are booked from their own number of units, and customers never get a code.

Nothing is preselected: you have to pick one before you can go on.

Things to know:

You can change it until the location is in use. Under the cards it says "You can change this until the location has its first booking or lock." Until then, the Location settings tab shows the same two cards, and you can pick the other one and press Save. Test bookings you make yourself don't count. Once the location has a real booking (any booking, also a cancelled or past one) or a lock, the tab only shows a read-only line, for example Staff presence: Unmanned, with the reason: "This can no longer be changed because the location has bookings. Contact support if it is wrong." or "This can no longer be changed because the location has locks. Remove them first, or contact support." After that, only Rentalbuddy support can change it.
A manned location takes no locks. At a Manned location you cannot add, sync or move locks there, and the Locks tab is hidden unless locks were already placed there earlier. If old locks are still there, the tab is marked in amber and says Locks do nothing at a manned location.: "Customers never get a code for them, but active locks still count toward your lock limit. Move them to another location or delete them." The Locations list shows a warning icon next to that location's lock count.
At a manned location, quantity 0 takes a product off sale. A rental product whose number of units is 0 is not shown to customers at all. If every rental product at a manned location is at 0, the readiness strip shows Every product has quantity 0.
Some older locations show Allockate as Staff presence. That is a legacy setting that only support can change. It takes locks like Unmanned, but Igloohome codes are only created at Unmanned locations, so ask support to switch it to Unmanned if you use Igloo locks there. Allockate lockers are now added as a lock type on the Locks tab.
If codes are missing for every booking at a location, check Staff presence first. The PIN code troubleshooting guide covers the rest.

Create a new location: the Add location dialog

Open Locations in the menu and press Add new location. The location step of the setup Guide on Home, and the link on Products when you have no location yet, open the same dialog.
Access: answer "How do customers get what they rent?" with Customers let themselves in or Staff hand it over (see above), and press Next.
Rental type: answer "What do you rent out here?" with the closest of Boat, Bicycle, Camping, Trailer, SUP, Canoe or Kayak, Sauna, Skiing or Other. As the dialog says, it "Sets the icon customers see when they book. You can change it later." Nothing is preselected here either: Next stays greyed out until you pick one.
Details: enter Name of your location, type the address into Address of your location and pick it from the suggestions (or press Use current location), and check Location email and Location phone. The line above them says "Your customers see the location email and phone in the booking and in their confirmation emails." Both are filled in from your account's contact details; change them if this place has its own. If the lookup finds no zip code, a Zip code field appears right after the address, followed by a one-line summary of the whole address. To check where the location sits, open Check the pin on the map and click the map to move the pin.
Press Add Location.

You get Location created! and land on the new location's page. Back takes you one step back in the dialog, and nothing is created until you press Add Location. The timezone is set from the address. If your account has booking languages, the location page then offers to translate your content into them.

If Add new location is greyed out:

You have reached your plan's limit. A notice next to the button says "You have reached the maximum number of locations for your subscription plan. Please upgrade your plan to add more locations.", and the link opens Billing.
Or your account could not be loaded: "We could not load account information needed to add a location. Try refreshing the page, or contact support if the problem continues."
If you do not see the button at all, your role cannot change locations (for example Account viewer).

Everything else (timezone, booking languages, Google Place ID and the other tabs) is set on the location's page afterwards.

What a new location starts with

A new location is not empty. So that it can be tested straight away, it gets:

one time period that starts on the day you create it, runs for five years, and is open around the clock on every day of the week;
a Booking interval of 1h, Blocking time after booking of 0, a Minimum booking length of 1 hour and a Maximum booking length of 14 days.

Before you go live, narrow the period and the weekly hours down to your real season on the Open dates tab. See the opening hours guide.

General Information

Location Active is the switch in the top right corner of the card. Read the section on it below before you rely on it.
Name of your location (required). Customers see it, so use the place name, not an internal code.
Staff presence: the two cards while it can still be changed, otherwise the read-only line with the reason (see above).
Product Type (required): the rental type you picked when you created the location. You can change it here.

Location & Contact Details

Location email and Location phone are the contact details customers see for this place: in every booking email, on the unlock and return pages, and in the "not available" message of the booking page. The card says so above the fields: "Your customers see the location email and phone in the booking and in their confirmation emails." Both are required, and the tab cannot be saved without them:

the email must be a valid address ("Enter a valid email address"), and the phone number needs at least six digits ("Enter a valid phone number");
Rentalbuddy's own email or phone is refused: "These are Rentalbuddy's contact details. Enter your own, so customers reach you and not us."

If you already run another location, Copy from next to the card title copies email and phone across ("Copy email and phone from another location.").

An older location saved before these fields were required can still be missing them, or still carry Rentalbuddy's details. It stays flagged until you fix it: the card says "This location has no email or phone number for customers, so booking confirmations give them no way to reach you." or "This location still shows Rentalbuddy's contact details, so customers who need help reach us instead of you.", the Location settings tab gets a mark, the Locations list shows a mark after the name, and Home lists it under Worth reviewing. The guide about customers contacting Rentalbuddy instead of you explains why this matters.

The address is set from the search or the map, not typed:

Type into Address of your location and pick a suggestion, press Use current location, or click the spot on the map. On a phone the map is folded away behind Check the pin on the map.
Above the map it says: "Click the map to move the pin, or search for an address above."
Address, City, Country, Latitude and Longitude are filled in for you and cannot be edited by hand. Zip code can only be typed in when the lookup did not return one.

If you empty the address field, the whole address is cleared. If you leave the field with half-typed text without picking a suggestion, it goes back to the address you had picked. If the address is wrong, move the pin. If the map finds coordinates but no street address, you get "Address not found for this location, but coordinates have been set."

Display Google Reviews takes a Google Place ID. It is usually filled in when you pick the spot on the map ("Usually this is filled in correctly when you pick a location on the map. If it looks wrong, you can update it manually."). If the review button after a rental opens a blank page or the wrong business, the Place ID probably points at a street address instead of your business listing. Open How do I find my Google Place ID? under the field. It links to Google's Place ID Finder, where you search for your business name and copy its Place ID.

Language & Timezone

Timezone is required and follows the map pin. When you move the pin a long way, the timezone is updated to the new coordinates. Check it after moving a location far, because opening hours, "today" in the open dates, start times and PIN code windows at this location all use it.

Use location-specific booking languages:

Off: the location uses your account's booking languages, which are listed under "This location uses the account’s default booking languages:" with a link, Edit account languages.
On: you choose Languages to show in booking view for this location only. Main language is shown but fixed to English.

If your account has no booking languages yet, the switch stays on and says "To change this: set booking languages for your account."

When you save after adding a language, you are offered a translation of your products, customer flow, website texts and legal texts into the new languages. Accept it. Otherwise customers who pick the new language read many of your texts in English.

The readiness strip: "This location is not taking bookings"

While something still stands between a location and its first booking, a strip under the location's name says This location is not taking bookings and lists the steps, each with a check mark when done. Open steps are links that take you to the right tab:

Step	Shown when	Takes you to
No products to book	the location has no rental product and no event	a new product for this location
Every product has quantity 0	Manned location where every rental product is at quantity 0 and there is no event	Products
Lock step (Unmanned locations only), worded after the actual problem: No locks added, All locks are switched off, No lock has a product yet or Locks can't create PIN codes	no active lock carries a product and can get codes	Locks tab
Book button not set up	you have not chosen how customers reach the booking, or the page address is missing or invalid	Book button tab
No time periods set	no time period covers today or a later date	Open dates tab
Configure payments	Stripe is not connected (and Stripe payments are not switched off for the account)	Settings → Payments

A location that only has storage and access-point locks counts as No locks added, because those locks take no bookings. Locks can't create PIN codes only appears for old Igloo locks that were typed in by Bluetooth ID and have no way to get codes. Manned locations have no lock step.

Locks that customers can book but that give no code (a lock whose code requests failed, or one Igloohome no longer lists) and lock units that are offline are not steps here. The location is still selling, so they are shown in red instead: on the Locks tab, as a red mark on the Locations list, and as Bookings without PIN codes or Lock units offline on Home. The lock guide explains them.

The strip is blue while you are still working through the setup Guide, and amber once the Guide is done. When the last step is ticked while you are on the page, it turns into This location is ready for bookings. once, with a Make a test booking button next to it. After that it disappears. A location that is ready shows no strip. If something breaks later, for example the last product is taken off its lock or the season ends, the strip comes back.

The same checks drive the warning marks on the location's tabs, the marks on the Locations list and the Locations not taking bookings notice on Home. How to work through them when customers cannot book is in the troubleshooting guide for customers who can't book anything.

The Locations list: columns, filters and the Columns picker

Locations shows one row per location. Click a row, or the cog View and edit details, to open it.

Columns shown by default: Name, Staff presence, Product Type, Location Active, Locks, Lock types, Open dates, Active open date and Book button URL.

Locks is the number of active locks, with a caption such as "2 inactive" when there are inactive ones. Click the number to open the location's Locks tab.
Lock types lists the kinds of locks at the location: Igloo, Manual lock, Allockate or Gokaya. A dash means no locks.
Active open date is an icon. Hover it to see Within scheduled open dates, Open dates start in the future or No active or upcoming open dates.
Book button URL shows a check mark when the book button setup is complete.

Use Columns above the table to show more, grouped by the tab they come from: City, Country, Booking flow, Languages, Booking interval, Blocking time after booking, Timezone, Move start time, Prolongation and Rentalbuddy Website. Reset to default brings back the standard set. Your choice is saved in this browser only.

Filters: the Product Type chips, and Lock types chips (Igloo, Manual lock, Allockate, No locks; Gokaya only appears if one of your locations has that hardware). The Lock types row only appears once at least one location has locks. Search locations searches names, types and more.

Warning marks on the list:

An amber icon after a location's name (blue while you are still in the setup Guide) means something there is not set up. Hover it for the reasons. It covers a location that is not taking bookings (for example "Beach is not taking bookings — missing: No time periods set."; an ended season reads Last time period ended with the date, and a time-slot location whose products all lack usable session lengths reads No session lengths customers can book), contact details that are missing or are Rentalbuddy's, terms and conditions that need a look, and a time period that ends soon with nothing set after it.
A red icon after the name means something has failed at a location that is still selling: customers are booking locks there that give no code, or a lock unit is offline. Hover it for which lock and what to do.
An info icon next to the Locks count means some switched-on locks have no product, for example "2 of 5 locks have no product assigned; nothing can be booked on them."
Above the table a notice sums it up, for example "3 locations need attention.", with the kinds ("1 has locks customers can't use.", "1 is not taking bookings.", "1 has something to review."), then "The marks in the rows say what." and Show only these locations. When the marked locations are all simply not taking bookings, the notice says Your location is not taking bookings (with one location) or counts them. View locations on Home opens the list already filtered to the affected locations.
A warning icon in the Booking flow column means some products there cannot be booked because their session lengths don't fit the time slots.
Partners who see several customer accounts get a switch, Not taking bookings, instead of the notice.

Locations with Location Active switched off are never marked.

Partners who manage several customer accounts also get the switch View for all accounts above the list. It is on by default and shows the locations of every account you manage. Switched off, you see only the locations of your own account. The choice is remembered in this browser. While you impersonate a customer account the switch is hidden, and you see only that account's locations.

The Location Active switch: what it really does

This is where the switch's name and its effect differ, so read it before relying on it.

Switching Location Active off changes the Location Active column on the Locations list to "No", and the location is no longer marked or counted as not taking bookings. It does not stop customers from booking. The booking page, booking links and QR codes keep working, and bookings keep coming in.

To actually stop bookings at a location:

end or delete its time periods on the Open dates tab, or close specific days with Custom dates (see the opening hours guide);
at an Unmanned location, you can also switch its locks to inactive on the Locks tab. Remember that customers then see no products at all, so for a single bad-weather day Custom dates is the better tool.

Which settings live at which level

Check this table before you go looking for a missing setting.

Setting	Level	Where
Users and roles	Account	Settings → Users
Stripe, payment methods	Account	Settings → Payments
Plan, lock limit, location limit	Account	Settings → Billing
Default booking languages	Account	Settings → Language
Default customer flow, checkout and return requirements, terms	Account	Settings → Customer flow
Email templates	Account	Settings → Emails
Name, address, phone, email, Google Place ID	Location	Location settings tab
Timezone, location booking languages	Location	Location settings tab
Staff presence (manned / unmanned)	Location	set when creating; changeable on Location settings until the first booking or lock, then only support
Locks: add, sync, activate, move, replace, lock QR codes	Location	Locks tab
How customers reach your booking (button, link, QR)	Location	Book button tab
Booking flow, time slots, session lengths, theme colour	Location	Booking experience tab
What customers see at checkout, unlock and return	Account or Location	Customer flow tab
Open dates, opening hours, booking interval, blocking time, closed days	Location	Open dates tab
Public booking page	Location	Website tab
Prices, stock, images, add-ons	Product	Products

Two settings exist at both levels:

Customer flow. By default a location follows the account. The location's Customer flow tab tells you which one applies. When it says "This location uses the customer flow from your account settings.", change it at account level or switch the location to its own settings. See the customer flow guide.
Booking languages. The switch Use location-specific booking languages on Location settings does the same job for languages.

Delete a location

Open Locations.
Press the bin icon (Delete) on the location's row.
Read the dialog Delete location?: "Are you sure you want to delete the location? The location, its products and locks will be removed."
Confirm with Delete location.

Before the dialog lets you through, it checks for bookings:

If there are active or future bookings, deleting is blocked: "You cannot delete this location while it has active or future bookings." The dialog lists those bookings with the customer's name, the dates and a Booking link for each (up to 20, then for example "and 5 more bookings"), so you can open them and move or cancel them first.
If the check fails: "Could not check bookings. Try again, or contact support if the problem continues." Deleting stays blocked.
If there were too many bookings to check: "Booking check may be incomplete (too many results). If delete is allowed, verify bookings before proceeding." For account users, deleting is blocked in this case too.

Deleting cannot be undone. It removes the location together with its products, its locks and its past bookings and their history in Rentalbuddy. Export anything you need for your books first. If you only want to stop selling there, end its open dates instead. Only roles that may delete locations see the bin icon.

Am I on the right screen?

Address, phone, email, timezone → Locations → the location → Location settings.
Opening hours, season dates, closed days, buffer between bookings → the location → Open dates.
Making a physical unit bookable or not → the location → Locks.
Price, image, stock → Products.
What every location does by default → Settings.
What only this location does → the location's own tab, with its location-specific switch turned on.

Common questions

What is the difference between a station and a location? The Stations page no longer exists; you no longer create or name stations. A location is the physical place with its address and hours, and its locks are listed directly on its Locks tab.

Where did the Stations page go? It moved into each location. Open Locations, open the location, and go to the Locks tab.

Can I change a location from manned to unmanned myself? Yes, until the location has its first booking or lock: on Location settings, pick the other card and press Save. After that the choice is locked, and Rentalbuddy support has to change it.

I picked the wrong option in the Add location dialog. What now? If the location has no bookings and no locks yet, switch it on the Location settings tab. Your own test bookings don't count.

I switched Location Active off, why are customers still booking? The switch does not stop bookings. To stop them, end the location's time periods or close the days under Custom dates on the Open dates tab.

Why can't I add a lock to my location? The location is set to Manned, and manned locations take no locks. Put the locks on an Unmanned location instead.

Why is the Add new location button greyed out? You have reached the number of locations included in your plan, or your account details could not be loaded. The notice next to the button says which one.

Can I have one address for the boats and another for the SUPs? The address belongs to the location, not the product. If the two are really at different places, create two locations.

I'm a partner. How do I see only my own locations instead of all my customers'? Switch off View for all accounts above the Locations list. Your choice is remembered in this browser.

If I delete a location, do I lose its bookings? Yes. Deleting removes its products, locks and bookings from Rentalbuddy. It is blocked while there are active or future bookings, and the dialog lists them. Export what you need first.

Why can't I save the location without an email and phone number? Location email and Location phone are required, because customers use them to reach you from every email and the unlock page. Enter your own details; Rentalbuddy's are refused.

Why did a Zip code field appear when I added my location? The address lookup found no zip code for that address. Type it in; the rest of the address comes from the search.

The pin is in the wrong place. How do I move it? Open Check the pin on the map and click the map where the location really is.

I emptied the address field and the whole address disappeared. Why? An empty field means no address, so the city, zip code, country and coordinates are cleared too. Search for the address again and pick a suggestion.

What does "3 locations need attention" on the Locations list mean? Those locations have a mark in their row: red for something that has failed (locks giving no codes, a unit offline), amber for something not set up. Hover the mark, or press Show only these locations.