By default, tickets are valid for the whole period you create them for; 1 day tickets are valid for 24 hours, 7 day tickets for 168 hours, and so on.
While this is fine for regular 'period passes' (tickets valid for a specific period), there are times when you'll want tickets to expire according to certain rules, or want to allow ticket activation at only certain times of the day. We call these 'activation schedules'.
Activation
We currently support activation schedules based on times and days of the week.
As an example, we could set up an activation schedule called "Off Peak" that applies to all day weekends and after 7pm Mon-Fri. Once this was set up for you then you could introduce tickets that could only be activated during those times. These tickets could be purchased at any time but only activated during the off peak time. Generally, this applies to short length tickets (eg 1 hour).
Activation schedules combined with lower fares can be used to encourage customers to travel outside of times when a lot of people are already travelling. Used smartly, this functionality can help to increase the use of under-utilised buses and flatten the demand curve throughout the day.
Expiry
The different expiry options (if set up) allow you to round a ticket's length down to a certain time of day. For example, we could set up an expiry time of midnight and then a "24 hour" ticket activated at 11pm would expire 1 hour later. Or you could round tickets down to the end of your operating day, such as 4am. Customers don't really like it when this happens, so generally, we encourage operators to avoid using it - but you may have legitimate reasons for wanting to do this.
Combining activation and expiry
The expiry and activation schedules can be used together. For example, you could have an activation schedule of midnight to 6am and an expiry time of 6am to be able to make tickets that could only be activated and used up to 6am.