Minimum age of customer

[nickevansuk]

As discussed in the 2021-11-24 W3C call, some Sellers or Booking Systems require the customer (i.e. the person making the booking) to be of a certain age.

This is distinct from age restrictions applied to the attendees themselves.

For example booking is only permitted for those over 13, or over 8. From a quick Google search it seems that children from age 6 can get a prepaid card in the UK, and from age 11 can get a bank account and debit card.

It should be possible for a minimum age to be specified within the open data, so that Brokers focussed on children can show opportunities that they are able to book themselves.

[nickevansuk]

To elaborate further, there seems to be two key ages here:

The minimum age of the customer who is making the booking

This is a legal or policy restriction of the Seller for the minimum age of the customer making the bookings (which is different from ageRestriction of the attendee).

This could be represented by a customerAgeRestriction for the Seller (distinct from the ageRestriction, genderRestriction and additionalAdmissionRestriction which all apply to the attendee, and are unique to the opportunity).

This means that the Seller can restrict who can attend specific opportunities based on the specific activity, however they need to specify a single minimum age for the person that makes the booking (who may or may not attend themselves).

This approach makes booking for multiple opportunities straightforward, as the Customer can simply be prompted once for the whole booking, e.g. "[x] I am 13 or over".

Any further per-opportunity restrictions on who can book can be included in additionalAdmissionRestriction as required, which are displayed prominently to users.

The minimum age at which the attendee requires emergency contact details

This is the age at which the Customer must be prompted for emergency contact details for the attendee

This could be specified on the Offer as requiresEmergencyContact, as the Offer already includes ageRestriction. Hence if a user selects a "Junior" priced Offer they would be prompted for emergency contact details to complete the booking. This also allows requiresEmergencyContact to vary per opportunity, as Offers are unique to opportunities.

[nickevansuk]

The customerAgeRestriction described above could also be used as a default minimum age for creating a primary CustomerAccount (note: not a dependent account, for which there is no age restriction), though this could be overridden by out-of-band agreement.

[nickevansuk]

This was agreed as a way forward on the 2022-01-06 W3C call