Can I use Squarespace to aggregate service providers?

I want to build a website where I aggregate services from lots of different service providers, all of whom provide similar services. This is not the industry it is in, but I imagine it being similar to a website that aggregates different walking tour providers in different cities. So each provider would have a particular geographic area and would offer walking tours within that geographic area. For example, a tour company in Chicago might offer two or three different walking Chicago-based walking tours, and a New York-based tour company would offer several walking tours in and around New York.

So my requirements are:

• I need to be able to search for walking tours by geographic location
• I need to connect the calendar for a particular walking tour to an online calendar provided by the tour company
• I need to be able to have a page for each tour company, listing the individual tours they offer.

So my basic question is: Can I use Squarespace for this?

From my reading of Squarespace's eCommerce offerings, it doesn't appear that Squarespace can support this out of the box. However, I wanted to post in this forum to see if anyone else had been able to build something similar using Squarespace, and if so, how you did it.

Thanks very much,

Eric

@ehyche I think this would be the perfect use case for Squarespace Scheduling aka Acuity! Have you checked that out? 

@KristineNeilStudio: thanks for the reply!

Yes, I looked into the Acuity scheduling. For my use case, it has two major limitations: a) It's more designed for specific appointment times rather than (i.e. - "book a salon appointment at 2:30pm on June 2nd" vs "book a half-day walking tour on June 2nd"); and b) it appears to only be able to connect to a single calendar.

Therefore, it seems ideal for a website that is promoting the services of a single provider. But it doesn't seem to be able to aggregate the calendars of multiple service providers.

Hi @ehyche - the number of calendars you can add depends on your Acuity plan:

Emerging - One calendar
Growing - Two to six calendars
Powerhouse - Seven to 36 calendars
Enterprise - Unlimited

So just looking at one of the higher plans might solve that issue. 

For the other issue, I think it would still be helpful to have the start and end times of a half day tour (i.e. 4 hour tour starts at 10am) but if needed you could always just set the "appointments" to be shorter durations and then hide the durations in the Scheduling page options panel. This will make it so the only thing the customer sees is "Half Day Walking Tour" or whatever you'd like to call it. 

Hope this helps as you consider whether you'd like to give it a try!