Set Booking Assets with WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments

This tutorial is about setting up booking assets using WooCommerce Bookings and Appointment plugin. 

Booking Assets

Booking Assets are global resources which you can share among various bookable products or use in a single product to provide variations in prices or availability. The assets have their own availability as well as booking costs. Using the Bookings Assets feature, you can set up single or multiple resources and attach them to your bookable products.


When To Use Booking Assets

In order to use the Booking Assets feature and get the most out of WooCommerce Bookings and Appointment plugin, it is very important you understand when to use it. You can use Booking Assets if your business requires the following.

  • When you provide multiple services bound by the availability

For Example: In the case of a Salon Appointment, you can provide Hair Styling at 3:00 pm. Hence, you will not be able to provide Head Massage at the same time. For this scenario, you have to use Assets to set up different services like Hair Styling, Head Massage, facials, etc.

  • When you need to provide variable prices for different services which have varied availability.

For Eg: Different Dog walking service providers could be available on different days of the week and also may have a different charge/cost. So when the user chooses a specific provider, the user sees the cost and availability for that particular provider.

  • When you provide different types of equipment for rentals bound by the quantity

For Example: In the case of Bike Rentals, you might have 10 Bikes with a 500 cc capacity and 15 Bikes with a 300 cc capacity. In that case, you can create 2 assets based on the engine capacity and set a quantity for each one of them.

  • When you have a service based on the staff’s availability

For Example: In the case of Online Pet-Sitting Appointments, different staff members can have different availability on different days of the week. Hence, you can create a dedicated asset for each staff member and provide booking availability for each one of them.

  • When you need to block the same time block for another product based on booking in one product. 

For Eg: A spa service provide could be available one service at a time. So when one service is booked, other services by this provider would not be available at the same time.

  • When you provide bookings for the same service or product but in different durations which cannot be handled in one calendar. For Eg: 4 hours and 12 hours. 

For Eg: If you provide rentals for 4 hours and 12 hours for the same accommodation. Then you can have a common asset attached to two products having these durations. The plugin takes care of blocking the corresponding times when either product gets a booking.

Similarly, there are other cases when you can make use of the Booking Assets. If you are still confused about whether Booking Assets will help you achieve your business requirement, contact our booking experts and they will help you decide.


Adding New Assets via Global Settings

To use the functionality of the asset, you need to first create assets based on your requirements. You can set up different assets for services, staff, etc. You can set up assets by following the steps below:

  1. Click on the Settings section under Bookings.
  2. Click on Assets
  3. Click on Add
  4. Enter the Asset Name
  5. Enter the Asset Quantity. This quantity is the number of times an asset is available.
  6. Click on Save Changes
Booking assets
Adding New Assets

Setting Asset Availability

Now that you have successfully added assets to your online store, however, before adding the assets to the products, you need to set availability rules for all your assets. You can set the availability for your assets using the following steps,

Asset Availability

  1. While on the Assets tab in the Bookings Settings, click on Add under Asset Availability.
  2. Choose the asset for which you want to create an availability rule under Asset. All your assets will be available as a drop-down option.
  3. Select the availability range based on the options shown in the image below.
    Range Type
  4. Now set the From option in order to make the asset available/unavailable, after a certain duration.
  5. Similarly, set the To option in order to make the asset available/unavailable, before a certain duration.
  6. Now set the Bookable option to whether you want to make the asset available or unavailable for booking, based on the rule.
  7. Click on Save Changes.

Assigning Assets to Bookable Products

Once you have created assets and asset availability, you can add the assets to the respective bookable products with the help of the steps below.

  1. Click on Products.
  2. Edit the product for which you want to set up assets.
  3. You can enable the assets under the Booking Assets option by clicking on the Enable option as shown below.
    Assigning Assets to Products
  4. Once you enable the Assets for the bookable products, the following options will be available in the product edit option.
    Assign assetsYou can set up the above options based on your requirements.

    • Assign
      This option allows you to choose whether the assets will be assigned automatically to the booking or the customers will have a choice to book assets with the bookable products. This option has the following values that you can set.

      • Let Customers Choose
      • Automatically Assigned
    • Label
      This option allows you to enter a custom description for your assets that will be visible on the product page while a customer places a booking.
    • Add
      This option allows you to add assets to the bookable products. You can choose to add any and all the assets to the product and even set the cost for each asset. This cost will be added to the total cost.
    • Create A New Asset
      If you require a new asset based on your product, you can click on Create A New Asset and you will be redirected to the Asset Global Settings page where you can create a new asset and set up availability for your asset.
  5. Once you add the asset to the bookable product, all the assets will be available for the product as shown below.
    Asset list

Setting Up Asset Cost

Once you have assigned the assets to the bookable products, it is time you set up the asset cost for that particular product.

  1. On the product edit page, you can set up the asset cost in the fields that are present in front of the asset name.
  2. Booking cost is calculated based on the following
    • Base Cost
      This cost will be the one-time cost for the asset when booked with the bookable products.
    • Block Cost
      This cost will be based on the number of blocks (booking duration) and will be multiplied with the number of blocks that a customer books.
      Asset Cost
  3. Once you are done with setting up the asset cost, just click on Update.
  4. The asset that you have created and assigned to your bookable product will be visible on the product page on top of the calendar, as shown in the image below.
    Asset on the product page
  5. Once the customer places the booking, the asset cost would be added to the cost of the bookable product, as shown in the image below.
    Asset cost added in the Cart page

Business Scenarios Fulfilled by Booking Assets

This tool can be used to set up many real-life booking scenarios, including the following,

Different Assets can be created based on Bike’s Engine Capacity, Bike Model, Manufacturer, etc.

Different Assets can be created for each Equipment Type, Size, Color, etc.

Different Assets can be created for Tutors, Subjects, Class-Rooms, etc.

Different Assets can be created for staff members with different availability.


For more information on how to set up the WooCommerce Bookings plugin, and how to make use of different features of the plugin like booking resources, booking participants, and a lot more, please refer WooCommerce Booking documentation.

We hope this guide would have helped you. Please contact our customer support if you need help in setting up bookings on your WooCommerce website. Our team should be able to help you out.