How to Set Up Online Boat-Rental using WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments

In this guide, we are going to give you the necessary steps and guidelines to set up an online booking system for your Boat/Kayak rental business. We will take a real-life example and the WooCommerce Bookings plugin to show you how it’s done.

The Business Case

One of our customers wanted to set up an online booking system for his Kayak rental business. Here’s how PluginHive Customer Support team helped him achieve it using our WooCommerce Bookings plugin.

Customer: I’m planning on building a website for a shop that offers kayak tours and kayak rentals. Here are my requirements:

1. Customers can select the number of kayaks they need – which will charge them per number of kayaks.
2. The system should manage their availability and disallow further bookings after their stock has gone down to zero.
3. Display how many units of a given boat are available at a given time.
4. After a kayak is dropped off, 1 hour has to be allowed before it’s rentable again.
5. Clients should not pay the whole price, but only a fixed amount (the remaining amount would be paid at the shop).

Solution using WooCommerce Bookings

1. In order to provide a field for customers to enter the number of kayaks, Create a product called Kayak tour and use the in-built “Bookings Participants” functionality available within the plugin which will allow the customer to enter the number of kayaks for booking and provide the cost accordingly for each kayak.
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3. Now to manage the availability of the kayaks, enable the option “Consider each participant as a separate booking” and provide the maximum booking as the number of kayaks available for each time slot. In doing so, if the number of kayaks is 10 for each time slot, and a customer books for 4 kayaks in one booking, then the number of kayaks left for that particular slot will be 6.
4. To display the number of kayaks available at a given time, enable the “Remaining bookings” option under the Bookings tab within the product settings page.
5. In order to allow 1 hour buffer time after every booking, provide the buffer time under the Bookings tab within the product settings page.
6. Now to provide a deposit amount for every booking, our plugin is compatible with WooCommerce Deposits which allows the admin to collect deposit amount for every booking made using WooCommerce Bookings plugin.
   

In conclusion

So this is how you set up a perfect online booking system for your Boat-rental business using the amazing WooCommerce Bookings plugin from PluginHive.

If you have any doubts or need help setting up Bookings on your WooCommerce-based website then feel free to Contact PluginHive Customer Support. Our support team should be able to help you out.

Good luck!