Set Up Online Hotel Booking with WooCommerce Bookings

In this article, we will check out how you can set up a hotel booking website with the help of the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin and provide your customers with a great experience. This article will cover a hotel booking business case involving a different cost based on the number of guests, a minimum stay duration, and much more.

Hotel Booking Business Scenario…

Evelin owns an online hotel booking website that allows customers to book villas in Bali. For one of her villas, she came up with a business case. According to Evelin,

“Dear PluginHive, we want to use your bookings plugin but we have found some obstacles that we can’t solve and we hope you can help us how we can configure these things in your plugin:

• Extra costs per night per person for a maximum of 8 people
• The minimum number of days is 3, and the booking price is € 150.00 per day
• For every person, we charge €10 per day, or
  • Charge every person after 2, €10 per day
• Check-in and check out on the same day

Hope you can help us!“

Solution

Evelin can easily set this up with the help of WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugins. Now let us check out how the plugin fulfills all her requirements.

Minimum Bookable Duration

The plugin allows you to set a duration for the booking in the Booking Availability Settings. You can define the booking period based on your requirements. In Evelin’s case, the booking was on a daily basis. Hence, you can define a range of days booking and set it to a minimum of 3 days booking, as shown in the image below.

This way when a customer books the product and clicks on the booking calendar, then automatically his booking will add three days as a minimum duration for the booking. The customers can, however, increase the duration based on his requirements as we have not set any Maximum Duration.

Booking Cost

In order to set your desired cost for bookings, you need to set the Booking Cost settings in the product edit page. Since the booking cost is calculated per day, we need to set the cost as Cost Per Block to $150.

Booking Participants

If you want to set up the number of guests and provide a cost based on the number of guests for your hotel booking, you can use the Booking Participants feature of the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin. All you need to do is enable Participants option under Booking Participant settings in the product edit page, and create your custom participant as shown in the image below.

Also, as you can see in the above image, we have added a per-participant cost to every participant. However, in another case where we require €10 for every additional guest over 2, we would require to use a customized paid solution. If you require the customized solution, reach out to the PluginHive support team.

Same Day Check-In and Check-Out

Based on Evelin’s requirements, she requires if a customer books for 3 days and checks out at the third day, then the same day must be available for any other customer who are looking to book the villa on the third day. To enable this functionality, you just need to enable the Bookings Per Night option in the Booking settings under the product edit page.

How to set up Hotel Booking using the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin?

To set up the Online Hotel Booking using the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin, follow the steps below:

• After installing and activating the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin, create a new product and set it as a Bookable Product in the Products page.
  
• Now you need to set the Booking settings to set the time slot for the bookable product, as shown in the image below.
  You can see the following things that we have set up in the above image:
  • A Daily Booking period
  • A minimum of 3 days’ booking will be mandatory
  • A maximum of 5 people will be able to book the same period (days) simultaneously, and after that, the product won’t be available for booking
  • Bookings Per Night are enabled and the new customers will be able to check in on the same day an old customer checks out
• Now, you can set the Booking Cost as displayed in the image below.
  You can see the following cost that we have set up in the image.
  • The cost per block is set to 150. So, the customers will be charged €150 per day
  • The display cost is set to 150. The display cost is the cost displayed on the product page before the customer selects the date and time for the booking
• Now, you can set the Booking Availability as displayed in the image below.
  You can clearly see the following availability rule that we have set up in the image.

   

  • The villa booking will only be available from February to September
• Now you would require to set up guests option using the Booking Participants, as displayed in the image below.
  You can clearly see the following availability rule that we have set up in the image.

   

  • Enabled the Participant option
  • Set up a Guest participant with a range from 1 to 8
  • Cost of each participant is €10
  • Cost for the participants is set to Charge Per Block
• Now publish the products to save settings.

Booking a Villa

Once the set up is complete, you can just visit the product page and place a booking.

• Click on a date and you can see a minimum of 3 days getting selected automatically, as shown in the image below.
  
• You can increase the booking duration by clicking on any date beyond the 3 days.
  
• Now you need to add the number of guests. As soon as you increase the number of guests, the cost would increase based on the number of days as well as the number of guests. As you can see in the image below, the cost increases for 2 guests for 3 days of booking, such:
  • Booking Cost – €150 per day
  • Participants Cost – €10 per participant per day
  • Total Booking Cost for 3 days would be – €150 x 3 + 2 Guests x €10 x 3 = €510
    

Final Thoughts

So, this article covered WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin and its features like the Booking Participants and Cost Calculation in order to set up an online hotel bookings website. The plugin allows you to define custom booking period and availability based on days, months, hours and minutes. Moreover, it allows you to set up a number of guests you want to allow for a single booking and charge them accordingly.

The WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin is a flexible plugin that can be used to set up a variety of online bookings or appointments systems based on WordPress. If you are also looking for a robust and reliable solution for your online hotel booking website, you can read more about the WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments plugin and the amazing features this plugin provides

You can contact our customer support if you need any help setting up Bookings on your WooCommerce website. Our team should help you through and out.