WooCommerce Accommodation Bookings 1.2.1

Woocommerce is a platform that has free ecommerce plugin which enables you to sell anything with ease. Woocommerce is built to seamlessly operate with wordpress. It is one of the world’s favorite ecommerce platforms that provides solution to both store owners and customers.
WooCommerce was launched on the 27th day of September, 2011. The platform quickly became popular because users were able to install and customize its pluging.
Woocommerce now powers 30% of most online stores, more than any other platform available with endless flexibility and access to premium wordpress extensions.

WOOCOMMERCE ACCOMODATION
One of the fastest growing businesses is hotel booking, although the hospitality industry is fraught with its own challenges, because guests find it difficult to book online with ease. However, with the aid of woocommerce platform, managing accommodations in the industry became less stressful. Woocommerce platform enables subscribers to track overnight and long term bookings.
With the accommodation add-on for woocommerce bookings, your guests now have the ability to quickly book overnight stays within seconds. There is also control over check-in, check-out and special room rates. You are always in constant touch with what is going on at any location you are.
If you own an hotel, and you have the challenge of taking your bookings online, this article will show you how you can sell hotel bookings with woocommerce using the ‘woocommerce booking and appointment plugin’. All you need to do is to create the hotel rooms as different products in woocommerce. You can do that from the products>add product link. While on the same page, there is a booking meta box that will allow you to configure all the booking settings for your hotel room.
There is a tab for booking options where you can do the booking setup under the booking meta box. If you need multiple day bookings, it is possible since rooms can be booked for more than a day.
Multiple days booking which will display the check-in and check-out calendars on the frontend has been enabled.
The minimum number of days to book for multiple day bookings can be set as well; you can change it to any number of days as per your client’s demand.
One beautiful thing about this arrangement is that once a room is reserved, it is never available for further booking until the customer that booked the reserved room checks out.

WORKS WITH WOOCOMMERCE BOOKING
Woocommerce bookings is an essential part of this platform, it is required for woocommerce accommodation to work. Accommodation booking is a free feature for the woocommerce booking extension

FEATURES OF WOOCOMMERCE BOOKING
Woocommerce bookings are one of the best and most reliable plug-in for creating online wordpress booking systems. Selling bookings is easy on this platform because you have full control due to the fact that the plugin comes loaded with some features and flexibility. When you want to manage availability and pricing for a certain period of time during the year, you can create custom booking and price range.
The following are the key features of woocommerce booking which makes it one of the best alternatives for creating your online booking systems

• Custom range for bookings; If you want to have a number of days in a year where you don’t want to allow booking, you can use the range settings. You can just add range and then select the start date and the end date and then set the criteria for that date range. This is very useful if you want the bookings to be disallowed for a specific time period.
  Peradventure, you intend to stop bookings for your hotel from July 30th to September 2nd this year for upgrade and maintenance of some essential unit. Therefore all you need to do is create a range with start date July 30th, 2017 and September 2nd, 2017 and set “allow bookings” as “No”. This will make the dates unavailable for booking
• Set the price per block, tax, discount for date ranges; automated online booking engines can be completely created using Woocommerce bookings. What you need to do is to create the bookable block by setting its time limit and the per block cost. Based on the selection of the users, the price on the front end can be calculated automatically.
  Let me give you an instance, if the bookable block is of one day each, with a price tag of say 500$, and your customer chooses to book 15 of such blocks, then the price will automatically calculated to be $7500. If you like, you can set tax rates or discount on each sale.
  Comparing these features with the old systems where you have to spend enormous time managing the bookings that you received online, all you need to do is to key in the prices, taxes, discount, etc and before you know it, it will be applied to the related dates and amount meant to pay will be calculated accordingly.

Other features include;

• New ‘accommodation’ option can be added to woocommerce booking extension
• The platform can add check-in and check-out times
• Woocommerce booking extension enables ‘number of nights’ to be specified as booking duration.
• Woocommerce booking extension allows an ‘override price’ option that enables special rates for weekends or holidays

FOR ADMIN

• Booking fields in backend to fit their requirement can be enable/disable by the admin.
• Configuration of the allowed adult amount, the extra price for adult amount option can be carried by the admin
• Setting of special promotion price based on a particular time and date can be achieved by the admin
• In a grid view, booking can be manage by the admin
• Admin can also change the status of booking without hitches
• Calendar view can aid management of bookings with the command of the admin
• Resources can be manage by the admin (exclusive feature)
• Since the platform is flexible, Admin can enable different payment option either as deposit or full amount and different payment methods (credit card or paypal)

FOR CUSTOMER

• Filling of important information when booking a room by the customer
• Customers can pay with any payment gateway available using PayPal, stripe, skills etc
• Google calendar view can be displayed by the customers.

HOW TO GET STARTED

• Woocommerce booking extension can be purchased and installed through this link
• The free add-on can be downloaded through this link
• Make sure you install the free ‘add-on’ on your woocommerce store.
• The ‘accommodation’ product type can be added as a new product.
• Check-in and check-out times as well as the booking price can be set

If this is the first time you are doing this, the set up should not take you more than 20 minutes. The plugin is tightly integrated with woocommerce, you should not find anything unusual when working and operating on the platform. The platform works and feels as if it is an integral part of wordpress and woocommerceitsef. It is a big advantage for woocommerce variable products to work alongside with the plugin.
Therefore selling hotel bookings with wordpress and woocommerce is a lucrative venture and easy to operate if you follow the guidelines stipulated above.