Bookable Products (Has Resources)

To accept bookings from your customers, you need to first create a bookable product. In this example, we will create hotel booking tickets.

Choose the bookable option from the product type list. When you choose a product as bookable, you will find extra fields like booking options, availability, and cost. We’ll discuss each of them in detail.

Begin with adding a title, description, and images for your product. Under bookable product, you can find a few extra options – catalog, has resources, has persons, and virtual. Choose the relevant checkbox based on your product type.

We’ll explain each of the settings for this product type in detail.

Booking Duration –

This determines how long the booking last. This duration can be fixed block or customer-defined. The duration units can be hours, minutes, days, or months.

• Fixed Block– Fixed block has a defined duration. For example, 5 days of coaching classes, 1-hour doctor’s appointment, etc.
• Customer Defined Block–  It has a set duration, but the customer has the freedom to choose as many blocks they want. If you set your Booking duration to be customer-defined, a minimum and maximum allowed value can be included in the General This allows for a more flexible starting schedule.

Calendar Display Mode –

There are two options under this –  Calendar always visible and Display calendar on click. By default, the setting is Calendar Always Visible.

If the Booking duration is set to be Customer defined with a unit of Days, then another option will be shown to enable the calendar range picker. Enabling this allows customers to select a start date and an end date for their booking within the calendar itself.

Can be Cancelled –

If you allow the customers to cancel their booking, you need to tick this option. Once you select this option, you’ll see a field that says – Booking can be cancelled until. The customer can choose how many minutes/hours/days/months prior to the start date the customer can cancel the booking.

AVAILABILITY SETTINGS

Under availability, you’ll find the following options.

• Max bookings per block– This setting allows multiple bookings at the same time. For instance, in this example, the fixed block is 1 day. So if we choose max bookings per block as 3, it means in a day, you can accept 3 bookings.
• Minimum block bookable– If today is 1^st March, and you select minimum block bookable as 1 month into the future, the first date a customer could book will be 1 April.
• Maximum block bookable– If today is 1^st march, and the maximum block bookable selected is 2months, then the first date a customer could book will be 1^st
• Require a buffer period of– The buffer period allows you to block off time at the end of a booking.
• Adjacent buffering–
• All dates are– There are two options – available by default and not available by default. Available by default means all blocks are available and you can specifically turn some off with rules. And the not available by default means all blocks are not available and must be turned on through availability rules.
• Check rules against– You will find two options under this – i) All blocks being booked – This checks all available blocks within a duration. For example, if a customer chooses to book for 5 days and 1 block is equal to 1 day, it will check availability for all 5 days. ii) Starting block only – This checks the first block the user selects. For example, if a customer chooses to book for 5 days and 1 block is equal to 1 day, it will only check availability for the first day.
• Restrict selectable days– Restrict the days of the week that are able to be selected on the calendar; this will not affect your availability.
• Restricted days– Select the day you would like to restrict the booking to start on. In this example, we have selected Sunday as the restricted day. Other days are also available but they cannot be selected as the day(s) that the booking starts on.
• First block starts at– Mention the starting time of the first block.
• Rules – This is the dynamic configuration where you can allow booking or not allow booking. It can set rules as follows:

1. By date range
2. By time range
3. By weekdays

COST

There are two types of cost – base cost and block cost.

• Base cost– This is the fixed cost and is applied regardless of a customer’s choice on the booking form.
• Block cost – It is the cost per block. If a customer books multiple blocks, the cost is multiplied by the number of blocks booked.
• Display cost – This is the cost displayed on the frontend. The product page in this example shows 30 on the frontend. You can leave a blank to have it calculated for you.

Since our product has resources, you will see a new tab – ‘RESOURCES’.

RESOURCES

There are two types of bookable resources:

• Customer selected– A booking form shows a dropdown list of resources that the customer can select. An example use case for a customer selected resource would be a room type, such as club, standard, and premium rooms.
• Automatically assigned– A resource is automatically assigned to a customer booking if available. An example use case for an automatically assigned resource would be a hair salon where the resources are staff and someone is assigned a booking.

You can now make the other settings like SEO, Gallery Video, FAQs, Product Policies, and Advanced settings. Once done, you can view your product.