Seasonal businesses like Lawn Care, Halloween Retailers, Snow Removal, etc., provide services only in a certain period throughout the year. For example, snow removal offers their service only in winter season which is probably between November to January month. We have Range type option in our Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce to setup bookings for such seasonal business services.

In this post, we will see how to setup services which are available to book only for a specific date/month range with Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce.

Admin Experience

Let’s say you are running a Snow Removal Service company and offering snow plowing and removing services during winter season. To setup booking for this service first create a product Classic Snow Removal Service from Products->Add Products link.  On the same Products page, you will also find the Booking Meta Box that allows you to setup your bookable product. Enable settings in Booking Meta box by clicking the Enable Booking option as shown below:

Enable Booking option

These settings can work with Single Day and Multiple Nights option. Let us first check the setup with Single Day option. So select Booking Type as Only Day- > Single Day and click on Save Changes button as shown below:

Select Booking Type as Single Day

Now say you are providing service from November to February month and you want your customers to book your service in between this period only. This can be achieved from the Availability tab where you add settings and select the bookable days from the Weekday table as shown below:

Enable bookable weekdays and add maximum bookings

Here Saturday and Sunday are enabled which means from the selected date range, all Saturday and Sundays will be available for booking. Also note the Max Bookings for these 2 days are set to 5, this means maximum of 5 bookings can be taken for each Saturday and Sunday.

So moving ahead, now to select the range of dates or month between November to February when the service will be available, enable the Set Availability by Dates/Months option and click on Add New Range button. From the Range Type dropdown select the specific option. You can use Fixed Range settings with Custom Range and Range of Months option. Let us first check the setup with Custom Range option as shown below:

Set Custom Range

Here as you can see, we have added a Custom Range of 1st December, 2017 to 15th December, 2017 and 1st February, 2018 to 15th February, 2018. Also you have the provision to add the No. of years for which these dates will recur and that is added in the Max Bookings column which is set to 2 as shown in the above screenshot.

Now let us see the setup for Range of Months option. For this, select Range of month from the Range Type drop down, select the month  and enable bookable as shown below:

Set Range of Months

You can also add the No. of years in the Max Bookings column as set for the Custom Range which implies the same date period would recur for next 2 years. Click on Save Changes button and you have set the product to take in bookings from 1st December, 2017 to 15th December, 2017 and 1st February, 2018 to 15th February, 2018, and also entire month of January. The No. of years settings would be effective for 2 years as added in Max Bookings column.

All details added for Availability by Dates/Months

Now, on similar terms, let us see the setup for Multiple Nights option. For this select Only Day-> Multiple Nights under Booking Type as shown below:

Select Multiple Nights settings

Go to Availability tab and you can add Maximum Bookings On Any Date option which refers to maximum bookings for snow removal service on a single given day. We have set that to 10 bookings and now select the bookable weekdays from the Weekday Table as shown below:

Adding details for weekdays and other settings

After completing all the above mentioned steps, the Snow Removal Services is now available and the customers can book your services for the number of days as per their requirement within the date range set by you.

User Experience

This is how your Snow Removal Services will look when the customer visits your site to book your services.

Product display on the front end 

You can see in the below images that the Select Date shows bookable dates as 2nd, 3rd, 9th and 10th December, 2017 & 3rd, 4th, 10th and 11th February, 2018. This is because we have selected bookable days as only Saturdays and Sundays between 1st December to 15th December, 2017 and 1st February to 15th February, 2018.

Calendar showing the bookable dates for December, 2017

Calendar showing the bookable dates for February, 2018

Also, we had selected No. of years for these dates to recur was for 2 years, hence same bookable dates will be shown on the calendar for December, 2018 and February, 2019 as shown below:

Calendar showing the bookable dates for December, 2018

Calendar showing the bookable dates for February, 2019

Also, as you have selected the month of January in the Range of Month option with bookable days as Saturdays and Sundays, all  Saturdays and Sundays of January will be enabled for booking. This will again be available for 2 years as No. of years was set to 2, hence the all Saturdays and Sundays for entire month of January 2018 and January 2019 will be shown enabled for booking in the bookable calendar as shown below:

Calendar showing the bookable dates for January, 2018

Calendar showing the bookable dates for January, 2019

Thus the customers can book your service only between the added date/month range and as per year to recur in the booking settings.

Now select the date for booking the service and you can see Add to Cart button will be enabled. You will also notice the Booking price displayed for the selected booking period as shown below.

Date selected for booking the service

Here, we have selected 10th December, 2017 and hence the price for booking for this date is $100. When you click Add to Cart button, the order is added to your cart and clicking the View Cart button will redirect you to the Cart page which will show the booking details as shown below:

Cart page showing all details

Here you can click on Proceed to checkout button to go to the Checkout page which gives you a preview of the actual order. Please ensure you check everything and then click on the Place Order button.

Orders page showing all details

Your order is now placed and you will receive an order confirmation as shown below:

Order details on order confirmation page

Conclusion

In this post, we have seen how one can setup bookings of seasonal business services like snow removal service etc using Range Type option for Range of Dates or Range of Months option available in our plugin. Similarly, there are many other businesses who provides services between a fixed date range so this option will help for setting up bookings of service with much ease. Book all year round booking type of our Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce will be explained in another post.

The taken example in this post was for WooCommerce Simple product, so to setup the services with Range Type booking option, will take around 15 minutes to complete. You can also use this setup for WooCommerce Variable product as per your requirements.