In Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce, single day bookings can be done in 2 ways: Recurring Weekdays and Specific Dates. In our last post, we saw how to setup Full Day Bookings with recurring weekdays, and today we will focus on how to capture bookings for Specific Dates with WooCommerce.

Firstly, let us understand what do mean by Specific Dates Booking.

This refers to bookings done on randomly selected dates and which does not have a fixed pattern or a particular weekday booking occurring every week. Thus Specific Dates booking method is useful for businesses who have products available only on particular dates.

For instance, businesses that book for Live Concerts, sell Movie or Cricket Match Tickets have particular dates for bookings. So for them, Specific Dates setting enables their customers to book the product only on the added specific dates.

Now let us see how Specific Dates Booking Settings work for Admin and Customers.

Admin Section

To start with, first, create a product from the Products -> Add Product link. On the same page, you would find the Booking Meta Box that allows you to set up your bookable product.

For better understanding, let’s take an instance of Booking Tickets for Live Music Concert where the audience can book their tickets for the day when that concert is going to take place.

So for this, on the Add Product page, enable settings in the Booking Meta box by clicking the Enable Booking option as shown below:

Enable Booking settings in General tab

By default, the Single day booking type will be shown as selected in the booking type drop-down. If you want to set this booking type for the product then you can just click on the Save Changes button to save this booking type.

Selecting the Booking type

Now you need to add the dates when this event would take place and for that go to the Availability tab as shown below:

Availability tab section

Here you need to enable the option Set Availability by Dates/Months because you have to add specific dates for Booking.

Set Availability by Dates/Months section

Now click on the Add New Range button to set the Range type as Specific Dates from the dropdown and add all the dates for live concert bookings.

Selecting Range type as Specific Dates

Adding event dates from calendar

So going back to the same instance, say the event is suppose to take place on 21st, 22nd, 28th and 29th of September 2017, hence select these dates in From & To column and add maximum number of tickets to be sold alongwith its price and turn Bookable option ON as shown below:

Adding event details

These dates will be showcased on the front end facilitating customers to select their desired date.

Once you have completed all these steps, the product is now ready to take the bookings of maximum 700 tickets for the Live Music Concert event occurring on 21st, 22nd, 28th and 29th of September 2017 at $ 50 as shown below:

Event details added in Booking -> Availability section

Note – It is mandatory to add Regular Price for the product on the Product Page irrespective of adding price in the Availability tab.

This ensures that the product is available on the Shop page for selling and you can move that to the cart.

Let us now look at how these settings would reflect on the front end for customers to book their tickets.

Customer Experience

The Live Music Concert product will appear on the front end of the website like shown in the below screenshot.

Here you can select the desired date and add the event to the cart.

Selecting the appropriate date for Booking

Once you select the date, the Add to Cart button on the Cart page will be enabled. Here let us select 22nd September 2017 and total of 2 tickets to be purchased as shown below:

Adding Booking details for the event

When you click the Add to Cart button, the order is added to your cart, and clicking the View Cart button will redirect you to the Cart page that displays all the Booking details as shown below:

Cart page displaying Booking details

Here you can click on Proceed to Checkout button to go to the Checkout page which will display the booking details and total amount for your order. You can place your order if everything seems fine.

The Checkout page gives you a preview of the actual order. Please ensure you check everything and then click on the Place Order button.

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

Order confirmation page

Thus the availability of tickets for the event will automatically be reduced by the quantity chosen.

Conclusion 

In the above example, we have shown the setup for booking Tickets for a Live Music Concert using Specific Dates. Similarly, we can set this for businesses that book Cricket Match Tickets, Theatre Tickets, etc., with Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce.

The above example was for Simple Products only. We can also use this setup with other WooCommerce Product Types. If you are trying this setting for the first time, it would take around 15 minutes to complete everything.

Thus Specific Dates setting brings ease to both admin and the customer with greater exploring possibilities for businesses that deal in events, appointments, entertainment etc.