Online businesses that provide booking services have different days of servicing. Hence our Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce provides ease for business owners to put up the availability of their working days as well as allow customers to select these services as per their convenience.

As discussed in our earlier posts, the 2 types of Single Day booking methods in which you can setup booking options for your services are Recurring Weekdays Booking and Specific Day Booking. Let us quickly recap them:

The Recurring Weekdays setting will allow adding weekdays for your service and the same weekdays will recur every week, whereas the Specific Dates setting will allow customers to reserve the service only on your added specific dates.

Now moving forward, today we shall learn about how settings can be added for booking services using both the above-mentioned Single Day booking methods.

These work differently for Admin and Customers, so let us look at these two sections separately using the below instance.

Let’s say you are running an amusement park business and the park is open for the public on all Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and on certain dates. In such a case, Recurring Weekdays and Specific Dates booking methods are used together to setup bookings for the amusement park.

Admin Section

The first step will be creating a product from the Products -> Add Product link. On the same page, you will also find the Booking Meta Box that allows you to set up your bookable product.

Enable settings in the Booking Meta box by clicking the Enable Booking option as shown below. By default, the Single day booking type will be shown as selected in the booking type drop-down. Whenever 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 Single Day option

Now you will need to add weekdays when this amusement park will be open, for which go to the Availability tab and select the days from the Weekdays table. Also, add the maximum number of bookings that can be accepted for that day and at what price as shown below:

Selecting weekdays, maximum bookings and price 

After you have done that, now add specific dates when this park will be operational. For this, select the option Select Availability by Dates/Months which will open the setting for selecting Specific Dates.

Here, for the same instance let’s add 2nd, 6th, and 9th November 2017 when the park will be open as well other than the above selected weekdays. Also, set the maximum bookings and price for these dates as shown below:

Selecting dates for showing availability of the park

This means the park is open for the public on the 2nd, 6th, and 9th of November as well as on all Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays. Maximum bookings that can be taken for these days are set to 30 per day at a price of $100 per person.

Thus selected Weekdays and Specific Dates will be showcased on the front end facilitating customers to select their desired day for booking. Once you have completed all the above steps, the product is now ready to take bookings for the amusement park.

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 tickets for the amusement park.

Customer Experience

The Magic World Amusement Park product will appear on the front end of the website like shown in the below screenshot.

Magic World Amusement Park bookable product

Here you can select the desired day and add the booking to the cart. You can see all Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, and 2nd, 6th, and 9th November 2017 are enabled as per the settings. Select the desired day for booking the park from the calendar and once that is done, the Add to Cart button on the Cart page will be enabled.

Available dates are enabled on the booking calendar

Now let us choose a day for visiting the amusement park. Say 17th November 2017 is selected for booking 2 tickets for Magic World Amusement Park as shown below:

Selection of date for booking tickets 

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 amusement park booking details as shown below:

Booking details are shown on the Cart page

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:

The order confirmation of the booking

Thus the availability of the amusement park will automatically be reduced by the quantity chosen.

Conclusion

In the above example, we have shown the setup for booking tickets for an amusement park using Specific Dates as well as Recurring Weekdays. Similarly, we can set this for businesses selling Cricket Match tickets, arranging One Day tours, booking Movies and Live Event 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 the availability of such settings that can allow Recurring Weekdays, as well as Specific Dates, booking to work simultaneously is rare to see in the market. This makes the plugin extremely versatile and a must have for booking businesses to boost their online revenue.