Booking management

You can decide to enable the “Require confirmation” option so your customers will have to request a confirmation in order to be able to place a booking.

You can find this option in Booking options > Settings > Booking Terms within the product edit page.

On the frontend the user will see a Request confirmation button instead of Book now.

The booking request will appear in All Bookings section and will be assigned the Pending status.

Confirm or reject the confirmation

The admin can either confirm or reject the booking request, by hovering over the status.

Two options will appear to either confirm or reject the booking request.

Or you can also enter the booking itself, and change the status.

In both cases, the users are notified via email of the admin’s answer.

Emails to customers

If the booking is confirmed, the email will include a button to allow the user to pay for the booking.

By clicking on the “pay booking” button, the bookable product is automatically added to the cart and the user can complete the order.

Now the booking order is created and associated to the request that had been previously submitted.

When a booking is rejected by the admin, the customer will also receive a notification via email.

There is no further action the customer can take.

Reject a pending confirmation automatically

With the option “Reject a ‘Pending confirmation’ booking after a specific time”, you can choose to automatically reject bookings with pending confirmations, when reaching an xx amount of days.

When reaching -in this example- 15 days, the customer will automatically be notified via email about the rejected booking confirmation.

A booking request without confirmation is a bookable product that you can book directly. In this case, the “Require confirmation” option is disabled.

When users place a booking, they are actually purchasing one of the products of your store.

Therefore, if all booking criteria are met (availability, duration, people), the product can be added to the cart and purchased just like any other WooCommerce product.

And just like purchasing any other WooCommerce, once the purchase is completed a new order is created and its status varies according to the payment method used.

At the same time, the new booking is added to the “All bookings” section in YITH > Booking > Dashboard. It is automatically associated to the related order.

To open the booking and see its details, simply click on the booking number (first column) and you will see the edit booking page.

From within the booking edit page, you can click on “View order” to see the related order.

If you want to allow users to cancel a booking they have already submitted, you can enable the “Allow cancellation” option from Booking Options > Settings > Booking Terms in the product edit page.

Your users will be able to cancel their booking no later than xx days/months before the booking start date.

Users can cancel the booking from their “My Account” page on your website.

The admin will see the booking appear with the “Cancelled” status.

Note: The plugin does not handle any other refund option related to booking cancellation.

The booking status is automatically changed based on the status of the associated order or on any actions performed by the user or the admin.

• “Unpaid”: if the order status is set to “pending” or “on hold”
• “Paid”: if the order status is set to “processing” or “completed”
• “Cancelled”: if the user has cancelled the booking
• “Pending”: if the booking request is waiting for admin confirmation
• “Confirmed”: if the booking request has been confirmed by the admin
• “Rejected”: if the booking request has been rejected by the admin
• “Completed”: this status can either be assigned manually or automatically after a certain number of days if the option “Set paid booking to “Completed” in YITH > Settings > “General settings” has been enabled.

All changes in the booking status are notified via email, you can find examples of these different emails here.

Booking status vs. order status

When the order is placed (eg. order is in ‘pending payment’) the booking is created in ‘unpaid’ status. When the order is changed to ‘completed’ or ‘processing’ the booking status automatically changes to ‘paid’. When an order is cancelled, the booking status will also change to ‘cancelled’ automatically.

The status of the booking can be adapted manually by the admin, and will be visible to the customer in the ‘Bookings’ section of their My Account page.

User view

After accessing the “My Account” page, users can verify the status anytime.

From Booking > Emails, you can enable/disable each email sent by YITH Booking.

You can also override the default settings, simply by opening the specific email you want to change.

Concerning the message, you can use the available placeholders and also customize the message content by taking advantage of the built-in editor which is accessible by clicking on the pencil icon.

To restore the default message, just click on the related link.

Booking emails include the iCal event so that Gmail shows the event in the email, if you set the email type as “Multipart/alternative”.

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Below you can find a list of all the available emails:

• Booking Status: this email is sent to the administrator when the status of a booking changes;
• New Booking (Admin): this email is sent to the administrator when a booking is created;
• New Booking: this email is sent to the customer when a booking is created;
• Confirmed Booking: this email is sent to the customer when a booking with a request for confirmation is confirmed;
• Rejected Booking: this email is sent to the customer when a booking with a request for confirmation is rejected;
• Cancelled Booking: this email is sent to the customer when a booking is cancelled;
• Paid Booking: this email is sent to the customer when a booking is paid;
• Completed Booking: this email is sent to the customer when a booking is completed;
• Customer Booking Note: this email is sent to the customer when the admin adds a note to the booking;
• Booking notification before start date: this email is sent to the customer XX days before the booking start date;
• Booking notification after start date: this email is sent to the customer XX days after the booking start date;
• Booking notification before end date: this email is sent to the customer XX days before the booking end date;
• Booking notification after end date: this email is sent to the customer XX days after the booking end date.

All the booking notifications emails include the option to select the booking status/statuses that will trigger the email sending. If a customer creates a booking after the days range you have configured, the email will be sent a few minutes after the booking creation.

Example: you want to send the email 7 days before the start date. Today is March 15 and a customer creates a booking that will start on March 20, therefore, 5 days before the start date. In this case, they will receive the booking notification email today.

EMAIL EXAMPLE