Improved Calendar Loading Speed (Hotel Booking 4.8.7) & New Widgets for Elementor & Divi
Table of Contents
This Hotel Booking 4.8.7 overview focuses on recent enhancements: we’ll discuss bug fixes and performance improvements, along with exciting news about updates to free Hotel Booking extensions!
Let’s review them!
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Improved calendar loading speed
Some of you noticed longer-than-usual loading times for the calendar in the search form. This was due to a combination of complex calculations happening behind the scenes and individual website’s server/hosting capabilities. We’ve streamlined those calculations and optimized calendar loading overall, so you should see a significant improvement in your website visitors’ experience submitting bookings via the Hotel Booking plugin’s forms.
To take this improvement even further, we’ve improved calendar compatibility with WordPress page caching plugins to help websites with caching plugins activated load even faster.
Improved calendar styles
We’ve improved the styles (appearance) of the availability calendar, that is, to properly show available and unavailable days of all your properties according to your applied booking rules, including manually blocked days, buffer periods, advance reservation rules, etc.
Last but not least, we’ve added the informative on-hover tooltips to the calendar dates that will give your potential guests more information about available and unavailable days displayed in the calendar.
The Check-out calendar works in harmony with the check-in calendar
We’ve addressed an issue where the check-out calendar would reset when the check-in calendar was accessed within the booking form.
The two calendars now seamlessly coordinate; when a client selects a date in the check-in calendar, the check-out calendar not only opens the relevant month but also retains its selected date even when closed.
New feature: Include the accommodation title to automated emails
Make your automated emails even more personalized by including custom accommodation names (not ‘accommodation type’ ones) to the customer emails that notify guests about reservation details.
How to do that?
Navigate to Accommodation > Settings > Email Settings > Reserved Accommodation Details Template > Open Email tags > Find %room_title% > copy and paste it to the email template > Save.
The “Reserved Accommodation Details Template” is used in the %reserved_rooms_details% tag in customer emails.
New widgets for Divi & Elementor
Extensions updated:
Hotel Booking & Divi Integration – 1.1.0 Download
Hotel Booking & Elementor Integration – 1.2.0 Download
These free extensions to the Hotel Booking plugin help you edit content visually with widgets/modules in the page builder of your choice.
To help you easier customize accommodation pages created with the Hotel Booking plugin in your favorite builder, whether it’s Elementor or Divi, we’ve added more dedicated widgets/modules you can simply drag to the page to edit: Title, Featured Image, Gallery, Price, Content, Attributes, and Attribute.
You can find new modules under the ‘MotoPress Hotel Booking’ category on both Elementor and Divi.
Using these new content elements, you can create a page layout for individual rooms or properties the way you want – add or exclude property details, change the order of presented information, etc., meaning, manipulate these new widgets as blocks with the abilities of the page builder (e.g. create a column-based layout for the room presentation, add or remove elements, etc.).
More fixes
And that’s not it! Here are a few more bug fixes in the core plugin and addons.
- For those of you taking advantage of the REST API, we are glad to inform you that we’ve fixed an issue with saving notes when creating a booking.
- In the Hotel Booking Styles & Templates extension, we’ve fixed issues of accommodation type templates that were edited with Elementor; now they should be properly displayed on the page.
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We hope that these minor updates will enhance your day-to-day workflow and bring better pre-vacation and booking experiences to your guests!
