MotoPress Booking Plugins: What’s the Difference?
Table of Contents
If you’re a business founder or developer, this comparison gives you a quick overview of the similarities and differences across the (for now) three-member MotoPress booking plugins family.
Like any family, there are debates about who’s best at what! However, we won’t tell you who – because this feature-by-feature comparison is designed to help you see which plugin is created to solve which problem.
At the same time, I won’t go too deep to not blur the focus. You can scroll to a specific part right away if you are interested in nuances – or even jump to the conclusion if you just want the big picture.
Targeted businesses
The list of businesses can grow quite long. What’s most important – these businesses deal with bookings, time scheduling, and item or space rentals.
Hotel Booking
Hotel Booking is widely used by vacation rentals, campgrounds, and small hotels. The number of items you can have is unlimited.
The best case is when they are run by one owner/company since there is no straightforward way to split access to bookings among multiple independent owners.
That said, it has an extension to assign different payment accounts to different accommodations. No overbooking after connection to external channels can be achieved with the integrated iCal sync.
Hotel Booking is the longest-standing benchmark WordPress booking plugin in our collection.
Appointment Booking
Appointment Booking works around employee schedules, hourly service durations, per-service pricing, buffer time customization, and staff calendars. It makes it perfect for businesses like salons, coaches, or schools.
Unlike many other WordPress appointment booking plugins, it also works for events or activities since you can sell tickets or seats with the group booking option enabled.
Booking Calendar
Booking Calendar is not targeted at specific businesses as much as the plugins above but I daresay it’s the key strength of it.
It’s an ultra-light WordPress calendar booking plugin and you can flex it into any direction if you need bookings that begin with the availability calendar. A one villa booking site? Yes.
A multi-item bike rental shop? Yes. Hourly studio rental? No doubt.
Its underlying principle is calendar-focused simplicity and power of the booking form, where you can add any fields, including those that re-calculate the price.
Booking period
Probably the most fundamental difference lies in the booking durations (time slots that are booked by customers).
As a hotel booking solution, Hotel Booking features offer only multi-night/changeover bookings, typical for hotels and vacation rentals.
Appointment Booking is optimized for hourly bookings of any duration, but it also supports full-day bookings (e.g., for a kayak rental store). Booking multiple days in one cart is possible, but a client will need to repeat the booking steps for each day.
Booking Calendar, as a universal utility, covers any scenario – changeover, hourly, and multi-day bookings.
Booking workflow & booking forms
What’s the difference in the booking form building process and its functioning for customers?
The Hotel Booking plugin relies on two key concepts:
– Common search form (typical check-in and check-out) with customizable filters (add ‘pets’, ‘location’, etc.). It adds a global search through all rental options.
– Color-coded availability booking calendars for individual properties with direct booking options.
You may use both options at the same time or just one of them.
Appointment Booking creates a multi-step search and booking form wizard.
This is a guided interface that helps people select services, providers, dates, and times, then proceed to confirmation and payment.
Booking Calendar is calendar-centered, meaning, one calendar interface displays real-time availability across all rentals that you add to the calendar.
Your customers can view open dates, compare options, and book one or multiple things/spaces/accommodations directly from the calendar. The second powerful thing is the booking form, which you can make simple or add many data collection and price adjustment fields.
Adding these forms and widgets to the site is a breeze. There are all possible integrations with page builders, including shortcodes.
Inventory
All MotoPress booking plugins include inventory/resources control, though to varying degrees.
Hotel Booking allows you to have ‘accommodation types’ as well as the exact number of physical accommodations in stock. Guests book the exact accommodations, and the inventory is updated accordingly.
Appointment Booking doesn’t operate this term since you are working with employee schedules and services. As a workaround, you can use the ‘employee’ setting to serve as inventory.
This concept is used in the Lorenty equipment rental WordPress theme, where field labels are also customized to turn ’employees’ into rental types.
The Booking Calendar plugin, more than other MotoPress plugins, emphasizes this term, allowing you to define rental types, set their exact quantities, configure pricing per rental types and availability for each physical item.
Payment gateways and price customization
All booking plugins provide pre-integrated payment options, many of them are available at no cost. You simply need to connect your accounts to the site with specific tokens.
| Payments | Hotel Booking | Appointment Booking | Booking Calendar |
|---|---|---|---|
| Built in | PayPal, 2Checkout, Braintree, Stripe, Bambora (formerly Beanstream), Pay on arrival, Direct Bank Transfer | PayPal, Stripe, Direct Bank Transfer, On-site | Stripe (includes multiple gateways enabled in your Stripe) |
| Extra fee |
|
|
|
What are some other options related to managing payments and pricing? Again, approaches are a bit different, as well as a variety of features.
Hotel Booking offers a complex set of rules and dependencies for availability and pricing, with dynamic rates and seasons. Appointment Booking allows you to set a price per service. The Booking Calendar WordPress plugin relies on the booking form’s cost adjustment fields – for the entire booking or just individual rentals.
| Payments | Hotel Booking | Appointment Booking | Booking Calendar |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rental cost | Customizable season and rate (e.g. weekly, extra guest, etc.) | Per-service (per-employee and per-duration variables) | Base (per timeslot/per rental) and extra costs |
| Invoices | Direct from site with add-on | Direct from site with add-on | Via Stripe |
| Tax setup | Yes | No | No |
| Sell extras/add-ons | Yes | No | Yes |
| Discount coupons | Yes | Yes | No |
| Automated payment requests | Add-on | No | No |
| Checkout field customization | Add-on | Add-on | Built-in |
| Payments to different owners | Add-on | No | Planned |
| Currency switcher | Add-on | No | No |
Admin calendar & booking management
Each plugin provides a way to manage bookings using a backoffice calendar, but they are slightly different.
Hotel Booking and Appointment Booking plugins by MotoPress use backend calendars that serve more for viewing availability, tracking statuses, and adding bookings.
The Booking Calendar plugin, on the contrary, provides a more feature-rich admin calendar, which serves as a visual inventory, availability and pricing management dashboard in place. It’s very akin to managing rentals in the Booking.com account.
Bookings and payments are listed in separate menus.
Other related features are compared in the table below:
| Payments | Hotel Booking | Appointment Booking | Booking Calendar |
|---|---|---|---|
| Add bookings by hand | Yes | Yes | No |
| Add payment manually | Yes, backoffice | Yes, backoffice | Via website |
| Booking and sales analytics | Yes | Yes | No |
| Reschedule | Yes | Yes | No |
| Automated emails upon bookings | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Customer login area | Yes | Yes | No |
| Minimum stays | Yes | No | No |
| Cancellation policies | Yes | Yes | No |
| Interdependent availability between items | Yes | No | No |
| Mobile app for owners | Yes | No | No |
| Sync to OTAs/iCal calendars | iCal | No | No |
Integration with third-party services
Each plugin comes with integrations tailored to the type of business/task it’s designed for. Only built-in payment gateways are not included below.
Hotel Booking has the widest range of integrations, most of which are optional paid extensions, but you can get all in a bundle with a discount. They include:
- WooCommerce for more payment gateways.
- PriceLabs to update prices on your site automatically with prices from PriceLabs.
- MailChimp to automate newsletters with this service.
- Divi & Elementor widgets.
- iCal support to connect Google Calendar, Apple Calendar and other calendars that support this format. Also, to sync WordPress bookings with external sites like Booking.com/Airbnb.
Appointment Booking offers integrations requested by people who work in service businesses (also available as separate purchases or in a discounted bundle).
- WooCommerce for more payment gateways.
- Zoom and Google Meet to automate virtual meeting links when a session is booked.
- Square payments.
- Twilio for instant SMS.
- Google Analytics to track customer behavior with the booking form.
- Google Calendar.
Booking Calendar only offers a built-in integration with Stripe at the moment.
WordPress designs & customization
Since MotoPress Hotel Booking and MotoPress Appointment Booking are older plugins, they have long offered a variety of WordPress themes to accompany them.
- Hotel WordPress themes are a collection of vacation rental, camping, and bed & breakfast designs. Free and premium.
- Service business themes include solutions for law firms, beauty salons, coaches, rental companies, photographers, and more. Free and premium as well.
The Booking Calendar plugin is a fresh invention waiting for the first designs!
All plugins, however, work well with page builders for WordPress. Hotel Booking and Appointment Booking integrate seamlessly with Elementor and Divi (the former via free add-ons, the latter natively) and also provide blocks for the WordPress block editor. Booking Calendar, by contrast, only supports the block editor for now. Naturally, all of them also offer shortcode support.
Pricing
The jackpot option to get all three MotoPress booking plugins – plus dozens of other brand products – is to subscribe to membership services.
For individual purchases:
– Annual pricing for each plugin differs based on the number of domains.
– Lifetime license is available for one site for Appointment Booking and Hotel Booking. Booking Calendar offers only yearly licenses for 1 site and 25 sites.
– To get all premium add-ons with the core plugin, simply purchase a bundle: HB Bundle and AB Bundle. Booking Calendar doesn’t offer any add-ons yet.
– Hotel Booking and Appointment Booking offer the Plugin Setup Service for an extra fee: HB & AB.
Every booking plugin has a free version with a few premium options disabled, find the links below:
While the free plugins are a great option to use a professional tool a budget-friendly way, it’s also possible to test out all premium features in a person trial account:
WordPress booking plugins: Conclusion + FAQ
Here’s a quick summary – the list starts with the earliest released plugin, of course.
MotoPress Hotel Booking is a full-scale direct booking engine for WordPress. It solves the problem of managing direct bookings + OTA-sourced (Booking.com, Airbnb, etc.), fully eliminating booking commissions, and taking your fully branded website under control.
For the latter, the MotoPress team offers great starter designs to cover various angles of the vacation rental industry. It lets you handle reservations over nights, manage different houses, pitches or cabins (resources), seasonal pricing, extras, online payments, availability calendars, and avoid double‐bookings.
MotoPress Appointment Booking fits service scheduling businesses that need to manage staff, their schedules, and place a self-booking form with multiple filters on their website.
Thanks to the group bookings support, you can also sell seats at events or places in classes. A collection of professional designs based on this plugin is also impressive.
MotoPress Booking Calendar is a no-noise utility for direct bookings from the calendar. Despite not being fully mature, Booking Calendar is rapidly gaining traction with its focus on scalability and seamless user experience.
One calendar can ‘contain’ unlimited rentals. You can have unlimited calendars. It has a super powerful booking form/checkout form editor, which, among other things, allows you to add fields that recalculate the booking cost automatically.
All three booking plugins for WordPress support online payments, making it easy to automate and monetize any booking on WordPress.
More FAQ + answers + comparison table
Are MotoPress booking plugins designed to be used together, or are they standalone?
Are MotoPress booking plugins interchangeable?
Is there a WordPress availability calendar?
