Booking is renumbered

[Adrian Ince]

On two occasions we have observed that a confirmed booking has been renumbered without any user intervention.
Scenario:
1. Booking #1234 request received
2. Admin confirms booking and email is issued etc.
3. Booking #1234 disappears…
4. …but is replaced with new booking request #1236 which requires approval

As a consequence we have a customer with their booking confirmation email for #1234 but future transactions, including payments, will be for #1236.

Our working assumption is that the admin has stayed in the booking edit screen and that WordPress has draft saved a new row to the posts table and related booking details to the postmeta table.

Can you confirm if this is what is happening, and if so propose a solution?

[Adrian Ince]

Note: we probably mean “auto save” rather than “draft save” – we are aware of the difference in functionality.

[J. Davis]

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your question. Unfortunately, we were not able to replicate the issue. When you edit booking the ID of booking can not be change. It should be completely new post when there is assigned a new ID. You may try to content the guest and ask him/her if he/she did anything unusual after the first submission of the reservation request – whether he tried to return to edit some booking information and submit it again?

best regards,
J. Davis

[Adrian Ince]

Our guest doesn’t remember doing anything “wrong” when making the booking, but then they haven’t used the front end booking form before, so how would they know what the UI flow is supposed to be?
If anything this is worse than the scenario we described in the admin back end: if the the guest can renumber an *approved* booking from the front end just by clicking back / forward, resuming a session or resubmitting a request then you have a real problem in the code handling the requests, don’t you?
Are you aware of *any* scenarios from the front end booking process that can cause a confirmed booking to be renumbered?
Thank you in advance, Adrian.

[J. Davis]

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your reply. This case might happen to the same customer so another customer could not book the same dates and overbooking was impossible. Though we have already fixed this issue since Hotel Booking 4.2.2. Please make sure you use the latest version of the plugin.

best regards,
J. Davis

[Adrian Ince]

This problem occured since 4.2.2
We are currently using 4.2.5

[J. Davis]

Hi Adrian,

The issue has been fixed and should not occur since 4.2.2 version. Most likely it is another case. Do you still get the bookings re-numbered or it happened once? Can you replicate the issue with 4.2.5 version?

best regards,
J. Davis

[Adrian Ince]

See above. In summary:
– It has only happened twice
– We can not reproduce the issue
– We can demonstrate that it DID happen, because we have emails with the booking numbers in the subject line for what is the *same* booking
– The last time it happened it was version 4.2.5

We need to understand how this happens, whether it is under our control in the backend or caused by user booking process in the front end. We are worried that this is part of a bigger problem with front end UI and that we may be losing bookings completely.

[J. Davis]

Hi Adrian,

Thanks for your reply. You may submit a request to our support team providing screenshots and we’ll investigate the case further.

best regards,
J. Davis

[Author]

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