Set up booking opportunities for individuals and groups

[Jonas Bühler]

Hi there

I use the Appointment Booking plugin for a small museum where we offer guided tours for individuals and groups.

I set up the service “Führung” (guided tour) to let people book guided tours. I played around with the capacity settings of this service, but it doesn’t yet work how I want it to.

What I want is this:

– Let different individuals book a place in the same guided tour (i.e. allow multiple bookings for the same service at the same time by the same employee)

– Let individuals make bookings for more than one person at once

– Set a minimum number of people that has to be reached in order for the guided tour to take place

– Set a maximum number of people at which the guided tour is fully booked and no longer available for additional bookings

– Set a price per person

How can I do this?

Best wishes
Jonas

[Jonas Bühler]

To specify my problem:

At the moment, I can’t do what I mentioned above because:

1. When I set a minimum capacity for my service, clients cannot make a booking for less people than set as the minimum capacity (contrary to what you say in your documentation).

2. When someone has booked an appointment, this appointment then disappears from the booking form for all other clients, which means that they cannot book the same guided tour.

Best wishes
Jonas

[J. Davis]

Hi Jonas,
Thanks for your question. One customer can book a tour for him/her or add a limited number of other customers (friends, relatives) to bring with him/her. The plugin does not have the option to accept group bookings when different customers book the same timeslot.
As a workaround, you may add employees as places in a group tour and then the same timeslot can be booked as many times as many employees are added.

[Kas]

It is incredible how many workarounds this plugin needs for very simple features. I already had to create more Employees to accommodate different durations/prices for services at different times of the week. Now, for each of those Employees I have to create multiples to make sure my clients can book 25 separate spaces of each time slot. Amazing!! And I have 25 services that will need multiple time slots creating. That is hell of a lot Employees to create. 🙁

[Jonas Bühler]

Yes, you’re absolutely right. Too many workarounds needed to provide basic functionalities – that’s why I chose to switch to a different plugin in the end.

Best wishes
Jonas

[Kas]

What did you end up choosing out of curiosity? I am still testing and looking around..

[Jonas Bühler]

I decided to go with Simply Schedule Appointments, and although this plugin isn’t perfect either, I’m much happier with this.

[J. Davis]

Thanks for your feedback. As for the group bookings we have plans to implement this feature in one of the next versions.

[Kas]

Hi John,
Great to hear about this feature plans to implement it. Do you have an approximate timeline for it?
Does that mean it will be possible to make a service that has bookable slots available to book by preset number of individual users/clients?
Thanks

[J. Davis]

I think it may take up to 1-1.5 months to release it. I guess the admin will be able to set the capacity for each service so different customers can reserve the same timeslot according to the server capacity option.

[Anthony Phillips]

Was this ever implemented, its November now and I can’t find it?

[J. Davis]

Hi Anthony,
Yes, it is possible now since the 2.0.0 version of the plugin https://motopress.com/products/appointment-booking/#release-notes
You can read this post to learn how it works https://motopress.com/blog/wordpress-event-booking/

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