How to Add a Hotel Room Booking System in WordPress

A website booking system offers a convenient and efficient way for customers to reserve hotel rooms at any time, from anywhere.

Whether users book from their desktops during work hours or on their mobile phones in the middle of the night, an online booking system makes the process quick and hassle-free. This flexibility not only improves the overall user experience but also ensures that potential reservations are never missed.

Having a booking system on your website can also reduce your staff’s workload, as customers can manage their bookings independently by checking availability, making modifications, or canceling reservations.

In this article, we will show you how to easily add a hotel room booking system in WordPress.

Why Add a Hotel Booking System in WordPress?

If you own a hotel, motel, or resort, then adding a hotel room booking system to your WordPress website can be extremely beneficial.

It will allow users to easily book a room online without having to visit or call your hotel. This convenience can improve user experience and convince more users to choose your hotel over the competition.

Plus, it can save time and effort in managing reservations because the system can automatically update room inventory, pricing, and availability.

It can also provide a secure platform for customer transactions and data protection, reducing the risk of fraud.

Overall, adding a room booking system to your hotel website can enhance your customer service, generate more revenue, and help streamline your reservation process.

That being said, let’s see how you can easily add a hotel room booking system in WordPress.

How to Add a Hotel Room Booking System in WordPress

First, you need to install and activate the Pinpoint Booking System plugin. For more instructions, please see our step-by-step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Configure the Calendar Settings

Upon activation, head over to the Pinpoint Booking System » Calendars page from the WordPress admin sidebar. Then, click on the calendar in the left column to open up its settings.

This will open a monthly calendar where you can configure your hotel’s availability. Simply click on any date in the calendar to open its settings in the right column.

Next, you can select room availability from the ‘Status’ dropdown menu. You should choose the ‘Booked’ option if all the rooms have been booked for that date. Alternatively, you can choose the ‘Available’ option if some rooms haven’t been booked yet.

Once you have done that, you will need to set a price for the available rooms by typing the value into the ‘Price’ box.

After that, simply type the number of rooms that are available into the ‘Number Available’ box.

If you want, you can also add extra information in the ‘Information’ box.

Now, you need to click on the gear icon at the top to configure calendar settings.

Once you are there, you can start by typing in a calendar name. This name won’t be displayed on your website and is just for your reference.

After that, scroll down to the ‘General Settings’ section. From here, you can select the date type, calendar style template, timezone, and more.

You can also choose the number of months that you want to display in your calendar at a time.

After making your choices, you need to scroll down to the ‘Currency’ section.

Here, simply choose the currency your hotel accepts from the dropdown menu. If you want, you can also choose a currency position from the dropdown menu so that the currency sign will be shown after the numbered price.

However, we recommend leaving this setting as the default.

Next, you must move to the ‘Day Settings’ section, and select the available days, first weekday, first day displayed, and more.

You can also choose to enable/disable morning checkout.

If you want to rent out hotel rooms by the hour, then you must scroll down to the ‘Hours Settings’ section.

From here, simply toggle the ‘Use Hours’ switch to ‘Enable’ and then configure the settings as you like.

You can also sync the hotel booking system with your Google Calendar by scrolling down to the ‘Google Calendar Sync settings’ section.

Here, toggle the ‘Enable Google Calendar Sync’ switch on, and then provide the client ID, project ID, calendar ID, and the token URL of your Google Calendar.

After that, head over to the ‘Sidebar Settings’ section.

From here, you can choose a template to display the hotel room booking system on the front end.

Configure the Hotel Booking System Notification Settings

Once you are done, make sure to click on the envelope icon at the top to configure the calendar’s notification settings.

You can start by adding your email address in the ‘Notification Email’ box. This is the email address where you will be notified when someone books a hotel room using your website.

If you are having trouble receiving WordPress emails, then you may want to take a look at our guide on how to fix WordPress not sending emails issue.

Next, you need to type the email address that you want to use to send messages to the customers into the ‘Reply Email’ box. After that, add the same email address into the ‘Admin Email Sender’ box if you are the administrator of the website.

Once you have done that, type a name into the ‘Email Name’ box. This name will be displayed in emails sent to your customers by the booking system plugin.

The plugin already comes with default email templates that it uses to send emails.

However, if you want to create your own email template, then you will have to visit the Pinpoint Booking System » Email Templates page.

From here, just click on the ‘+’ button at the top to open up a new email template. Next, select an email type from the ‘Select Template’ dropdown menu and add your preferred content to the ‘Message’ section.

Once you are done, your changes will be automatically saved.

Next, head back to the ‘Calendar Notification Settings’ page and scroll down to the ‘Enable Notifications’ section. Here you can decide when you want users to be notified with an email.

For instance, if you want to send an email to a user once their reservation has been approved, simply toggle the switch next to that option to enable it.

Configure the Payment Gateway Settings

Once you have done that, click on the wallet icon at the top to configure the payment gateway settings.

From here, you need to toggle the ‘Enable payment on arrival’ switch if you will allow customers to pay when they check in to your hotel.

Next, you have to expand the ‘Billing Address’ section and toggle the ‘Enable billing address’ switch to activate the setting. Then, simply choose the details that the customer must fill in before they can book a hotel room.

For instance, you can ask for a customer’s first name, last name, address, country, phone number, and email.

Next, you can also enable the shipping address by toggling the ‘Enable shipping address’ switch.

After that, click on the ‘PayPal’ section to expand it and then toggle the ‘Enable PayPal payment’ switch.

Now, go ahead and simply add your PayPal credentials to activate the payment gateway.

Once you are done, your settings will be automatically saved.

Configure the Booking Form Settings

After setting up a booking system calendar, you need to visit the Pinpoint Booking System » Forms page from the WordPress admin sidebar.

By default, the plugin has already created a simple contact form that customers can use to secure bookings on your website.

Adding this contact form to your website will allow customers to skip third-party hotel booking platforms like Booking.com. It will also save on commission fees that you would otherwise have to pay to these booking sites.

You can also add a new field to the default booking form by clicking on the ‘+’ button next to the ‘Form Fields’ options. Once the new field has been added, simply click on the ‘Show Settings’ button to expand it.

Next, you can add a field name and choose its allowed characters and size. You should also toggle on the ‘Required’ switch if the field you are creating is essential for the booking process.

Once your contact form has been created, users will be able to book reservations using it.

Now, to check your reservations, you will have to visit the Pinpoint Booking System » Reservations page from the admin sidebar.

Here, you can see all the reservations on your website, and you can select their statuses as ‘Pending’, ‘Approved’, or ‘Rejected’ from the ‘Status’ section.

You can also choose a payment method for those reservations from the ‘Payment method’ section.

To manually add a new reservation, you will have to click on the ‘+’ icon at the top.

This will open up the booking system on the right side of the screen, and you can enter details to create the reservation.

Configure the General Settings

To configure the general settings, you need to visit the PinPoint Booking System » Settings page from the admin sidebar.

Next, click on the ‘User Permissions’ option from the left column. This will open up a list of options where you can select the WordPress user roles that will be allowed to edit their own calendars.

You can even set permissions for specific users by expanding the ‘Set permissions on individual users’ tab.

From here, simply check the ‘Use Booking System’ box next to the user role that is allowed to make changes to their hotel booking system calendar.

Adding the Hotel Room Booking System to a WordPress Post or Page

You can easily add the hotel room booking system to a page or post using a shortcode.

For this tutorial, we will be adding the booking system to a page.

First, you need to open up an existing or new page from the admin sidebar. Once you are there, click on the Add Block ‘(+)’ button at the top left corner and locate the Shortcode block.

Upon adding the block to the WordPress page, simply copy and paste the following shortcode into the block.

[dopbsp id=1]

Finally, click the ‘Update’ or ‘Publish’ button to save your changes.

Now, you can visit your website to see the hotel room booking system in action.

Bonus: Show Weather Forecast in WordPress

If your hotel is in an area where the climate isn’t as stable, then you can also show a weather forecast on your business website. This will allow users to make an informed decision when planning a trip to that place.

For instance, if you have a hotel in Bali where the rainy season is prevalent from November to April, then adding a forecast will make planning easier for customers planning to visit during those months.

To do this, you can use the Location Weather plugin. This tool will show the wind speed, temperature, air pressure, visibility, and more.

Upon activation, just visit the Location Weather » Settings page and add the API key for OpenWeather. This will be the online service the plugin will use to fetch real-time forecasts for your site.

Once you do that, you can go to the Location Weather » Add New page and choose the city and location whose weather you want to showcase.

Then, you can check the units that Location Weather is using for temperature, pressure, and wind speed, and make any necessary changes.

Once you are done, just click the ‘Publish’ button to store your settings. The plugin will now give you a shortcode that you can add to any page to display the weather forecast.

For more information, see our tutorial on how to show the weather forecast in WordPress.

We hope this article helped you learn how to add a hotel room booking system in WordPress. You may also want to see our beginner’s guide to adding a customer reviews page in WordPress and our list of shopping cart abandonment statistics to improve your site.

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