I’m designing a website for a friend’s bed & breakfast business. Is there a Stack that would enable B&B customers to book and pay for stays online? I’ve seen holiday rentals operate like this, but that would be quite simple because customers just book Saturday to Sunday and one flat fee for the holiday let. With the B&B there would be quite a few more variables, such as number of nights, children or no children, two adults, one adult etc…
Thanks,
There isn’t a Stack or Plugin that does exactly what you want, at least as far as I’m aware. As you say there are a lot of ‘variables’ which makes it difficult to provide a package solution.
Availability calendars that you could look at incorporating include:
http://www.phpjabbers.com/availability-booking-calendar/
http://fullcalendar.io
http://www.ajaxavailabilitycalendar.com
But I’ve found the small Hotel and B&B trade are using a number of channels (Booking.com, HomeAway, AirBNB etc) as well as their own website. To centralise a diary, take bookings online and update all the channels there are a numbers of services you can incorporate into your site. Take a look at these to get you started:
Supercontrol
Kigo
Freetobook
There are lots more, all of them require a £ subscription, and (in my opinion) none of them are perfect.
Good luck, and if you find (or build) a great solution at a reasonable price, please let me know.
Regards
Mark
I haven’t had to build one of these sites but I’m often curious about booking solutions. If you come up with something you like, I’d be interested in seeing the finished product as well
Thanks for the advice and suggestions!
I dreamt up a possible ‘low tech’ alternative for B&B bookings using a contact form and the old fashioned ‘customer adds up the cost themselves’. It should be possible to change the form settings to push the customer to fill in the variables. Such as ‘Number of Adults…’, ‘Number of children…’ ‘Number of nights…’ ‘Dates required…’. And just as you would on an old-fashioned paper and pen mail order form, add up the cost yourself. It should then be possible to have a stack that allows the customer to manually input the amount payable and then pay. This I think would depend on some sort of calendar of availability, maybe laboriously updated by the b&b owner once bookings are made?
Maybe something like Payloom could be pushed to allow for the input of b&b variables even?
php jabbers scripts are quite easy to set up and it seems they do what you want so give them a try. They Zalsohave really good support department. I use their calendars with RW and there are no problems.
Hi - have you made any progress with this? I’m also building a B&B website and looking for an on-line booking system.
Something like this may help http://www.freetobook.com/index.php
Ah I’ve just seen it was already suggested above.
I do run a B&B and have built several small but perfectly formed B&B sites using FreeToBook. The post above says that it’s a subscription site, but in fact the basic functionality - online booking - is free. You pay for addons, such as credit/debit card processing or a special mobile presentation. It’s good: I’d recommend them wholeheartedly. Don’t reinvent the wheel!
Keep is simple. I have a site that the owner has a holiday home they let out in the UK, Since it is let out for weeks at a time and is only one it was just easier to have her update a Google calendar with ical and use pluskit to update the site. this way customers could see the availability. Works no problem.
most import was get the SEO working that is what really turned the bookings around.
I have a B&B website using the same Nick Cates theme as @scottsteven and it works well - http://thewillowscanterbury.co.uk . Fortunately my client only wants telephone bookings or email enquiries but interesting to see how others do it and I need something like this for a Village Hall booking system so helpful thread
Just noticed that your menu bar disappears on the maps page using Safari. Not sure about other browsers. http://www.towerbungalow.co.uk/location/page23/location.php
If you scroll down it reappears but it’s just a bit confusing for navigation.
just noticed that . I will have to look at when I have time. That is the only windows server I have and it does weird things., I hate using windows as a web server but its the clients choice.
I’ve used Acuity for appts (and it takes payments) but not sure how it’d work for a BnB.
@Beeswax - we have a Stack out now which is good for B&B. More info: