Does your WordPress website have a booking function to save your customers time and increase their satisfaction? It is a necessary feature that your business needs to have in the market. People now like to book/ reserve/ register on the internet before coming to the destinations in whatever industry: Travel, Hotel, Restaurant & Cafe, Gym, so they can skip the queue onsite. To have this, we need a WordPress Booking Plugin for your website.
What Features Should Have in a WordPress Booking Plugin?
As the title suggests, of course, you need to find a plugin that has a strong booking system that lets you customize whatever form you like to fit your business. But it’s not good enough, below are some features that we want you to look for:
- A flexible booking form: To customize easily on each business such as a travel website needs to have at least a destinations function, a restaurant website needs to have available time slots, a hotel needs to show available rooms and calendar views, etc. It is indeed important for a booking plugin WordPress.
- A mobile responsive design: To book your service anywhere and anytime on any devices such as smartphones, tablets, desktop computers, etc.
- Automatic email notifications: To let customers know when they reserved or booked successfully and also remind them of their upcoming bookings.
- Integration with online payments: For example, WooCommerce, to give more options and conveniences for your clients. Maybe a small business does not require online payment. However, we live in this age of life, we highly recommend you to integrate this function besides offline payment.
9+ Best WordPress Booking Tools
Now is the time for you to study and pick a WordPress Booking Plugin that you prefer for your own business. Our experts tested and tried most of the booking plugins to give out this list. Let’s explore it.
WP Hotel Booking – Top 1 Free WordPress Booking Plugin
Are you impressed by the elegant Hotel WordPress Theme Sailing or flexible WordPress Travel Theme LuxStay? If you are, you should know that the plugin WP Hotel Booking is the main factor in delivering them to success. In the future, more themes based on this plugin will come out and surely make your experience easy and comfortable.
WP Hotel Booking helps you manage and control your hotel with ease and comfort. Of course, the hotel booking system is very powerful since it’s the heart of any booking plugins or themes. Inside, you can manage rooms, bookings, customers, coupons & deals, pricing plans, and extra packages. Also, you can translate this plugin to many other languages thanks to WPML integration.
For better outcomes, our theme also integrates well with the WooCommerce plugin. Therefore, our users can select freely among 100+ payment gateways. The most popular 4 paying gates are Stripe, PayPal, 2Checkout, and Authorize.net.
BookingPress – Appointments & Scheduling WordPress Booking Plugin
BookingPress is one of the best freemium WordPress booking plugins for all kinds of service-based businesses to manage their client appointment bookings. It is an outstanding, user-friendly, and powerful booking plugin with dozens of amazing features.
With BookingPress Online Booking Plugin, online appointment scheduling is flexible since it is more dynamic and packed with fantastic features.
It is also a best-suited WordPress appointment plugin for salons, tutors, gym & fitness studios, doctors, spas, consultants, wedding planners, yoga studios, dealers, and restaurants.
Features:
● 32+ Premium add-ons completely FREE (it is the only WordPress Booking Plugin that gives such a huge facility)
● 15+ new online payment gateways integration FREE (PayPal, Razorpay, Stripe, Mollie, Authorize.net, 2Checkout, PagSeguro, Braintree, Worldpay, Paystack, PayUMoney, PayPal Pro, PayFast, Square, Worldpay, Skrill, WooCommerce, etc.)
● Award-winning responsive design for frontend and backend
● Google, Apple, and Outlook calendar integrations.
● Fully customizable booking forms and customer panel
● Advanced service options with extras selection
● Advanced staff dashboard for staff members
● Email, WhatsApp & SMS notifications.
● Invoice feature with pdf support.
● Custom booking fields with conditional hide/show.
● Suitable for various types of business
● Cart add-ons facility for multi-booking.
● Advanced reports and analysis.
● 24/7 Customer support.
Bookly – Great Free & Paid WordPress Booking Plugin
Bookly is the first booking plugin WordPress we have to mention here. There are Free and Paid versions.
The free version usually has a simple booking system but it’s still good enough for you if you do not require such features. It offers an online booking form that allows users to schedule time and date as well as a reserve on your website. Moreover, this free plugin has a mobile-friendly form, it looks great even on the small screen size. After booking, users will receive not only an email but also an SMS to confirm the online reservation with the upcoming plan reminder too. However, the free version allows online payments through the Stripe Payments option in Bookly Cloud.
Besides the features of the free version, the Bookly Pro version offers you a complete booking system. By integrating with the WooCommerce plugin, you can pay online with different channels. Actually, you can pay cash on arrival or pick one in ten online payment options. Plus, this plugin syncs with Google Calendar to manage staff workload, hours, and bookings. If there are busy slots in Google Calendar, this plugin will auto close that time and provide the best available time slots. Let’s check out to understand more information and make this plugin yours!
Booked – A Strong WordPress Booking Plugin
If you are interested in the WordPress Booking Plugin, Booked is another tool that definitely helps you out. If you feel hassle with the registration when you book something on some websites, Booked brings a new feature to you. It allows your customers to book appointments right away by only providing a name and email address. You can show the time slots in a calendar or list view, add multi-calendars with a lot of color types and assign to the specific agent to handle each one.
In addition, Booked supports WooCommerce to purchase online instead of paying cash onsite. Using Booked on mobile or laptops or other devices is possible. Even if you wish to translate to another language, you can do as well. The price of this plugin is quite reasonable, $49, it includes 6 months of support and lifetime updates. Well, worth considering!
Booking Calendar – A Free WordPress Booking Plugin
Booking Calendar is a free WordPress booking calendar plugin. Do you know that this is the first booking tool for WP and the oldest one? Booking Calendar has necessary functions for your small/ medium business. Customers can check the availability and choose the date & time slot then submit their appointment. A notification email will be sent out to them and you can either accept or decline that booking via the admin panel dashboard. Also, you can import Google Calendar Events easily to the booking admin as well. The plugin also supports captcha for the security part to test and avoid spam too.
Amelia – Free WordPress Booking Plugin
Amelia Free WordPress Booking Plugin version is a well-established booking system for the smooth management of online appointment scheduling and event reservation processes. This practical booking system will take away the burden of repetitive tasks in a technically accurate and easy-navigating way.
The full Amelia version, however, gives you the complete booking experience. You will have Google and Outlook integration for your employees, email and SMS reminders, and Online payments with WooCommerce, PayPal, Stripe, Razorpay, and Mollie. Front-end customer and employee panel. Custom fields, group bookings, multiple locations, deposit payments, packages option, Zoom, Google meet integration, and many more, just in one booking plugin
WooCommerce Bookings And Appointments
If you are struggling to find the finest bookings and appointments handling tool for your online business, WooCommerce Bookings & Appointments plugin is the best one to run your bookings and rentals without having any difficulty. This booking solution seamlessly works with WooCommerce and offers single & multiple-day bookings, bookings with start and end dates, recurring, adjacent, and non-adjacent bookings, etc. You can set up bookings based on time, date, days, hours as well
This plugin is compatible with WooCommerce Bookings Addons and easily integrates with other plugins like WooCommerce Product Addons and WooCommerce Deposits Plugin to handle partial payments and deposits. This plugin has great compatibility with some of the most popular WooCommerce solutions like Multi-Currency Switcher, WPML, recurring bookings, etc
WooCommerce Bookings & Appointments plugins offer the usable functionalities like Emails notifications and reminders, Setting up booking confirmation and cancellation, Two-way google calendar sync, Buffer time between bookings, Booking Search widget, Calendar design customization, and many more so that store owners can set up their bookings to attract their customers.
If you are looking for a booking tool that is handy and feature-rich, try WooCommerce Bookings & Appointments plugin today. This plugin has both free and paid versions. The plugin pricing starts from $99 for a single-site license and goes up to $259 for 25 sites license.
WP Simple Booking Calendar
WP Simple Booking Calendar is another WordPress Booking Plugin. Even though this is a free version, you still can use all the basic functions of a booking system. Clients can check the legend near the calendar and select the preferred date, however, they can not reserve the time slots. The plugin is translation-ready with backup/ restore calendars.
If you do feel that this free plugin is not enough, you can check out the premium version. It offers a powerful booking calendar that users can book multiple times. You might be familiar with Airbnb, Booking.com, or Agoda, then this version can sync the calendars with those famous platforms too.There are various options to customize the booking system such as showing multiple months, editing week/ month/ year.
WooCommerce Bookings
Next is WooCommerce Bookings plugin from WooCommerce extensions for the booking system WordPress. You can set up for customers to book and reserve preferred time slots of classes, appointments, rentals, tours, hotels, etc. Blocking the time off and creating buffers between bookings are easier with this plugin. If you want to customize the different prices, it’s possible. You can receive the confirmation email to check before approving that order or set up a cancellation function or remind customers of the upcoming bookings.
However, this extension comes with $249 for only one site, and with $449 for 25 sites, it’s quite expensive compared with others. On the other hand, they do not offer only 6-month support as normal, they give you 1-year support. You can request a full refund within 30 days counted from the time you purchased. Because it’s base on the free WooCommerce plugin so this WooCommerce Booking integrates well with all other WooCommerce extensions and add-ons
BirchPress
BirchPress is a professional WordPress Booking Plugin. It is a fully responsive plugin. Customers access your site to check and book online appointments anywhere. Paying through Paypal or any kind of payment by the WooCommerce integration. Moreover, BirchPress syncs with all kinds of calendars(Google, Outlook, Ical, etc).. Same other booking plugins, email notifications, and reminders are in the package too. In short, BirchPress is suitable for small businesses such as education, healthcare, fitness, salons, etc.
MotoPress Appointment Booking
The WordPress Appointment Booking plugin by MotoPress helps you arrange online scheduling on any service-related website. It provides you with a mobile-friendly booking wizard. You can add any number of custom services and multiple employees. Flexible timetables may include lunch breaks, vacations, days off, etc. Let your clients make an appointment for a group or individual and add several services to the cart during one submission.
You can accept online and offline payments, sync bookings with an employee’s Google Calendar, and define Appointment Manager and Appointment Employee user roles. This WordPress scheduling plugin allows you to view bookings in a centralized calendar, provide discounts via coupon codes, and edit existing bookings.
MotoPress Hotel Booking
MotoPress Hotel Booking is a powerful WordPress reservation plugin. It’s absolutely for hotel or vacation rental sites. It offers 2-way iCal auto synchronizations with Airbnb, TripAdvisor, booking.com, etc. Also, with WooCommerce, you can pay through many gateways. If you run a promotion, Motopress gives you the option to set up coupons on the admin dashboard. Those coupons can have expiration dates as well. The plugin integrates with famous editors such as Gutenberg, Divi, Elementor, and it also has email notifications, well-documented, WPML, and more. There is a collection of WordPress hotel themes that are powered up by this plugin for free.
StartBooking
StartBooking is the last WordPress Booking Plugin on our list today. It gives you 14 days of trial with unlimited site & appointment, and they offer a money-back guarantee option if you wish to apply for a refund. StartBooking lets you customize online appointments easily and connect to Google Calendar for better arrangement. By providing time slots, duration, group booking, working days & hours, you can have in hand a smart booking system than ever.
Moreover, your clients can use your site on any size of the screen like desktop, tablet, smartphone, and checking reminder notifications anytime. The plugin integrates with Stripe as well for online payments. If you use an individual package, it costs only $12/ month. And if you go with a business plan, it needs $28/ month with further features such as booking upsells, advanced reports, VIP support, etc.
To Sum Up
It’s the end of our topic today and we hope that you can choose a WordPress Booking Plugin without taking time to study a dozen plugins on the market. If you want to have a free booking plugin, you can visit WP Simple Booking Calendar and you can check out with Bookly if you want a plugin with a lot of features.
Read More: 5 Best Contact Form plugins for WordPress compared
