With the Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce, businesses like hotel or resort booking, air or railway ticketing, tour operators, etc., that provide services throughout the year can accept bookings in advance i.e. some days before the booking date.

Let’s say that you run a tour business. One of your tour packages is for Leh Ladakh.

You want to show all the dates available for booking all year round. Additionally, you want the first available booking date of this tour should be 5 days after the current date.

Here’s how you can set this up:

Admin Experience

Create a product Star Tours – Leh Ladakh package from Products > Add Products link.

On the same Products page, you will also find the Booking Meta Box that allows you to set up your bookable product. Enable settings in the Booking Meta box by clicking the Enable Booking option.

Number of dates to choose and Advance booking period options can work with Only Day Date & Time booking types. Let us check the setup with Multiple Nights option.

Select Booking Type as Multiple Nights and click on Save Settingss button as shown below:

Select Booking type as Multiple Nights

Go to the Availability Tab and configure the Number of dates to choose, Maximum Bookings On Any Date, and Advance Booking Period options. These are set to 365 days, 10 bookings, and 120 hours respectively as shown below.

This means the booking dates enabled will show bookings available for one year (365 days) from the current date. The customer can book the tour 5 days (120 hours) before the tour date.

Also, not more than 10 bookings on a single given day will be accepted.

Other settings in the Availability tab

You provide an all-year-round service so you want your customers to book the tour a minimum of 5 days in advance.

Additionally, you don’t want your customer to choose the weekend as the booking date.

Configure this in the Availability tab by selecting the bookable days from the Weekday table as shown below:

Bookable weekdays selected

Here, the weekdays from Monday to Friday are enabled for booking. Click the Save Settings button and your Leh Ladakh Tour is ready to accept bookings.

User Experience

This is how your Leh Ladakh Tour will look as the customer visits to book your site:

Product display on the front end

The calendar will display bookable dates all around the year except the dates on Saturdays and Sundays.

The first available date to book the tour is 6th December 2017.

This is because the Advance Booking Period option is set to 120 hours from the current date 1st December 2017.

Hence, 5 days after the current date is enabled when booking will be possible.

The first available bookable date for the tour

Now to book the tour, the customer selects the tour from 1st February 2018 to 9th February 2018.

Accordingly, the price is calculated and displayed as shown below.

As we select these dates, the Add to Cart button is enabled. When you click the Add to Cart button, the order is added to your cart.

Clicking the View Cart button will redirect you to the Cart page which will show the booking details as shown below:

Cart page showing booking details

Here the customer can click the Proceed to Checkout button to go to the Checkout page.

It gives you a preview of the actual order.

They can click the Place Order button after checking all the booking details.

Booking details are shown while placing the order

The order is now placed and they will receive an order confirmation as shown below:

Booking details are shown on the Order Confirmation page

The above example used a WooCommerce Simple product with multiple days. However, you can use these features to set a Single-day bookable product too.

To conclude, the Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce’s Advance Booking Period setting is a great facilitator to manage orders as it easily secures your bookings in advance!