Businesses like Hotel Reservations, Villa bookings, Tour Packages, Equipment or Costume on hire, etc., require a booking functionality that allows their customers to book or rent their products for multiple days.

For instance, while making a hotel reservation, you want customers to be able to choose the check-in date and check-out date for their reservation. Here’s when the Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce plugin’s Multiple Nights Booking type comes in.

Multiple Nights booking is divided into three types:

1. Simple products booking
2. Variable products booking
3. Minimum Day booking for multiple days

These settings work differently for Admin and Customers.

1. Admin Section

Let’s take the instance of booking a hotel room for 3 nights.

Create a bookable product from the Products > Add Product link.

Find the Booking Meta Box. Press the toggle button to Enable Booking.

You can convert your normal WooCommerce product into a bookable product by enabling these settings.

Now, select the Multiple Nights option in the Booking type drop-down as shown below:

Select Booking Type as Multiple Nights

Next, go to the Availability tab as shown below:

Adding additional settings

In this case, you can specify how long the bookings can be made or if they are available in advance. This ensures that customers avoid booking a room just a few minutes before.

For this, you will have to fill in the following fields to update settings in the Availability tab:

A. Advance booking period (in hours) field

This will help you specify the number of hours before you need an advance booking notice.

It is set to ‘0’ hours by default for the above-mentioned instance.

B. Number of dates to choose field

This field lets you determine the maximum number of days from the present day for hotel reservations.

It could be set to a month (30 days) or even a year (365 days).

For this instance, you can set it to 30 days, which means you can enable the customer to see in the calendar the dates for a month to book the hotel room.

C. Maximum bookings on any date field

This setting allows you to set the maximum number of hotel room reservations for that particular date.

Once the threshold is reached, the rooms will be unavailable for further bookings.

It is set to 60 bookings in a day in our above instance.

D. Minimum Number of Nights to book field

This setting enables hotels to keep a mandatory mark on bookings. It is where a customer needs to make a booking for at least those many days.

For instance, if you want the customer to select at least 2 nights for booking compulsorily, you will enter the value 2 here.

This option is used by some hotel booking businesses to acquire more sales or revenue.

Most hotels do not make this mandatory; hence, you can also set it to ‘0’ as in the above instance.

E. Maximum number of nights to book field

This setting allows customers to book for the maximum number of nights for multiple days of booking.

The bookings made cannot exceed that mark, and dates in the calendar will appear accordingly. For instance, if you want to accept only 5-night bookings for a room, you will add 5 here. This will let the customer select only a maximum of 5 bookings and not more.

For this instance, the field is set to 365 days above. 

Scroll down to add all the bookable weekdays along with the above settings:

Selecting bookable weekdays 

Once you have completed all the above steps, the simple product of hotel room reservation is ready for taking multiple night bookings.

Let us now look at how these settings would reflect on the front end for customers to make bookings.

2. Customer Section

The newly created simple product Hotel Sinclaire will appear on the front end of the website as shown here:

Product displayed on the front end

The Start Date and End Date options appear only in the Multiple Nights settings.

This implies you need to select the date of the check-in day and the check-out day of your stay in the hotel.

So click on Start Date and select a date from the calendar as shown below:

Selecting the Start Date for hotel booking

The date starts from 27th February 2024.

The month of March show dates are available till 27th March 2024, as shown below.

This is because 30 days from the present date was set in the Number of dates to choose field in the Availability settings.

Select the End Date for hotel booking

Let’s say the customer chooses the check-in date as 27th March 2024.

They now move on to select the check-out date.

Click on the End Date field and select the date from the calendar. The end date was selected as 30th March 2024. 

Note that the price will be calculated by multiplying with the selected number of days to book the product.

Once the start date and end dates have been selected, the Book Now! button will be enabled as shown below:

Add to Cart button enabled

Clicking it will add the order to your cart.

Clicking the View Cart button will redirect you to the Cart page, which will show the selected booking details:

Details on the Cart page

Clicking the Proceed to Checkout button takes you to the Checkout page, which previews the actual order.

Order details on the Checkout page

Your order is now placed, and you will receive an order confirmation as shown below:

Order confirmation page showing all booking details

The above example demonstrated the setup for booking a hotel room for 3 nights using the multiple-booking method.

Similarly, you can set up bookings for making appointments, managing reservations, and renting with the Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce.