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. Make the toggle for the Enable Booking green.

By enabling these settings, you can convert your normal WooCommerce product into a bookable product.

This time, you will 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 will need to specify how much time in advance the bookings can be made. This ensures that customers avoid booking a room just a few minutes in advance.

For this, you will have to fill these fields:

1. Advance Booking Period (in hours) field

This will help you specify the number of hours before which the bookings will be taken.

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

2. Numer of dates to choose field

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

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 the calendar will show dates for a month to book the hotel room.

3. 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.

You can set it to 60 bookings for a day in our above instance.

4. 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 compulsorily select at least 2 nights for booking, you will enter the value 2 here.

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

Most of the hotels do not keep this mandatory and hence you can also set it to ‘0’.

5. Maximum Number of Nights to book field

This setting allows customers to book for the given maximum number of nights.

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

In this case, you can set the field to 365 days. 

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 product is now ready for taking multiple nights booking.

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 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 first day and the last 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 will show dates available till 27th March 2024.

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

Select the End Date for hotel booking

Let’s say that the customer chooses the Start Date as 27th March 2024.

They now move on to select the End Date.

Click on the End Date field and select the date from the calendar. They have selected the End Date as 30th March 2024. 

Note that the price will be calculated as per 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 booking details:

Details on the Cart page

Clicking the Proceed to Checkout button takes you to the Checkout page which gives you a preview of 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 instance described 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 even rentals with Booking & Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce.