Take bookings on your website

Tables, rooms, classes, sessions, courts, or the whole place: your website can take bookings you confirm, or instant ones, with an admin page at /admin. How it works and how to set it up.

Your website can take bookings itself: a table for tonight, a room for three nights, a place in Saturday's class, a court for an hour. Customers pick a time on your site and leave their details; you get an email, they get one too, and everything is listed in your admin page. No extra subscription, no commission, and it keeps working on your own domain or if you ever move the site.

What it does

  • Shows what is free and what is taken, for each thing people can book.
  • Lets a customer pick a night, a day or a time slot and send their details.
  • Emails you what came in. If you chose to confirm bookings yourself, the email has two buttons, Accept and Decline. If you chose instant booking, it is confirmed on the spot.
  • Emails the customer: an acknowledgement, then your answer.
  • Gives you an admin page at /admin on your site: bookings to answer, what is coming up, dates or hours you block by hand, and the history.

Setting it up

Ask the assistant in your project for bookings, in your own words: "I want people to book a table", "let guests reserve the room", "sign up for a class". Its first question decides the shape: do you want bookings to arrive as an email you answer yourself, or do you want the site to keep count of places and show what is full? The email option is a booking form that reaches your inbox, and that is often all a business needs. If you want the site to keep count, it asks a few more questions and builds the rest:

  1. What people book (you can have several: two rooms, three tables, a class and a workshop).
  2. How time is counted: by night, by time slot, or by whole day.
  3. How many at once: one per room, six per table, twelve per class.
  4. Who confirms: you, or booked instantly.
  5. What you need from the customer: name and email always, plus phone, party size, a message, or anything specific to your business.
  6. Where your bookings live today. The usual answer is "just email me". If you already use a platform that shares a calendar link (Airbnb, Booking.com, Google Calendar), the assistant can connect it so those dates show as taken too: see Connect your Airbnb and Booking.com calendars.
  7. Your rules: minimum or maximum length, how far ahead, opening days and hours, dates that are never bookable.

Then it writes every message in your language, places the booking widget on the right pages in your site's style, and asks you to make one test booking.

Your admin page

Your site gets an admin page, usually at /admin. The assistant tells you how to open it: either with your site's own login, or with a password you choose. The assistant asks for it through a secure card in the chat, it is kept in Website settings under environment variables, and you can change it there any time.

From there you accept or decline requests, cancel a booking, and block dates or hours (your own use, maintenance, holidays).

See your bookings in your own calendar

Your site can give you a private calendar link, one per thing people book, with every confirmed booking and every block. Add it to the calendar you already use: in Google Calendar, Other calendars, then the plus sign, then From URL; in Apple Calendar, File, then New Calendar Subscription; in Outlook, Add calendar, then Subscribe from web. Ask the assistant for "the calendar link for my bookings" and it shows you where to find it on your admin page. The link appears once your site is published, because your calendar app will keep reading it from your live site, and it stays the same when you connect your own domain. Calendar apps refresh subscriptions on their own schedule, from a few minutes to a few hours.

Good to know

  • A request does not block anything until you accept it. Two customers can ask for the same slot; you choose. Instant bookings block on the spot.
  • Payments and deposits are not part of this yet. You arrange payment with the customer as you do today. Online payment is planned as a separate addition.
  • Connected platform calendars are not instant. They refresh their links every 15 minutes to a few hours; your site re-reads them every 10 minutes. That is true for every tool using these links.
  • Moving your site elsewhere? Everything is code and settings inside your site. Set the same environment variables on the new host and it works.