Running a hotel can be a demanding job especially when it comes to managing your reservations in a way that ensures the convenience of your guests and that can prevent any overlaps in your bookings. You are also required to determine your rates for various seasons, provide additional services, and, perhaps, have some special offers to give your customers. After you are done with all of that, you need to figure out an efficient channel through which your customers can pay for their reservations.
It might be unpractical to go about installing each of these features to your website with the help of a developer, since such an attempt would be costly, time-consuming, and will require having an in-house team to offer support for such a system. A more practical approach would be to use a hotel booking plugin that can take care of the whole process for you, including support, for a modest price and more guaranteed performance. In this article, I'm going to introduce to you 6 of the top hotel booking plugins for WordPress.
HBook
HBook covers your entire booking process, providing your customers with all of the tools they will need to land in one of your hotel rooms.
HBook can enable you to install a fully functional booking system on your website within a few simple steps. You are first asked to define the types of accommodation you offer, the seasons, and your rates. You then get to embed a booking form anywhere you prefer on the website using a shortcode. There are also shortcodes that you can use to embed rates tables, accommodation types lists, or an availability calendar. Basically, any WordPress beginner can manage to successfully finish this process without the slightest confusion. Luckily, all of these forms and tables can be perfectly integrated into your website's theme.
On the functional side, HBook will provide your users and potential guests with a level of comfort that will definitely extend their convenience with your services to the earliest phase which is booking. The plugin's booking process is quite smooth, facilitating everything that customers will need to make their decisions, from a robust search engine to multiple payment options and right up to booking confirmation. HBook also allows you to offer extra services to customers and have them included in the reservation bill. Users can be allowed to choose between paying a deposit or the full amount, and you can include multiple payment channels, including credit cards, PayPal, bank transfers, or payment on arrival.
The plugin's pricing system is quite advanced and will enable you to offer rates based on complex calculations that take into consideration the various factors that affect the price, which will simply make the pricing more fair for both you and the customer. It will also enable you to issue discounts and vouchers, set custom fees, and charge security deposits. That way HBook will be covering you in every dimension of the booking process. Finally, HBook helps you manage your data pretty effectively. Through the admin dashboard, you will get to manage your bookings, export bookings to CSV files, send out automatic emails, and manage the finances. A special feature of HBook is that it enables you to synchronize the bookings on your website with major accommodation platforms like Airbnb, booking.com, VRBO, Google Cal, and others.
Hotel Booking by MotoPress
- https://motopress.com/products/hotel-booking/
- Price: Single Site ($49) – Unlimited Sites ($149)
With this hotel booking plugin from MotoPress, managing your bookings will be easier than you have ever done it before.
Using this plugin, you can make your website capable of facilitating all sorts of property rental and hospitality services. Users will have everything needed for the booking process to go smoothly. The plugin lets you embed a form through which users can check the availability as well as reservation forms. By entering their check-in and check-out dates and the personal data, users will get to view all of the information related to their inquiry. You can provide users with a description of the property in addition to its capacity, facilities, bed size, and so on.
The booking calendar will be a huge relief for you with regard to keeping track of your bookings. The calendar appears to you inside the dashboard with all of the bookings marked on it, and you can use the calendar's interface to manage the bookings and any other data. The plugin even lets you customize your seasons and mark them on the calendar, as well as determine the rates on each room, allowing you to set different rates for the same room type. You can choose whether to make the money refundable or not and what the terms of the reservations should be. A single guest can be allowed to book various accommodations within the same transaction and with a single invoice. Besides the accommodation, the plugin also lets you add various other services alongside the rooms that can be added to the bill as well. In addition to all of that, the invoices can include any special mandatory fees, taxes, etc.
Moreover, this plugin has a feature similar to the one that I mentioned with HBook that lets you sync your bookings with major online travel agencies like Airbnb and Booking.com. There are various payment gateways integrated here that you can allow users to pay through. These include PayPal, 2Checkout, Braintree, Stripe, and Beanstream. There's also an add-on for WooCommerce payments, which itself comes with a fairly long list of payment gateways. Through the admin dashboard, you will get to issue coupon codes by which users can receive discounts when making reservations on your website. You can also customize emails to go out automatically to your users whenever you need to notify them about their bookings or otherwise.
WP Hotel Booking
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-hotel-booking/
- Price: Free
Managing your bookings, payments, invoices, special events, and many other things from inside your WordPress dashboard cannot be easier than that.
This plugin is amazingly compatible with WordPress and can be one of the most practical plugins on this list. It comes with a complete hotel booking system which you can fully manage from inside your WordPress dashboard. Using this plugin, you can manage your rooms and reservations without any of the excessive efforts that usually go with that. You can receive reservations, approve them, send out email confirmations, and receive payments quite easily. The plugin is also set up as to ease the task of pricing, enabling you to set various pricing plans and special packages to attend to the needs of various types of customers. In case there are special dates that you don't want to be included in these plans like holidays, special events, etc., you can mark these on the calendar and customers will not be able to access them while booking.
The payment options that are provided by this plugin are plenty. Customers can pay in multiple currencies both online and offline. Online payments can be made via PayPal, Authorize.net, or Stripe. There are free add-ons for each of these payment gateways. There are also add-ons that are offered for free through which you can issue discount coupons, receive booking statistics, and gain access to various other features. The last two add-ons that I want to mention here are the WooCommerce payment add-on by which you can include all of WooCommerce's payment solutions, and the WPML add-on through which you can translate your website to any of a wide variety of languages.
Hostel PRO
- http://wp-hostel.com/
- Price: Hostel PRO ($47) – Hostel PRO Ensuite ($67)
Hostel PRO provides an easy, straightforward booking process that your guests will not struggle with one bit.
Hostel PRO is definitely a plugin that you would want to consider when setting up a booking system for your website. Through this plugin, you can rent out an unlimited number of rooms in your hotel/hostel. Users can be allowed to view all of the details about each room, including the number of beds, room type, bathroom usage, and receive a definitive rate for the period they are trying to book. You can also use the plugin's discount and surcharges feature that lets prices move up and down based on a set of factors or conditions. Hostel PRO gives you the capability to customize your own booking form and using a shortcode, you can embed this form wherever you want on the website.
If you happen to have a limited capacity and want to leave some rooms available for special occasions, you can easily set the dates of unavailability so that they do not appear in the users' search results in the first place. The listing of rooms can be done using a shortcode as well, and with the list appears a date selector where users can make their bookings right away. There is also an availability calendar shortcode, and through iCal, you can synchronize your bookings with a number of major online booking platforms. Hostel PRO is integrated with PayPal and Stripe for online payments, and if you happen to use the basic version of the plugin, you will still get PayPal. Finally, Hostel PRO's analytics are brilliant when it comes to keeping track of your hotel's reservations, availability, and so on.
The Ensuite Module adds a few other features to the ones I already mentioned. For starters, it lets you set up email reminders, confirmations, and thank-you messages that can be automatically sent out to customers. It also enables you to manage your staff members through your dashboard, track the hotel's expenses, and update the hotel's room service schedule more easily.
Hotel Master
Hotel Master will not only give your hotel's website a truly shiny and hospitable look, but the theme is quite practical as well.
Hotel Master is a theme rather than just a plugin, which means that it will also help you design the website in order to have it fit the booking functions that you want for your hotel. The booking layout that the theme installs will definitely be quite convenient for your customers. It enables you to list as many rooms as you want with a description of each room, its specifications, type, price, and maximum capacity. Users can filter these various rooms and categories using the theme's advanced search engine, and on your side, each booking will appear in a list that you can display and manage from your dashboard.
In addition to the rooms, the theme allows you to list any other facilities or services that you have to offer, and these extra services, as well as access to any exclusive facilities in the hotel, can be added to the total booking bill. These services can be removed or edited just as easily. Hotel Master is pretty flexible when it comes to pricing. You can set fixed prices or have the prices fluctuate based on various conditions. It also enables you to set different rates for each season as well as block certain dates. Through this theme, you'll be able to provide your customers with discount coupons that they can use in later bookings, and you can let them have discounts for booking consecutive nights. The payment methods that the theme is integrated with are PayPal, Stripe, PayMill, and Authorized.net. It's also integrated with WooCommerce which has its own payment solutions.
WPOpal
- http://www.wpopal.com/
- Price: Free
WPOpal enables you to provide a variety of services to your guests and charge them for it while guaranteeing that you have a robust customer support team to serve you while you do so.
WPOpal's hotel booking plugin is pretty impressive for one that is offered completely free of charge. It's very easy to install and set up and can fit seamlessly into any WordPress theme that you're using. The booking process is quite brief, too, consisting only of 4 simple steps after which you get informed inside your WordPress dashboard about the new reservations. You'll find it easy to manage your rooms from listing new rooms to blocking and editing reservations. Guests will be able to pay you using multiple currencies through either PayPal or Stripe. The plugin installs a cart to your website that will make the booking easier for your customers, and it supports taxes and extra fees.
WPOpal also enables you to add extra packages with special rates as well offer your customers discount coupons. Invoices can also include payments for special services like Wi-Fi, airport pickup, laundry, etc. As you provide and manage your hotel, it's a relief to know that you have some support to make sure that everything goes as you want. Well, WPOpal has a robust customer support team that can assist you through every issue that you might face. Last but not least, all of the plugin's features and data undergo automatic search engine optimization and are fully-responsive to any device or screen type.
What About Traffic & Conversions?
Plugins are great when they solve specific problems in an elegant way. They can make your website work better, engage your audience, and build your brand.
A plugin won't autogenerate traffic or guarantee conversions though. It won't magically turn your website into a thriving, cash-generating online business
Get trained on how to start your affiliate marketing business. Build organic search engine traffic, and start converting visitors into money in your pocket!
Nathaniell
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