With appointment booking, visitors pick a free time in your calendar and book it with their name and email. It suits coaches, salons, tutors, guided tours or rooms for hire.
Events work the other way round. With an RSVP form, you choose the date and people sign up for it. With a booking, you publish your open hours and the visitor chooses the moment.
The pieces
- Booking types are the services people can book, each with its length, capacity, price and hosts. Find them under HappenBoard → Bookings → Booking types.
- Availability is when each host can be booked: weekly hours, days off, seasons and exceptions. Set it under HappenBoard → Bookings → Availability.
- The Booking Page block is what visitors book with. Each booking type also has a page of its own that already carries it.
- Bookings, under HappenBoard → Bookings, lists every booking that comes in.
A host is a WordPress user who can edit posts, such as an author, an editor or an administrator. There is no separate staff list to keep.
Other blocks list your services, show your open times anywhere on the site, and let customers see their own bookings. See the booking blocks.
Set it up in this order
- Create a booking type and add at least one host.
- Set that host’s availability: open their weekly hours.
- Publish the booking page, or link to the booking type’s own page.
Without a host or open hours, the booking page shows No times available.
What a visitor does
- Opens the booking page and sees a month calendar. Only days with a free time can be clicked.
- Picks a day, then a time. Some booking types first ask How long or With whom.
- Reads the price for that time, then fills in Your name and Email. A signed-in visitor finds both filled in.
- Clicks Confirm booking, or Request booking when the booking type needs your approval.
Times are shown in the visitor’s own time zone, which is named under the list of times.
A booking is not an event: it creates no event post and is not in the iCal feed. The admin Calendar can show bookings beside your events: click its Bookings button.
Manage bookings
HappenBoard → Bookings lists each booking with the customer, the booking type, the host, the date, the status, the seats, the price and what was paid. Tabs filter the list: All bookings, Requests, Confirmed, Completed, Cancelled, Declined and No-show. The search box finds a customer by name or email.
- Approve request and Decline request answer a booking type that needs approval. See approving booking requests.
- Cancel booking frees the time and emails the customer.
- Mark as completed and Mark as no-show record how a confirmed appointment went, once its start time has passed. They fill the Completed and No-show tabs and send no email.
- Notes keeps a private journal on the booking, for your team only.
- Export selected downloads the chosen bookings as CSV. Export CSV downloads the current tab, up to 10,000 bookings per file.
New booking books a customer in yourself, for someone who phoned or walked in. The time is checked like any other, and the booking is confirmed at once with the confirmation email.
Emails the customer receives
- A confirmation with a calendar invite, so they can add the appointment to their own calendar.
- On a booking type that needs approval, an acknowledgement of the request first. Then the confirmation, or a “request declined” email with a Book another time button.
- Reminders 24 hours and 1 hour before the appointment.
- An email when the booking moves, with an updated calendar invite, and one when it is cancelled, with a Book another time button.
The confirmation, the reminders and the email about a moved booking have a link to move or cancel the booking online, until the booking type’s Customer change cutoff. A request still waiting for approval can only be cancelled. With Fixed assignment, a customer can only move to a time their host is free. With Round-robin, another free host takes the booking when theirs is busy at the new time.
Dates are written in the customer’s time zone. Emails go out in the language of the page the booking was made on, with your email branding. Reminders rely on WordPress scheduled tasks (through Action Scheduler when another plugin, such as WooCommerce, provides it), so a site with very few visits can send them late.
Emails your team receives
The host and the site administrator are emailed when a booking is confirmed, when a request waits for approval, and when a booking moves or is cancelled. Nobody is emailed about a change they made themselves.
To stop these emails, go to HappenBoard → Settings → Email and switch off Email the host and the site admin about bookings. The other email settings are in automatic emails.
Who can manage bookings
Administrators and editors can use Bookings, Booking types and Availability. See roles and permissions.
With HappenBoard Pro
Pro adds online payment, deposits, and prices that change by person, date or time. It also shares rooms and equipment between services, reads busy times from Google or Outlook calendars, and adds the Find a Time search block. See what Pro adds.
Next steps
- Creating a booking type: set up your first service.
- Setting your availability: open the hours each host can be booked.
- Publishing the booking page: put the booking form in front of visitors.