The Availability Calendar is one of the main part of booking engine. You can find the Availability Calendar settings in “Basic settings” section of each booking object. They are:
- Available from Date, Available to Date – they determine the main date range in which the object is available for reservation (required)
- Cyclic availability: start after every N days – useful for cruises and similar businesses, where your object is available for booking in N days from the previous available date (leave blank or 0 to skip this option)
- Cyclic availability: available N days after start – if previous field value > 1 the object will be available for booking next N days after new cycle started including day of the start (for cruises this value usually will be 1)
- Date to exclude – excludes date from the Availability calendar. You can specify any number of dates here (optional)
- Maximum number of Guests – should be 1 or greater (required)
- Number of items – number of the same rooms, cars, etc. (optional)
For tours and similar events, which have “recurrent custom” booking period in booking rule settings, the additional “Schedule section” is shown. You have to specify Duration of your event here and add available times for booking to each day of the week. Note, that you need to click “Save schedule” button in this section to apply your changes.
The main Availability Calendar settings could be partially overwritten by rates in “Prices” section. Since every rate has “Start days” option you can exclude, for example, Monday from “Start days” in all rates, and the booking object will not available for booking on all Mondays. Read more about Rates and Prices.
Front-end Availability Calendar
By default the Availability Calendar is shown on the booking object page on site front-end (you can change it on the plugin setting page). It contains prices for each available date (they are displayed when you hover over a cell) and is synchronized with the booking form widget.
Below is an example of the calendar with cyclic availability:
