Bookings and rentals

Bookings turn your marketplace into a rental site. Sellers make a listing bookable by the day, the night or the hour. Buyers see an availability calendar on the listing, pick their dates and send a request, and the seller accepts or declines it. Accepted dates are crossed out, so the same item is never booked twice.

It suits equipment and tool hire, vehicles, holiday homes, rooms, venues and anything else rented out by time.

Payment isn’t taken through your site: buyer and seller arrange it between them once the booking is accepted.

Switch bookings on

If you chose rentals when you created your site, bookings are already on for every category. Otherwise:

1. In the admin panel, go to Addons and open Bookings.
2. Switch on Enable bookings.
3. Under Categories with bookable listings, tick the categories for rentals, for example equipment, vehicles or holiday homes, or tick All categories. Ticking a category includes its subcategories.
4. Click Save changes in the bar at the bottom.

Only listings in these categories can be made bookable.

The calendar shows on listings in the Nova and default themes. With other themes, members can still manage bookings from their account, but buyers can’t request a booking from the listing page.

How sellers make a listing bookable

1. In their account menu, the seller opens Bookings, then the My listings tab.
2. Next to the listing, they click Set up bookings.
3. They tick Buyers can book this listing and fill in the settings below.
4. They click Save.

Setting	What it does
Price per	Per day, Per night (check-in and check-out) or Per hour. The listing’s price is the price of one day, night or hour. A listing without a price shows that the total is agreed with the buyer.
Minimum duration and Maximum duration	In days, nights or hours. A maximum of 0 means no maximum. Hourly bookings stay within one day.
Blocked dates	Dates when the item isn’t available, one date or range per line, with a date picker to add them.
Calendar link	A private link the seller can add to Google Calendar, Apple Calendar or Outlook to see the accepted bookings. Anyone with the link can see them, so Reset link makes the old one stop working.

How buyers book

On the listing, the buyer picks the dates (First day and Last day, or Check-in and Check-out for nights) or the hours on the calendar. Booked and blocked dates are crossed out. The listing shows the number of days, nights or hours and the total. The buyer adds a message to the seller and clicks Request to book.

Visitors who aren’t signed in see the calendar and a Log in to book link. The seller sees Manage bookings and Booking settings links instead.

Limits that keep things fair:

• Day and night bookings start tomorrow at the earliest, hourly bookings from the next hour, and bookings can be made up to 18 months ahead.
• A buyer can have up to 3 open requests per listing, and send up to 10 requests a day across your site.

Managing bookings

Everything happens in Bookings in the account menu, which has three tabs:

Tab	Who uses it	What they can do
Requests received	Sellers	Accept or Decline each request. A request that overlaps a booking already accepted is marked and can only be declined.
My bookings	Buyers	See their requests and bookings, Withdraw request, or cancel an accepted booking before it starts.
My listings	Sellers	Make listings bookable and change their settings.

A seller can also cancel an accepted booking before it starts. Pending requests can overlap each other; only an accepted booking blocks the dates. A request still unanswered when its start date passes expires.

Both sides get an email at every step. You can reword them in Email templates: booking-request, booking-request-sent, booking-accepted, booking-declined, booking-cancelled and booking-update. Booking emails are sent even to members who unsubscribed from emails, because they’re about a booking they made.

Good to know

• Times are shown in your site’s time zone (Settings › General › Regional). Changing the time zone later doesn’t move bookings already made.
• On a private site, calendar apps can’t read the calendar link, because your site asks them to sign in.

Related guides

• Categories — set up the rental categories bookings use.
• Messaging between members — let buyer and seller talk before and after a booking.
• Email templates — reword the booking emails.