Does anyone know a gadget, functional but also cheap, for booking for a Bed & breackfast to be included in Blocs?
I think @Flashman offers a good solution. Iāve used a number of the PHP jabbers scripts, including the booking systems. All of them integrate and work very well in Blocs. Never had any issues whatsoever. Essentially, theses are independent web applications that are set up on your server with MySQL and PHP. The installation is simple, but PHP Jabbers do offer an installation service if youāre uncomfortable with installing apps on your server. Once the apps are up and running, you incorporate them into your blocs project through a code snippet which the apps conveniently provide in their respective administration areas. In some apps, you have to give some pages a PHP extension (easy to do in Blocs) and you may have to add a piece of code in the head of some pages (normally before doctype) - again, simple in blocs.
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I was going to ask a similar question, however a search uncovered this thread. An existing client has come back asking for a second website. This time itās for a bed & breakfast here in the UK and at present they can be booked through any of a dozen online services like expedia, tripadvisor, Priceline and others.
The client wants the ability to take online bookings direct through the website, but have them sync with these others to avoid double bookings. By booking direct he saves on the commission.
He mentioned synching with booking .com specifically, but having never built a site for a bed & breakfast or hotel I want to do a bit of research in advance before they come back and we talk money.
At this point weāve only discussed my going there to take photos before they open their doors to tourists again in mid September and it looks like weāll have a drone video as well. Can somebody point me in the right direction regarding a suitable plugin or script?
Ideally Iād do this in Blocs but if needs be Iāll use WordPress, which is the most likely to have a suitable plugin I would imagine. Knowing that Blocs will soon export to WordPress I want to learn more about that side anyway.
My own experience with third-party online reservation systems is that they can be a bit of a pain for property owners to deal with unless they have a very clear strategy. You can often see this āfailure of the systemā with companies like AirBnb. Often times, Iāve encountered a situation where a reservation is made on the AirBnb platform, but the property owner has been forced to offer an alternative property. This is the double booking situation coming into play. Unfortunately, small property owners are not really geared up to dealing with listing their property on multiple platforms. However, larger property owners do utilise strategies to minimise the possibility of double booking. Some of the hotels Iāve dealt with list on a few platforms simultaneously. However, because there is no automatic syncing between the various platforms, they have to manually sync their calendars. Many will do this several times a day just to minimise the issue.
One strategy that seems to be deployed frequently is to only list a certain quantity of accommodation types and dates on each platform. Then, as bookings come in from each platform, they are entered manually in the hotelās own system. When the platform starts running out of accommodation, the hotel adds new rooms and dates based on its own availably calendar. Likewise, if he hotel reserves one of itās allocated rooms on itās own system, it removes the allocation from the booking platform.
It really can be a full time job for someone with a large number of properties, but given that many property owners have an occupancy rate of about 70%-80%, they do tend to have a bit of wiggle-room that makes the balancing act all worth while.
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Thanks, no doubt Iāll learn some more when I speak to them again soon and Iāll keep looking in the meantime. In this case they actually operate from their own home, which is a very nice old farmhouse in Cornwall and have just three rooms available, however they are fully booked for when they re-open. He seemed to think there were plugins available for this sort of thing.
His primary aim here is to have people find the property through Google or elsewhere and book direct to save on the booking commission, which I gather is pretty high.
In view of the size of the property and its booking number potential, (probably no more than 150 reservations a year) the use of online booking platforms may be a false economy. The client may be better to deploy a pay per click system to get direct site referrals. I say this because even if booking platforms come up high on the search engine lists, they will tend to only display the type and location of the property the users has searched for. Even if they go to the main page of the platform and conduct a search from there, the search results will be dependent upon the search criteria entered. Therefore, it may be better to get the site SEO correct so that the property appears in more search results for those who know where and when they want to book - which most people do.
When deploying a pay per click SEM strategy, the client really needs to look at his booking history to see where most of his previous clients came from. This could help identify the geographic locations where clients generally originate from and focus the pay-per-click activity to those areas only. This generally results in fewer wasted clicks and more relevant clicks. Iām sure the cost of this type of SEM work would be far less than the commissions paid to the bigger platforms.
Hello Flashman,
I am also looking around for a booking system to integrate into a small 5 room āhotelā website.
I was wondering what your final decision/ solution was ?
I thank-you
Tony
We ended up going with the choice of the client, which is https://en.freetobook.com. There are slicker options out there, but the client likes this one from a cost perspective and it does what you want. The provider was also helpful with support and I was able to integrate it inside Blocs.
This is the only B&B site I did, however it has worked fine and not required any troubleshooting, so I would certainly consider it for future sites as well.
Perfect. Thank-you. Looks like they are U.K oriented, I will contact them. This hotel website is based in Germany. I am still looking around for a fairly priced, good solution. It is astonishing how many systems exist.
Wonderful Jerry. Thank-you for the infoās. I will take a look. 
I own a 5-bedroom guest house in France. Our house is on booking .com but itās out of the question for this company (which has become unavoidable thanks to the huge purchase of keywords on Google) to cannibalise all my bookings and force me to pay them commission. So I created my website with Blocs nearly 10 years ago and I use freetobook.com, which is an excellent low-cost solution. On average, every year, I book 65% directly and 35% via booking .com. All this to say that itās economically essential to have an effective website (created with Blocs) combined with a good online booking module.
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Perfect Pat. I assume that booking .com and freetobook are connected to avoid double booking ? Exactly the infoās I am looking for. Thank-you.
Yes if you book directly through the website using freetobook it automatically blocks off those dates at booking .com and the other similar sites. There are definitely slicker options out there than freetobook if you are running a 5 star hotel chain, but for smaller setups freetobook is pretty cost effective.
For my new rental apartment website, i`m using Rental Property Booking Calendar | PHPJabbers
The PHP Script works perfect for me. It has payment possibilities, calendar, email confirmations etc.
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Great Thank-you.
I also downloaded this to play around with it. Thank-you.
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Really nice site, very tidy.
Hello @RME
Iām sorry, I wanted to test the booking process on your site and I was hoping to stop before the payment module, but the booking has been made. Please ignore this one.
Thank you.
Thats strange, so a booking can be confirmed without payment?..iām guessing the booking can be easily canceled, but I would hope a payment portal would go through before confirming.