In the digital age, users are online 24/7. Everyone prefers to check availability and make appointments, reservations, or bookings online. They want to do this any time of night and day. This means when your doors close for the day, your business should still be available online. If not, you’re losing business!
Your website should make it easy for guests to view, reserve, and book available appointments. This is where WordPress booking and reservation plugins can help you meet your online business goals. They help you streamline your online appointments and bookings. Their solutions include basic booking, online calendar integration, payments and much more.
So whatever your businesss—from haircuts to hotels, and from health salons to consulting firms—WordPress booking and reservations plugins will help extend what your business can do.
A WordPress Plugin for Every Need
One of the great things about WordPress is the huge number of plugins available for adding new functionality to your site. Plugins are specialized pieces of code that add new functionality to your WordPress website. They extend the capabilities of your WordPress website. And since plugins are built to carry out very specific functions, they expand what your website can do.
These plugins can add some minor feature or a whole extensive system. Building this functionality from scratch would be a massive undertaking, requiring a lot of thought, planning, programming, testing, as well as incorporating user suggestions to improve it and make it efficient.
The good news is plugins can save you the worry and the time. There are people and companies that have devoted themselves to making plugins. So if you don’t have coding knowledge you don’t need to worry. And even if you are a coder, you don’t have time to create all your own plugins when there are so many professional-quality plugins available.
WordPress Booking and Reservation Plugins
Think about this for a moment. You run a consumer-oriented website. You want your customers to be able to book appointments on your website any time of day or night. You know that without this you’re losing business. But how do you make your website capable of taking appointments? You need an appointment booking plugin, also known as a booking and reservation plugin.
Also, you may want your customer to be able to make payments for their appointments online. How do you do that? You get a plugin that can integrate with payment gateways like PayPal, Stripe, Square, or Mollie.
Your WordPress website needs a booking form so that guests can view, reserve, or book appointments. You don’t have to build a form from scratch, a booking and reservation plugin enables you to easily add a booking form or booking system to your website. You can integrate a calendar into this plugin or it may also come with a calendar so your clients can see days and hours available for them to reserve or book appointments.
As opposed to manual booking systems, booking and reservation plugins allow you automate your booking system therefore saving you and your customers time.
Best of all your data is one place. Decision making is made easy because you can access all stats you need from the back-end.
The one problem is that there are a lot of plugins in the market: tens of thousands. That’s why in this post, I’m going to show you some of the best quality booking and reservation plugins available in 2019.
1. Bookly PRO
Bookly Pro WordPress Booking Plugin is super easy to install even for a WordPress beginner. You’ll be up and running in seconds. It is full-featured, fully customizable, and mobile-ready so customers can book their appointments on the go. It’s has an easy scheduling process that walks the user from booking to payment in 2 to 6 easy steps.
The inclusion of SMS notifications, online payments, and Google Calendar sync sets it apart from many others.
“Automated online booking & scheduling for WordPress: fully customizable booking form with online payments, notifications, and Google Calendar sync.”
Features also included:
- ability to book different services, with multiple staff members, at different prices
- translation ready—includes 10 languages
- easy payment integration
- and more
The Bookly Pro booking plugin is one of the most robust and flexible booking and reservation plugins you’ll find.
2. Bookme WordPress Booking Plugin
The Bookme WordPress booking plugin is a multi-purpose booking plugin that cuts away bloated features and delivers a streamlined booking system. It is built with many kinds of businesses in mind. It can be adapted for customer scheduling in beauty salons, patient scheduling health and wellness business, training scheduling in gyms and yoga studios, scheduling classes and tutors in education settings, booking and reservations and so on.
Customers can check availability, make appointments, and pay for services with this WordPress booking and reservation plugin.
Some booking types easily used:
- consultant booking
- default booking
- group booking
- and more
The number of staff members and services is unlimited, the appearance is fully customizable, and it supports custom fields and time slots.
Bookme comes with a powerful admin panel and is user friendly, allowing you to manage all bookings, customers, staff members and more–with just a few clicks.
The Bookme WordPress Booking Plugin provides all the essential booking and reservation features you want and need, put together in a well-designed package.
3. Webba Booking Plugin
As a service provider saving time and money, while at the same time offering convenient services to your customers is super important. Webba Booking Plugin is built with this in mind.
First, it’s one of the best-looking WordPress booking and reservation plugins. Secondly, it’s a robust system that has a long list of features to help you customize the appearance of the system in order to express your unique visual and business identity.
Here are some features to help with customization:
- 80+ options for appearance customization
- 79 design presets
- editable front-end text strings
“Webba Booking is a powerful and easy to use WordPress booking plugin especially thought for service providers to optimize their time and for the comfort of their customers.”
To help you properly manage your appointments, features included allow your users to:
- make multiple reservation in the same session
- make reservations of several people or services at the same time
- make online payments with platforms such as PayPal, Stripe, WooCommerce
- export CSVs
- and more
There are many different notification mediums and types, not to mention reminders. So much is customizable, and the Google Calendar support is stellar.
4. Booki—WordPress Booking Calendar
If you want a lightweight and minimalist plugin, Booki is it. It supports both appointment-based and reservation-based bookings. Customers can see bookings in their own time zone. It is integrated with PayPal, has a shopping cart, and can issue discount coupons. It is also integrated with MailChimp.
The Booki plugin also offers some unique features needed for a satisfying booking experience.
For example, a built-in form builder allows you to create bookings that serve a specific purpose. You can add fields that ask for user input as part of the booking process.
You can define rules for bookings, for example the number of days that can be booked in a single booking calendar. You can specify a booking period with start and end dates. You can specify price at day, hour, or minute level. You can exclude specific days and time slots.
Not only that, the system can adapt to allow single or multiple bookings depending on whether your project is Reservation based or Appointment based. Costs can be included as a list of checkboxes. You can create unlimited number of extra features that your customer can checkout along with their booking.
Customer msb1974 has this to say about Booki
Great value for the price, lets me do exactly what I want, provides a lot of options. Very good documentation. Thanks! This plugin has huge potential!
5. Team Booking
Use the power of Google Calendar for your booking and reservations by using the Team Booking system for WordPress. All the availability planing is coordinated via Google Calendar!
- Create “availability” events on Goolgle Calendar.
- These events appear on the front-end as open slots for booking.
- When the slot is booked, the Google Calendar updates automatically.
This is a highly collaborative workflow. If you’re working as a team you can let your coworkers plan their own availability from their own Google Calendars.
Other features include:
- 3 levels of notification—to the customer, service provider and admin
- Google Calendar and Google Maps support
- translation-ready
- approval and cancellation system for both provider and customers
- customize reservation forms and email notifications
They even provide an API for your custom app.
Customer Richvds has this to say about the Team Booking Plugin:
Excellent product, well thought out and smartly put together, with the added plus of great support!
6. HBook Hotel Booking System
HBook is a powerful and versatile plugin that is perfectly suited for anybody that owns a business in the hospitality industry: a hotel, B&B, holiday apartment, or campground. It will allow you to easily enable online reservation on your WordPress website. It comes equipped with a customizable booking form with a drag-and-drop form builder that allows you to choose what customer details you want to gather. Shortcode support allows you to add availability calendars, table rates, and booking forms anywhere on your website in seconds.
It has an efficient booking management system with features that include:
- calendar view to see your bookings at a glance
- reservation list in a table to view details of all bookings, add comments, change accommodation, update remaining balance, or send emails
- synchronize your bookings with websites such as AirBnB, Homeaway, VRBO, and Booking.com
- export your bookings to CSV files
- integration with multiple payment methods: Stripe, Paypal, Square, Cardlink, Mollie, and more
Customer contactovisual has this to say:
Simple yet solid hotel booking plugin. I should also mention the excellent documentation and ease of translating for multi-language websites—so important in the hotel business. Good work.
7. Amelia—Enterprise-Level Appointment Booking
Amelia is your automated booking specialist, working 24/7 to make sure your customers can make appointments even while you sleep.
Like the other plugins in this list, Amelia lets your customers make appointments any time of day and night. This plugin is easy to customize so you can build your own appointment booking forms.
Some features include:
- supports multiple employees, each with their own services and availability schedule
- supports multiple business locations
- step-by-step appointment wizard makes booking easy
- options to upsell during appointment booking
- integration with WooCommerce, PayPal, and Stripe
- supports on-site payments so your customers can pay in cash when they arrive
Customer StewartRodgers has this to say:
A really sleek plugin. The development team are super responsive to support and requests, and are continually working on improving it.
Looks like this one has a promising future.
8. Events Calendar Registration and Booking
Do want to promote classes, seminars, workshops, conferences, or concerts on your WordPress website? Do you want to set ticket prices for your events, create recurring events or even accept donations for your events? If so, Events Calendar Registration and Booking plugin has got you covered.
With Events Calendar, you can easily create and manage your events online through the WordPress admin interface. Then, visitors will be able to register and pay online for those events via PayPal, Stripe, or Authorize.Net. It gives you a quick glimpse of the latest events created, sort them by categories, view payments, and keep track of your attendees.
Other important features of this plugin include:
- multilingual
- integrated with Google Maps
- countdown timer
- confirmation emails
- shortcode support for calendars and single events
Conclusion
There are many different kind of WordPress appointment, booking, and reservation plugins available today. Choosing the right one can be crucial to the smooth running of your business. You need to choose a plugin that fits your requirements. While this list is in no way exhaustive, we’ve selected plugins with a solid reputation. All these plugins are available on Envato Market.
Did You Find the Plugin You Need?
If a WordPress booking plugin feature you want isn’t listed here, you might consider coding your own. Envato Tuts+ has WordPress tutorials, eBooks, and courses. Try WordPress Plugin Development Essentials or maybe the WordPress Hacker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Some helpful eBooks include Useful Tricks and Techniques for WordPress and Mastering WordPress.
