Different hourly rates based on length

Hello,

Thanks for your detailed message. Unfortunately, that’s not a configuration you could achieve with our plugin VikRentCar, I’m sorry.

The minimum rental period is 1 hour, and this applies also to our twin-plugin VikRentItems that would also support Time Slots to allow clients to pick a specific duration for the rent from an apposite drop down menu.

If your client does not need to offer bookings for longer than 24 hours, then we invite you to look at our other plugin VikAppointments, but for our rentals plugins there is nothing you could do to allow a 30-minute rent.

The VikWP Team

Thank you for your answer and taking the time, i understand. But if you disregard the 30 minutes, is it possible to have dynamic pricing like only these:

1 hour: 2500

3 hour: 6000

12 hours: 12 500

Hi,

Yes, you can definitely define the exact rental costs for 1 hour, 3 hours and 12 hours.

However, VikRentCar may not be the right plugin in this case because customers would need to choose an exact duration of 1, 3 or 12 hours by using the date-time picker calendars. In case users selected a total duration of 20 hours (for example), the system would revert to the cost defined for one day of rent, and if no costs are available for 1 day, then booking would not be allowed.

We invite you to check the “twin” plugin VikRentItems and its Time Slots feature. With that plugin you could easily create 3 time slots, one for 1 hour of rent, another for the 3-hour slot and then the one for the 12-hour duration. Thanks to the time slots, users would be asked to pick a date and a duration from the Time Slots dropdown. This way you ensure that a fixed duration for the rent will be selected. That’s why we do not recommend using Vik Rent Car in this case.

Thank you very much, are there any instructions how? I sat them up like this but i cant seem to get it to work:

View post on imgur.com

And also is the half hour option something you could make as a custom function if i paid you?

Hi,

Thanks for the screen shot. Vik Rent Car always requires to have the cost for 1 day of rent defined for at least one rate plan (Type of Price). This means that from the page Fares Table like in your screen shot, you should click the “Daily Fares” tab and make sure 1 day of rent will have a cost defined, probably for the highest duration you offer (12 hours).

Also, your current pricing configuration is not defining any rental cost for 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and above 13 hours of rent. Whenever a cost for a specific duration is not available, the system will revert to the cost for 1 day of rent.

For example, if you select a rental from July 1st at 10:00AM until July 1st at 11:00AM (1 hour), the cost defined in your screen shot for 1 hour will be applied as long as there is also a cost specified for 1 day (which is always mandatory).
Instead, with your current configuration, a rental lasting 2 hours would have no hourly rates defined, and so the system would apply the fee for one day (if available, otherwise the vehicle would not be bookable).

You can find a complete documentation of the rental pricing system of our plugin on our official website, where we explain how the calculation is made and what factors can impact on the final rental cost.

Unfortunately, we do not offer customizations for our plugins, I’m sorry. First of all, adding the support for half-hour rentals would require a different database structure, and then the whole framework would not be compatible with such a duration. Also, by installing a future update, such strong changes would go lost and so it is not worth it.
Any feature request is always evaluated internally for the future versions of the plugin, but in your case I would recommend trying either Vik Rent Items or Vik Appointments (especially if you need to support 30-minute bookings), because the framework of Vik Rent Car is not really compatible with your needs.

Thank you very much, you are helping me alot. I would be interested in checking out your plugins in the future to, if only because of the excellent service. One more thing if i may; is it possible to set max hours that is available for a car to 12 hours?

Hi,

At the moment it is not possible to define a maximum duration that can be selected by the users, or to set fixed intervals. In the upcoming updates of VikRentCar we will allow to hide the time by forcing an exact time for pick up and drop off, and by mixing this new configuration setting with the restrictions for the min/max days of rent, it will be easy to always obtain fixed durations of rent.

However, our suggestions about our other plugins were exactly given for this reason. With Vik Rent Car you are allowing your clients to select the date and time, when what you needed was just a choice between a fixed set of duration/lengths. This is exactly what you can define with Vik Rent Items thanks to the Time Slots feature. If you visit the official demo website of our plugin Vik Rent Items you will see that some rental items are using the Time Slots, where guests are asked to select the date and the duration from an apposite drop down menu. There you could have the options for 1 hour, 3 hours, 12 hours etc..

The most you can do with Vik Rent Car instead, is to not define any daily fares for more than 1 day of rent, so that booking a vehicle for 2 days won’t be allowed. This is because it’s necessary to always define a cost for the requested duration in order to allow the booking process. Hourly rentals will always require a cost to be defined for 1 day of rent as discussed in the previous messages, and then if a cost is available for the number of hours requested, then that hourly cost will be applied instead.