Hi,
Thanks for your message. Unfortunately, that’s something you could do only with the commercial version of the plugin, I’m sorry.
The status assigned to every reservation is given by the settings of your payment method, but the point is that the free version of Vik Booking does not come with any payment methods pre-installed. When no payment methods are available, it’s assumed that the default status to be assigned to a booking is “Confirmed” and not “Pending” (“Standby”). The same thing would happen if a coupon discount code would make the booking total amount equal to or less than zero. Even in this case the default status would be “Confirmed”.
You can assign a “Pending” (“Standby”) status to bookings only if the selected payment option requires an actual transaction. In this case, once the payment goes through, the status would be changed to “Confirmed” automatically.
Another solution, only available with the commercial version of the plugin, is to rename the pre-installed payment option “Bank Transfer” into anything like “Request Approval” or similar, and since this particular payment method does not start any payment transaction, you can just use it as a way to keep the default status to “Pending” for a manual approval via back-end by the administrators.
Since the free version of Vik Booking does not ship with any payment method pre-installed, this was the only choice we had, otherwise it would not have been possible to actually collect reservations. An administrator would have had to manually confirm all of them.
In case you are not willing to get the commercial version of our plugin, please get in touch with our team through our website so that we can try to find a solution for your case. For the free version it would be necessary to insert a record onto a specific database table of Vik Booking, and then to code a custom payment plugin by following our technical documentation. Such payment plugin should not be doing anything special, because all you need is a “payment driver” that allows you to set the default status to “Pending” for each reservation.
Instead, if you believe you will get the Pro version of Vik Booking one day, you already know how to control the status assigned to the various reservations through the payment options.
We hope this helps!
The VikWP Team
