Presale Question (Hostel like behavior)

Hello,

We have many customers that are using Vik Booking for a hostel. However, it is necessary to properly configure the plugin in order to let the customers book “beds” rather than “rooms”.
Your clients will be booking rooms from your website, so for a hostel you should treat the “rooms” as “beds”. In order to do that, your room types in Vik Booking should have a number of units available equal to the total number of beds that can be booked. For example, if a shared dorm has 15 beds, you should create a room type in Vik Booking with 15 units available.
The maximum number of adults allowed per “room” should be set to 1, just like the minimum, because in your case the customers will be booking beds, and so one bed is only for one person. You can also adjust the various Search Parameters to control the “Search” Widget or other booking forms of the plugin, to define that the maximum number of adults per room (per bed in your case) is always 1.
Regarding the prices: Vik Booking supports any pricing model according to the OpenTravel standards, but in your case the “Occupancy Pricing” is useless because you always have an occupancy of 1 adult per room (per bed). However, from the page Rates Table you can define the exact costs for any length of stay (“LOS” Pricing Model), so you can set up the pricing from 1 night up to 6 to $20/night, and the pricing from 7 nights and more to $18/night.
The only thing you cannot setup is a sort of a discount per number of beds booked. This function is not available, as it would be like offering a discount to customers that book a “Double Room” and a “Single Room”. Discounts “per quantity” are not supported, as the pricing is defined either at Room or Rate Plan level. Booking two or more rooms (beds) will simply produce a sum of the cost of each room (bed) booked.
The last action you should take to finalize the setup is to override some default language definitions. For examples, any occurrence of “room” should be overridden to “bed”. There are several free plugins we recommend using for WordPress that would help you do that. The most used free plugin among our customers for overriding language definitions is called “Gettext override translations”.

Hello @e4jvikwp,

and thank you very much for these detailed answear.
I see i could running into some problems here.
You say i have to Translate/rename the rooms into beds, my customer have only two multi bed rooms with 4 beds each room but he have another 4 rooms with single bed and double beds in there.
so a customer could book beds and rooms when i rename the rooms into beds globally there would be a conflict with the single rooms.
so is it possible to only rename “some” of the rooms to beds with the “Gettext override translations” Plugin ?
Do you plan to implement a more “complex” room system like my customer have in his situation atm and a better native hostel system?

best regards

another question coming in my mind while reading your reply:

how is the booking process in this situation lets take your example.
shared dorm with 15 units and lets say a customer needs 5 beds.
So he have to click 5 times the bed/room? or can he choose 5 beds with a dropdown or something like that?

• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by lagjag.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 1 month ago by lagjag.

Hello @lagjag

What you said is true. You could definitely have conflicts with the language translations if you have both shared and private rooms.
Unfortunately there are no parameters available for the room types to use specific labels, like “rooms” or “beds”. Also, the system allows bookings of multiple rooms, and in case of mixed types (shared and private), we wouldn’t know what definitions to use.
Moreover, the global search forms you see in the demo website (the “Search Form” widget for example) require to build drop down menus for the selection of the number of rooms/beds to book, and they need to collect the information about each room party (how many guests per room) in order to display the search results according to the remaining availability and according to the input request.
We can study a solution for this mixed cases of room types, but it’s not going to be easy. Labels could always be misleading, unless you use something like “rooms/beds” which include both options.

What we would suggest in these cases is to opt for using different types of pages in Vik Booking. In fact, if you let the customers book individual rooms/beds from the respective “Room Details” page, then you should not have problems with mixed types, and the drop down menus of the search form would be built according to the configuration of each room for the min and max number of adults, children and rooms (beds).

In a typical configuration for Hostels, customers can book multiple beds (rooms) with the same booking. You can allow that by letting the customers book multiple units of the same room type. In case of a shared dorm, in order to book several beds it is necessary to use the apposite drop down menu to choose a higher number of rooms to book (beds), always with one adult max per room (bed).

We are marking this topic as resolved.