Rooms and Rates in Inquiry

Hello,

Thanks for the detailed description of the scenario. We will start from the pricing requirements, which seem to be quite straight forward.

You should probably create your rooms individually in Vik Booking, and if they have the same characteristics and amenities, you can consider creating just one room-type with 5 units in total, like if this was a hotel room that can be booked up to 5 times on the same dates. Instead, if only one reservation can be accommodated on the same dates, then you should create one room-type only with just one unit. This way, whenever a confirmed booking comes in, the whole property will be booked.

Alternatively, thanks to the shared calendars feature, you could choose to create the whole property as one room-type, as well as the individual rooms by sharing their calendars with each other. With this kind of configuration, by booking the “entire property” room-type, all the sub-rooms would be booked. Instead, by booking an “individual room”, the system will occupy that room as well as the “entire property” room, but the other 4 individual rooms would still be available.

If you were to allow payments online through a real payment processor via credit card, then you would not be able to manually accept bookings. This is because as soon as the system receives a valid payment response from the bank for a booking transaction, the status of the reservation will automatically change to Confirmed, and the rooms booked will be occupied on those dates.

We do not really recommend using the Inquiry tool that you’ve noticed with the search-form widget, because that offers a similar functionality to what Airbnb offer on their site. The system in this case would automatically create a Pending reservation according to the requested number of guests and dates by using the first available room found.

Given your requirements, these are the two setup options we recommend:

1. Do not publish any online payment method that supports credit cards. You should rather keep the credit card payment unpublished, and make available instead a “Request Approval” payment option. You can do that by creating a new payment method in Vik Booking by choosing the driver “bank transfer”, and by giving it a name like “Request Approval”. The setting “Auto-set booking to confirmed” should be disabled so that all bookings will get the “Pending” status by default. At that point, an administrator should manually review the pending reservations, and for those who can be accepted you can switch the payment method assigned by selecting a credit card payment solution like PayPal Checkout, which comes by default with the Pro version of Vik Booking. Changing the payment method assigned to a reservation can be made from the reservation details page in the wp-admin section, from the “Administration” tab. This way your guests can be notified via email by hitting the apposite button to inform them that they can proceed to the payment online, and in case of a valid payment received, their booking status will be automatically set to “Confirmed”.
2. Another valid solution is to offer a payment method through credit cards that won’t actually charge the amount, but that will simply pre-authorize the payment (no capture). However, for this solution you would need to purchase an extra payment plugin from our website, or to code a custom payment plugin by following our technical documentation. For example, Stripe allows you to select the type of transaction, which can be “Capture” or “Auth”. PayPal would not support “auth-only” transactions. At that point, if the booking can be accepted you can just capture the payment manually by using your bank interface. Stripe for example allows you to capture the pre-authorized payments within one week.

We hope the above solutions will help you configure the booking process according to your needs.

We invite you to reach out to our team by opening a Support Ticket should you need any help.

Thank you,
The VikWP Team

Thanks, this helped a lot!

I didn’t know one could change the payment method for bookings “on the fly.” This is really helpful, especially with the reduced PayPal fees for a non-profit like ours.

Is there a solution to having guests charged, instead of rooms? I can only differentiate between adult/child normally, but I would 6 categories: member/non-member and child/student/adult (2*3 = 6)

For now, I have the 6 rates on the rooms and only 1 guest category, with a +100% charge on the room per person. This works when the guests belong to the same category: 2 member students pay the same and double as much as someone booking the room alone.

Could I even model 1 member student and 1 member adult booking the same room? I can’t think of a way to do this.

Guests can definitely be charged as long as the OBP (Occupancy-Based-Pricing) offsets are defined from the edit page of your room types in Vik Booking.

Basically, from the page Rates Table you define the default nightly rates for your listings. Such rates should be based on your preferred occupancy, which can be the lowest, the maximum or the best room occupancy. At that point, by editing your rooms in Vik Booking, you can specify the OBP offsets for any adults occupancy, from the lowest adults capacity to the maximum. That’s how Vik Booking applies the OBP standard model.

Children instead are charged separately as any OpenTravel pricing model suggests. If you wish to apply charges to children, then you can either define the age intervals (“age-buckets”) and related cost through a dedicated Option/Extra fee in Vik Booking, or you can define to turn off the number of children selection in order to treat every guest, beyond a minimum age, as an adult, where the regular OBP pricing will be applied. This is what happens on most OTAs.