Hi,
Thanks for your message. Unfortunately, the booking status is controlled by the payment methods, which are not available in the free version of the plugin, I’m sorry.
By default, the status given to all bookings in case of no selected payment options, will be “Confirmed”, and this status will actually occupy the rooms/listings on the booked dates. Those who use the commercial/Pro version of VikBooking can publish some payment options, either through credit card transactions or with offline transactions like “Bank Transfer”, “Pay upon arrival” etc.. the settings of each configured payment option will let you choose the status to give to the bookings, which is “Pending” by default, and for those payment methods supporting credit card transactions, the bookings will be automatically confirmed upon receiving a valid payment.
Those who use the commercial version of the plugin can also choose to not publish any credit-card payment option in case they would like to manually accept bookings. In this case we suggest publishing an offline payment solution available by default with the commercial version of the plugin, and to rename it into something like “Request Approval”. By choosing the “pending” status from the settings of the payment option, all reservations with this payment method assigned will be saved with a “pending” status, and administrators will be able to manually confirm the bookings, or even to assign a different payment method in order to allow the guests to automatically confirm their bookings by placing a valid payment.
We hope this helps!
The VikWP Team