Hi,
We believe to have understood that you would like pending (stand-by) reservations to occupy your rooms. You mentioned the “Bank Transfer”, which is a pre-installed payment method in the Pro version of the plugin. This is not a real gateway like PayPal, it is in fact considered as an “offline” payment method. The status given to bookings with this payment method selected can be controlled through the parameter “Auto-set booking to confirmed” in the edit page of your payment method. If enabled, bookings paid through bank transfer will immediately get a confirmed status, hence the rooms booked will be occupied and no longer displayed in the search results in case of no remaining availability for some precise dates.
Instead, all reservations listed as “Waiting for the payment” will not occupy your rooms until the status will change to “Confirmed”. Such rooms will only be occupied for the number of minutes defined in the configuration settings of VikBooking, but their calendars will not display such dates in “red” as if they were occupied by a confirmed reservation.
Our suggestion for those using offline payment methods like the Bank Transfer, especially when using VikBooking with our Channel Manager, is to immediately set the status to “Confirmed”, and through the reminders you can monitor the payments for such bookings. In case you do not receive a payment within some days, you can cancel the reservation to release the occupied room on the requested dates. This is safer than keeping a room available for 3 days during which you may get duplicate reservations.
If you are using the Pro version of the plugin, we invite you to get in touch with our team through our website by opening a support ticket so that we can provide better assistance. Thank you!
The VikWP Team