Hi,
Thanks for describing how you would like to set up the booking process on your website. That’s actually what most OTAs call “Quote & Hold” or “Request to Book/Booking Inquiry”.
You may need to use the Pro/commercial version of the plugin in order to accomplish a proper configuration, but we are going to explain the options available.
The free version of VikBooking does not support payment methods, and so this means that by default, due to missing payment options, all bookings get a “Confirmed” status. The status of a reservation is given by the selected payment option, and when no options are available, reservations are confirmed by default. All confirmed reservations will occupy the rooms on the requested dates, and so if you are looking to implementing an approval process, the best solution would probably be to publish a payment option called “Request Approval” so that you can control the status to be assigned to new reservations (“Pending/Stand-by”). The Pro/commercial version of the plugin allows you to do so by choosing a payment solution that is not based on credit card transactions, like the “Bank Transfer” which could be named “Request Approval” or anything similar. This way, the guests would receive an email notification stating that their booking is pending approval and the status would be “Pending”. The property manager would be notified as well, and they could either confirm the reservation manually, or they could adjust the booking details and eventually assign a real payment option through credit card that would allow the guests to automatically confirm their reservation by placing a payment. This is how most of our clients work whenever they need to work with a “Quote & Hold” or “Request to Book” flow.
With the free version of the plugin any reservation would be automatically confirmed, and the rooms would be blocked. You could add some custom details to the confirmation email message that is automatically sent to the guests by informing them that their reservation will have to be manually approved, and in this case the PM could either cancel and reject the reservation, or they could notify the customer that the booking was accepted.
An alternative solution with the free version of the plugin is to disable the booking process as you’ve also noticed. However, in this case you can enable the “Request Information” option from the settings of each room-type in VikBooking, and by using the Shortcodes of type “Rooms List” and “Room Details” you could still display the availability calendars to your guests. They just won’t be able to pick any stay dates due to the fact that the booking process is disabled. Lastly, another possible solution with the free version is to keep the booking process disabled, and to publish the Widget/Block of type “Search Form” that allows you to select the layout of type “Inquiry”. This special layout of the Search Form widget/block would create a pending reservation in the system that the property manager could review and eventually accept or cancel. In any case, no payments or confirmations would be allowed with the free version of the plugin.
We hope this helps!
The VikWP Team