General
The screen has three sections: Display of the admin, Booking rules, then Currency and online payment, where Stripe and PayPal each have their own tab. The Save bar stays at the bottom of the screen and warns you if you leave with unsaved changes.
- Site currency — used by Stripe and PayPal for every payment. Prices are never converted between currencies: choose it before taking real bookings.
- Hold duration — how long a place stays reserved for a visitor who is booking, before it is released for someone else (15 minutes by default).
- Unpaid online booking released after — nothing stays blocked without a payment: an online booking still unpaid after this delay is cancelled and its places are free again (30 minutes by default, 10 at least). A paid booking, a deposit included, is never touched; nor is a manual booking. Without any payment method, bookings are never released.
- Online booking — tick "Temporarily close the online booking" (holidays, full season…) to replace the booking form with your message. No new online booking can be made; bookings already made can still be paid, and you can still enter bookings by hand.
- Several languages — with Polylang or WPML, open their string translation screen (group "VEFmultiBooking") to translate your offers, resource descriptions, price categories, extras, questions, closing message and email texts. Each text appears there once you have saved it here. A booking remembers the language it was made in, and its emails are sent in it.
- Overlapping bookings — when a visitor books something that takes place at the same time as another booking made with the same email address (or another activity of his current booking), he is told before the payment and can go on by pressing the button again. He is never blocked. Untick the box to switch the warning off. Bookings you enter by hand are not concerned.
- Minimum notice — the default delay before the booked time, for online bookings (each resource can set its own).
- Activities with a minimum of participants — how many hours before the start the decision is taken.
Display of the admin
Say what you sell (accommodation, activities, both, something else) and choose a Simple or Advanced display. The words of the menu follow your choice, and the Simple display keeps the essentials of a resource in view while the other settings are folded under "Advanced settings".
Nothing is deleted when you change these two choices: your data and your settings stay as they are, and you can add products of any kind at any time. The same choices are in the bar at the top of every page, and a Simple / Advanced switch is in the main forms.
In Simple, the optional settings of a form (categories of an offer, price basis and period, options and questions, other start times of a rule…) are hidden, never removed; a setting that is in use stays in view. The word "Package" can be replaced by your own (for example "Organised stay") in the Settings screen.
Stripe and PayPal
Each mode (Stripe test or live, PayPal sandbox or live) has its own keys, entered separately: switching the mode never reuses the keys of the other one. Start in test mode, make a test booking, then switch to live.
The settings page shows the webhook address to enter in the Stripe and PayPal dashboards: it is how the payment provider tells your site that a payment is done. Without it, a paid booking would stay "pending".