Tour booking sites let the public find ideal travel destinations to suit their needs. These types of sites should offer multiple payment options, customizable forms, handling bookings for multiple locations, and much more. A suitable WordPress plugin is also key for any successful tour booking site, especially as they can often handle more than simply booking tours and managing reservations.
The MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin lets you take reservations, appointments, bookings, and more. You’re able to plan schedules too, integrate payment gateways, and incorporate all manner of features and functionality.
In this post, we’ll examine how the MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin can help you to create a tour booking site in particular!
Introducing the MotoPress Appointment Booking Plugin
MotoPress’ Appointment Booking plugin gives you the functionality to simplify online bookings for your site. You can also use it for time scheduling applications, such as meetings. The feature set is versatile, in that you can adapt it for use in beauty salons, medical centers, fitness studios, educational institutions, and more. Of course, tour operators can leverage its qualities too.
This is thanks to a robust list of inclusions for the plugin:
- Custom time steps and reservations. The plugin lets you add customizable time steps and increments for booking slots, including all-day booking options. You’ll also be able to add time ‘buffers’ for each slot. This can help you adapt schedules to your needs, and will be a godsend if you need precise time management.
- Calendar sync and automated notifications. Punctuality for a tour is important, and the Appointment Booking plugin gives you the option to sync bookings to a customer’s personal calendar. Reminders can also help to update your customers about an upcoming tour.
- Group bookings. The plugin lets a customer book as a group. As a tour operator, you’ll lean on this piece of functionality a lot, as the majority of bookings will be for groups.
- Staff management and scheduling. There’s plenty of administrative options for organizing your team too. For instance, you can add as many team members as you need and assign them to the right services you offer. Scheduling their time is a breeze also, including breaks, days off, and more.
There’s much more in the box that can help you when creating a tour booking site. However, if the cost is restrictive, no cool features will be worth the expense.
How Much MotoPress’ Appointment Booking Plugin Costs
MotoPress’ Appointment Booking Plugin provides flexible and straightforward pricing, which is excellent to see. There are two pricing tiers available:
- Single Site License ($79.00). For small to mid-sized companies that run one website, this license will be ideal.
- Unlimited Sites License ($199.00). If you have the budget, this license works best for big companies or agencies that run multiple websites.
The good news is that you get the same premium features and functionality regardless of the price you pay. However, we’d like to see a middle-ground option for maybe three- or five-site licenses. $79 to $199 is a big jump if you require two or three licenses.
How to Build a Tour Booking Site Using WordPress and MotoPress’ Appointment Booking Plugin
Once you purchase the MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin, you’ll need to install and activate it. You might also want to consider whether a dedicated WordPress booking theme would be suitable too.
From this point, you can begin to use the plugin. Let’s start with the setup.
1. Initial Configuration
To begin, head to the Appointments screen within WordPress. There are lots of screens here we’ll get to, but for now we want Settings:
We won’t go through every option here, although we encourage you to look through the excellent documentation for more on what you can change.
Instead, you’ll want to look at a few typical tweaks to make your booking system your own. For instance, you can choose how often you want your tours to start using Default Time Step: anywhere between 10–30 minutes.
In addition you can select how you confirm bookings. This could be an automatic or manual confirmation, or once a customer pays for the tour. Speaking of which, you may also want to set a Terms and Conditions page to display at the checkout. It’s ultimately a ‘consent’ declaration, and might be ideal for tours where there’s a risk (such as boat tours).
You’ll also want to go through the options to set up multi-bookings, cancellations, and other essential settings. Once you finish and save your changes though, it’s time to look at adding services to your tour booking site.
2. Add Team Members to Your Tours
If your tours are guided by specific people, you can add team members for them. To do this, head to Appointments > Employees and click on Add New.
This section lets you input the information for any and all team members. This includes their name, bio, photo, social media links, and contact details. You are also able to assign designated services (i.e. tours) for each team member. In cases where members of your team specialize in a specific type of tour, this function could be handy.
Adding team members and assigning them services also brings another benefit. You can provide a more intimate and personal feel to your tours, as you can display the information you have for each tour guide.
3. Add Your Tour’s Services and Information
If you ever use WordPress’ taxonomies, you’ll understand the Appointments > Services screen. Much like adding categories and tags, you’ll use the left-hand fields to set up the services your tour will provide.
Start by first adding service categories to your tours from the Appointments > Services Categories screen, and adding a name and description. You can also create hierarchies for types of tours or create categories for different cities.
Next, navigate to the Appointments > Services screen in WordPress to add a new tour service. Here, you’ll set up the specifics of each service you offer:
Let’s run through the fields you can tweak to your liking. First, the price and duration. Here, enter the service price (0 for no cost) and the duration (our example uses two hours).
Next, you have fields dedicated to booking times:
- Service Time Interval. Next, customize the appointment booking time slot intervals. The default uses a global time slot length, but you can override this.
- Buffer Time: Both of these let you add extra time to the start and end of the intervals you set for preparation and cleanup.
The Time Before Booking and Advanced Scheduling Window fields let you determine how far in advance customers can book. For immediate bookings, set both to zero across all of the time value fields.
Next, the capacity fields lets you set the minimum and maximum numbers of people associated with one booking. For instance, a Minimum Capacity of 2 means each booking will present information such as price based on that number of people. In fact, you can choose to set whether the price mirrors the capacity values you set too.
There are three other fields worth highlighting, based on team members and notifications:
- Employee assignment. Simply put, you choose your eligible employees for the service here. This could be an individual or every team member you employ.
- Deposit Settings: If your tour bookings take deposits, this is where you set it up. You can configure the deposit type (such as a percentage of the fee or fixed amount), and the value.
- Notification notices. Here, you can enable notifications to help inform your team and customers about any important booking updates.
Once you enter all the details and finish up, save your new service to make it available for booking on your site.
4. Set Up Payments
With your tour services in place, you can start to figure out how customers will pay for them. MotoPress’ Appointment Booking plugin includes multiple ways to set up payment gateways. You can find these options on the Appointments > Settings > Payments tab.
Here, you can provide different gateways such as PayPal, Stripe or even a direct bank transfer. Through these gateways, you can also support Apple Pay, Google Pay and other methods.
You can choose a default digital payment gateway while also offering other options such as Pay on-site. To enable payment options of your choice, click on the gateway and click on the checkbox for ‘Enable this payment method.’
You’ll have to get PayPal API credentials and Stripe API Keys to enable payment on your site. You can also test these payments by selecting the ‘Enable Sandbox Mode’ when enabling these gateways.
5. Display Booking Forms on the Front-End of Your Site
Now that you have curated your services and enabled payment, it’s time to display booking forms on your WordPress site.
Generate the Shortcode
The first task is to go to the Appointment > Shortcode screen, click on Add New and select Appointment Form from the drop-down menu:
Next, customize the form’s settings to meet your requirements by providing a suitable title in the Form Title field. You can also decide which items to display on your form, such as a Service Category, Service, Location, and Employee in the Default Values section.
You may also want to customize your form through the Styles panel to help match it to your site’s design. For instance, you could modify the form width, primary and secondary text colors, background colors, and button padding. You’re also able to configure the Timepicker settings to set specific start and end times for your services.
Finally, copy the shortcode after configuring and generating it, then paste it into any post or page.
Create and Design Your Booking Page
Your form may need a dedicated page. Let’s run through this quickly. Create a page through the Pages > Add New option within the WordPress dashboard. This page should have a suitable name, such as “Book a Tour” or “Schedule an Appointment”:
Next, design the page in line with your company’s branding and color scheme. Once you finish your design, use the Shortcode Block (if you’re using the WordPress Block Editor) and paste in your generated shortcode from earlier. At this point, your form is ready to accept submissions!
6. Monitor Bookings and Discover Insights
Once your booking forms are live and customers start booking tours, it becomes necessary to keep track of these bookings and analyse the data. The MotoPress Appointment Booking plugin provides high-level analysis and reporting features for this purpose.
Head over to Appointments > Analytics to check out detailed breakdowns of your reservation stats. You’ll get a clear picture of every angle of your appointment system, such as the bookings that are confirmed, still waiting, or cancelled across different services and locations. This info is useful for spotting booking trends and using your marketing budget in the right place.
The reporting dashboard lets you sort data by services, locations, employees, and booking statuses (such as Confirmed, Pending, and Cancelled). Plus, you can zero in on any time frame that matters to you – for instance, tours booked during busy tourist seasons or even custom periods. The analytics dashboard is super useful for figuring how your bookings change over time.
Give Your Tour Booking Site a Lift With MotoPress’ Appointment Booking Plugin!
The MotoPress WordPress Appointment Booking plugin offers an ideal level of functionality and usability to be an essential part of your tour booking site. It gives you the front-end and back-end tools you need to ensure your customers can join you and an organized team on your next tour. Also, given that a single-site license is $59, it’s a snip for what you get in the box.
Will this plugin become a part of your tour booking site? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
