Forum Discussion
Microsoft Bookings for small holiday accommodations businesses
Hi Kushla,
Bookings is not really designed for that scenario, but with a little extra work you can set up a workaround with some limitations.
1. You would need to add each room as a staff member
2. You would need to add the kind of rooms as services (I.e. Queen room, 2 twin beds, etc) and assign the staff/room to each service
3. You would need to setup specific time frames for each service (I.e. Set up 30 mins long per service)
4. You need to set your business hours from 3-30pm each day. This way, your customers can only book one service per day.
I set this up with one bedroom as a test and it worked. You can see it https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/TrialGabrielhotel@microsoft.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/
Let me know if you have questions, depending on how many rooms you have, this could take a while to setup.
Gabriel.
That demo page looks good Gabriel, and it looks as though this could be extended to use for booking rooms in a community hall? We have 3 rooms, and people should be able to book them for part days, ideally it would be good to book additional services with them such as a number of chairs, tables etc but I think that will be hard. Are there any plans to extend Microsoft Bookings for this sort of scenario - I suspect there are quite a few businesses that would find it useful.
Chris
Hi Chris - Thanks for your feedback! For now, we are not looking at being able to have more than one service booked at the same time but we have enabled "Custom fields" where you can ask your customer to submit specific information about their booking and you can make it so that they can't complete the booking without submitting that info.
I hope that helps with your scenario for now.
Thanks!
We are also looking for a booking solution for a community hall, but also something that can be expanded to any community resources (e.g. parks for weddings, barbecues, meeting rooms etc).
It would be better if the staff list was not shown to users when booking in this scenario.
More customisation is also required e.g. custom fields, relationships between services (e.g. if service x is booked then offer service y and z as options).
Not sure that Bookings is mature enough for us at the moment, but looks like a great start and will be keeping an eye on its progress. I just hope they don't go the same way of all other booking apps in making it overly specific to predetermined use cases.
Hi Ian,
Thanks for your feedback!
The booking calendar admin can select to not show the staff list to its customers, in that case Bookings will randomly assign any staff member that is assigned to the service and free at the time of the appointment.
We also released https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Add-custom-and-required-questions-to-the-Booking-page-fd6b7587-5055-4bcd-83a4-13bd4929bfff that allow you to request specific information about your customer or the appointment. Sadly, we do not support the cross-service scenario you described.
Hope this helps!