Support Inventory Booking (rent-a-car, hotel, restaurant table)#16

Implement support for booking apartments, rent-a-cars, restaurant tables, bikes, etc. - everything which isn’t connected to employees, may have longer booking periods, and has a stock.
Can be implemented as a separate plugin

I am looking for something similar, in our case, equipment rental is by the day, and we deliver in 2-4 hour blocks ahead of the “24 clock start time” and then pick up in a 2-4 hour block after the “24 clock end time”. In addition, the equipment takes another 2 hrs to clean, service, etc and every 3 months we send it out for a full week of maintenance/upgrades.

The ability to select number of days, then a drop off/pickup time while also blocking out service/maintanance times would be great features.

Among these the biggest ones would definitely be hotel/rental booking as there are not many solutions that are quality oriented in this space. Amelia is already proven to be great in the space of appointment booking, adding this type of booking next to what already has been implemented would be just putting this plugin even more on a desired list. Right now we have FluentBooking launch that promises to add this early 2024 and we have Brainstorm Force getting LatePoint, an established player in SaaS appointment booking. None of those right now have an option to book accomodation or any of the mentioned in OP. VikBooking is really the most feature-rich plugin of this kind in WordPress, we need more options definitely, there is a big hole to fill and soon these other players will work on that too, if Amelia is first to introduce this feature it can easily dominate this space as being already feature-rich in appointments and events.

Of course, accomodation booking would immediately need to have Booking.com and AirBnB two-sided sync implemented as plugins like VikBooking or MotoPress family have this already, it’s a standard in this field, no one is just booking through the website, it’s always one of those big platforms too for the exposure and convenience/trust.

Feature - Cab Bookings

Allow customer to select a vehicle-type (Cabs Inventory), one-way or round-trip, provide pickup - destination addresses, choose travel date and time, and provide their contact details.

Inventory of cabs or vehicle types (sedan, wagon, limo, etc) may get added, edited, or removed by business owner.

Hello everyone, I tried to create a project with Amelia for the rental of work machines with or without work tools, for example forklift with 2m or 3m forks (tools).

The services in my case were items, so I had to create 1 employee for each item, service.
My articles, i.e. services, had a 24 hour timeframe so I wasn’t interested in the times but there was no way to make them disappear, except via CSS by setting the time slots well.

My items were bookable for multiple days, so I used recurring appointments to do this.
An unforeseen event occurred during the multiple rental days because if I booked 1 item for 3 days Amelia rightly offered me 3 lines (1 for each “appointment”).
I created a custom field called “pickup date” to precisely understand the pickup date of the item due to the multiple amelia lines for my multi-day reservation, and here a problem arose.

The project also included a “partner area” where the partner could rent the owning company’s items to its end customers.

The partner in my project was an amelia customer, so that he could see all his reservations in his backend, I had set up a custom field “end customer” where the partner had to type the name of the end customer every time when making a reservation.

Returning to the problem of the “collection date” field, the partner could not change the value of that field, and in any case even if he could change it in a 5-day booking, for example from 20/02 to 25/02, once the booking has been made if the customer wants to change the booking from 21/02 to 25/02 so by changing the collection date the system no longer returns.

After many and many tests I had to give up, currently some features are missing, but the developers are not far behind us!

I therefore hope in the future for rental functionality with the idea of a partner area where a company’s partner can rent vehicles or equipment. The partner must be able to change his end customers’ appointments.
You don’t have to see the company calendar but only your appointments, the partner sees the availability on the front end.

Good continuation to everyone.

Salve a tutti, ho provato a creare un progetto con amelia per il noleggio di macchine da lavoro con o senza utensili da lavoro, esempio muletto con forche di 2 m o 3m (utensili).

I servizi nel mio caso erano articoli, quindi ho dovuto creare 1 dipendente per ogni articolo, servizio.
I miei articoli cioè i servizi avevano un tempo di 24h quindi gli orari non mi interessavano ma non c’era modo di farli scomparire, se non tramite css impostando bene le fasce orarie.

I miei articoli erano prenotabili per più giorni, quindi per fare ciò usavo gli appuntamenti ricorrenti.
Un’imprevisto è stato proprio sui più giorni di noleggio perchè se prenotavo 1 articolo per 3 giorni amelia giustamente mi proponeva 3 righe (1 per ogni “appuntamento”).
Ho creato un campo personalizzato chiamato “data di ritiro” per appunto capire la data di ritiro dell’articolo a causa delle più righe di amelia per la mia prenotazione di più giorni, e qui è sorto un problema.

Il progetto comprendeva anche un “area partner” dove il partner potesse noleggiare ai suoi clienti finali gli articoli dell’azienda proprietaria.

Il partner nel mio progetto era un cliente amelia, in modo che vedesse tutte le sue prenotazioni nel suo backend, avevo impostato un campo personalizzato “cliente finale” dove il partner doveva digitare tutte le volte il nome del cliente finale quando effettuava una prenotazione.

Tornando al problema del campo “data di ritiro” il partner non poteva cambiare il valore di quel campo, e comunque anche se poteva modificarlo in una prenotazione di 5 giorni, esempio dal 20/02 al 25/02 una volta fatta la prenotazione se il cliente vuole cambiare la prenotazione dal 21/02 al 25/02 quindi cambiando la data di ritiro il sistema non torna più.

Dopo tante e tante prove mi sono dovuto arrendere, ad oggi manca qualche funzionalità, ma non ci sono molto lontani gli sviluppatori!

Spero in futuro quindi nella funzionalità di noleggio con l’idea anche di un’area partner dove il partner di un azienda può noleggiare mezzi o attrezzatura. Il partner deve poter modificare i suoi appuntamenti dei suoi clienti finali.
Non deve vedere il calendario dell’azienda ma solo i propri appuntamenti, le disponibilità il partner le vede nel front end.

Buon proseguimento a tutti.

Hi all, thank you for suggesting and voting.

We are definitely considering covering the inventory/resource booking, though it would be quite different from the primary use case Amelia’s booking / time a lot engine was built around (employees, services, appointments that are typically minutes/hours, not days) so there’s a lot of development involved.

We aren’t sure if it is the best solution to place all the settings (mix appointment, event and inventory-based booking) in the same interface as it might make it too complicated and overwhelming. Also, probably most businesses won’t need both use cases, usually it’s appointments or inventory. So we think it should be some kind of a module.

In any case it is in our plans, and in the meantime you could help us by sharing your desired usage scenarios.

Thanks!

@Admin any news about it?

Dear all,

(Sorry but this is still not the notification that the feature has been delivered) 🥲

Many of you wanted to hear more regular and summarized feedback about what we are working on. That makes total sense, and we hear you!

We have prepared a post summarizing our work from the past year and current developments:

https://wpamelia.com/year-2024-in-review/

We plan to make our communication with you more regular. Post + newsletter + a small notification in the plugin itself seem appropriate, but let us know if you prefer a different channel.

Also, we are looking for volunteers to help us in some areas (more information in the post).

Thank you, and hope you like it,

Alexander