Create a Booking Shopify Hotel System in 3 Easy Steps

Shopify is first and foremost made for online stores, that is, its main focus is on powerful e-commerce features. It serves as a site builder platform and an online selling tool at the same time.

But it’s definitely not limited to just that one shop scenario. No matter what purposes you use Shopify for, it’s going to be a flexible and powerful solution for multiple needs, including a booking Shopify system.

The latter is geared at various needs, including appointment scheduling, rental services, hotel reservations and more.

You are right, there are many extra apps to connect booking features for Shopify. And if you are in search of just such things, we’re ready to tell you more about one case we’re most familiar with, and it’s about how to integrate hotel bookings for Shopify.

We actually tested the waters with Shopify to see that it’s pretty doable to integrate a full-fledged hotel booking widget with Shopify with a single code embed created with the BNBForms widget.

Also, let me stress that a ‘hotel’ here is an umbrella term, you can use it to rent out any type of thing, such as campsites, trailers, boats, etc. Shopify travel booking is also a popular direction BNBForms can help with.

Note: we’re going to talk about booking features for daily rentals, that is, that can be rented out for at least 1 night.

💡 Discover: Best Vacation Rental Website Builders for Direct Bookings

Let’s first focus on what BNBForms exactly is.

BNBForms is a robust vacation rental software & booking widget

BNBForms is a platform for vacation rental and hotel owners as well as other businesses that work with rental equipment.

It delivers loads of tools for creating a database/directory of properties with handy tools, running a booking widget and recording all bookings paperless.

That is, BNBForms is an awesome toolkit for those who sell and rent out things on Shopify.

While you’ll need to add all your hotel information in a personal BNBForms account, you can then ‘take’ the booking widget generated by BNBForms and move it to place on any CMS/website platform, Shopify among them.

All the business-fueled, high-frequency features a business might expect from this type of software are included. Here are some of them:

• Designate different accommodation pricing depending on the number of travelers and on the period of their stay; seasonal and amenity-based rates are also there.
• An iCal file format that will allow you to cross-sync bookings to Airbnb, Booking and other apps, for example, Google and Apple calendars.
• Create personal discounts for clients.
• Obligatory taxes and fees added to the base property cost (optional)
• Availability property calendars with color-coded available and unavailable dates.
• Set flexible rules for the arrival and departure times, min and max days to stay, disable reservation for certain accommodation for a chosen period of time, designate buffer times between bookings.
• Add bookings in a variety of ways, including by hand.
• Confirm bookings automatically by payment: via bank transfer, cash on arrival, PayPal, 2Checkout, Stripe, Braintree and Bambora – these methods can be used for free.
• Automated notifications via email.
• Upsell extras and packages.
• Work with client data: views graphs in a sales dashboard, download reports on the number of bookings, clients and more.

These are just a few highlights, you’ll see that there is more to discover under the hood!

As you see, it’ll work pretty well for any Shopify rental plugin scenario.

📊 Compare: What is the Best Vacation Rental Software? Compare Features & Pricing

Step 1. Getting started with BNBForms

Let’s start with BNBForms in numbers. 

Cost: one fixed yearly subscription price ($119 per year)

Free trial: one month free

Limitations: no, you can host unlimited properties and bookings without any commissions for either side (you and your guest)

Live demo: BNBForms demo

Register for free: BNBForms dashboard

How to add to Shopify: register an account, set up your accommodations and configure settings, get a code, copy it and paste to the certain code section in Shopify.

Now let’s take you through the steps of creating an account for hosting your rentals.

1. Sign up with BNBForms – free, no credit card details asked.
2. Confirm your email you used during the registration.
3. Your personal account is created! Log into it.
4. Head to Accommodation > Add Accommodation type to start with adding your properties.

Now you have enough time, 30 days, to test whether it works for your business.

It’s rather the most time-consuming task to set up the booking system, but adding a code itself for the proper booking system to work is a matter of minutes. 

Step 2. Add a Shopify booking widget with BNBForms

BNBForms is not native to Shopify, but it works great as a third-party script.

Remember that before connecting Shopify to your BNBForms, the latter must be already set up (i.e. add rooms or houses, set booking rules, customize payment gateways, etc.).

To create a Shopify booking hotel system property, you need to follow the next steps below:

1. Log into your Shopify site admin account.

2. Choose the site you want to edit.

3. Go to “Online Store”.

4. Find your current theme.

5. Click “Actions”.

6. Click “Edit code”.

7. Go to the BNBForms dashboard > Widget Script > and copy the widget code.

8. Find the theme.liquid code.

9. Paste it at the end of the <head> or <body> tag in your Shopify account.

10. Save changes.

Go to preview and customize your site to make sure that the Shopify booking widget appears and works properly.

That’s it! Your Shopify booking engine is up and running!

Let’s also take through the general booking submission process your customer goes through.

First, they specify their check-in and check-out date preferences, and the number of people.

Then the booking form takes them to the next page where it’s required to choose a property.

All properties with the details you added before in your BNBForms account will be specified (amenities, capacity, view, bed types, photos, etc.).

They can also view availability calendars or information of chosen rooms or accommodations.

Once your guest chooses a property, they are redirected to the checkout page, where they are to additionally choose rates, the number of people, buy extras, and do more booking customization.

It’s you chance to sell more services! Vacation rental owners usually share this as a good tip to earn more.

All the charges are previewable in details in the final price breakdown table; remember that you can also taxes and fees for the customer to see details.

That’s it, a booking is made after your client provided all the needed data. They can also secure their booking by paying online or choosing one of the later payment options (depends on what you offer them).

It’ll be clear for a client that the booking is made.

We also have tutorials on how to add the BNBForms widget to Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, GoDaddy, and a plain HTML website.

Step 3. Manage your bookings

Get ready to see all bookings in a calendar view and see all past and future bookings.

Once new bookings arrive, you can view and manage them in dedicated menus. There are a payment history, a booking calendar, and other dashboard to control your clients.

You can edit existing bookings, too, for example, switch a booked property for a client, update arrival and departure info, change reserved services, and more.

All transactions can be viewed in individual booking details, as well as add payments manually for those who paid after arrival.

To get a detailed overview of your performance, go to the Reports menu to see how many bookings you received in a certain period of time.

Get a booking Shopify hotel system that works

A hotel booking Shopify system is not a unicorn, you can create it easily with a few simple steps using the BNBForms property rental software that works just great for any platform and CMS. If you do need a powerful Shopify rental plugin, test-drive BNBForms with a free account, you won’t be disappointed. 

Get started with BNBForms