how to add hotel booking form to wordpress

The Best Way to Add Hotel Booking Form to WordPress

Are you running a hotel or rental property website and looking to power it up with a convenient booking engine?

Adding a hotel booking form to WordPress is not a hard task if you use BNBForms.

In general, it takes a few steps: you need to add your properties, set up the booking system according to your preferences, and then add the hotel booking widget to your WordPress site.

And that’s it!

Of course, there is some learning curve, but the platform is easy to work with even for non-techs.

All the steps can be applied in a user-friendly account where you can set up all the things in button clicks and see the changes in real time.

So let’s befriend you with BNBForms that doesn’t require you to even have a plugin for bookings.

How to get started with BNBForms

Follow these steps to create a free account with BNBForms and then add a hotel booking form to your WordPress site.

  1. Sign up with BNBForms.
  2. Verify your address via email.
  3. Log into your newly created account with the details provided.
  4. Add your accommodations, configure the settings and start adding the booking widget to your WordPress site.

For some more detailed information on menus and dashboards, you can go to our blow-by-blow BNBForms tutorial.

That tutorial explains how to add amenities, customize services and set up the payment gateway processing option for your rental properties.

In this post, however, we’ll go through the general basics to explain you how the platform works, as well as its main features and benefits.

If you’re also using other platforms, we have dedicated BNBForms tutorials as well:

Key benefits: Set a flexible range of pricing, sync availability calendars to OTAs, add payment gateways

BNBForms is a vacation rental platform that provides the most common features for managing hotel and holiday home sites, including the property management tools, channel manager, and bookings control. 

Here are the key features that will help you tailor your booking engine experiences for you and your customers:

Pricing tiers, rates, and discounts.

Feel free to set price tires for different properties based on how many guests, when (a holiday period? a regular season or high season?), and for how long they are staying. The settings for discounts are super agile as well, allowing you to provide customers with personal discounts or create ones for promo campaigns. 

rates-hotel-booking-site

Sync availability of your properties with external platforms.

If you list your properties elsewhere, Airbnb or Booking.com, or any other online travel platform, you can still use them with BNBForms at the same time.

Thanks to the support of iCal, you can connect the calendars to sync the availability with the almost real-time frequency. By the way, Google and Apple calendars also support this format so that you can receive the updates in these apps, too.

Taxes, fees and other obligatory charges.

The base property rate can be tailored with various types of extra charges, such as taxes or fees. You can display the sum of these charges next to the property rate or include that price and display it as a total.

taxes and fees

Real-time availability calendars. 

There are traditional real-time availability calendars with the color-coded available and unavailable days and guests can check them for individual rooms.

Booking rules & confirmation modes.

Tailor the way bookings are made on your site, for example, designate available arrival and departure times, the stay-in period, buffer time and window, and more.

Incoming bookings can be confirmed by your staff in a more or less automatic way: by clicking a button manually, automatically or upon a payment.

booking-rules-booking-widget

Payment processing options.

As payment options, you can offer bank transfers, cash on arrival, PayPal, 2Checkout, Stripe, Braintree, and Bambora. No need for extra integration or charges, the gateways are pre-built and can be easily configured. Payments can be done in advance as deposits or full charges.

Email notifications.

All actions associated with bookings are followed by automatic email notifications, for example, guests and adminds will be notified about canceled or confirmed bookings. You can brand not only the content of these emails, but also colors, logos and other visual details.

email-notifications-hotel-booking-system

Extras & packages.

Are there any extra services you offer for free or for an additional cost? Set the price, how often to charge and how to multiply it (e.g. per accommodation or per person) depending on the service.

Sales dashboard.

There is the built-in business performance measuring tooling that will help you track the numbers, for example, the revenue or the number of reservations for a particular period of time. Get valuable business insights right in your dashboard! 

Customize the booking widget.

It’s easy to customize the colors of the booking widget, edit field labels or hide fields (except for the arrival and departure dates).

border-color

As you see, you’ll be provided with a centralized dashboard for everything – managing bookings, properties, payments, clients, and booking channels, all under one roof.

All these instruments are centralized in one BNBforms dashboard, helping you operate clients, reservations, properties, analytics info, and all other settings.

This is probably the most time-consuming task to deal with all the necessities, all the tools and settings first.

Getting through all these steps will help you oil the booking machine your way. The next step is to simply add the booking widget to your WordPress site.

This WordPress booking form widget is already generated with all your settings taken into account.

This hotel booking form for WordPress provides a very intuitive wizard experience for your guests, with common booking fields, and mobile-friendly views.

So how to add a booking form in WordPress using BNBForms?

How to Add Hotel Booking Form to WordPress with the BNBForms script

In WordPress, you can add a script to the header or footer areas of your site.

You need a helping tool to assist you, for example, let’s go with a free Head & Footer code plugin.

Adding a script with the use of this plugin will help you add the booking widget as an always visible sidebar. 

After you’ve installed it, add a code script from the BNBForms dashboard to the header part.

header-script

Then go to visit your live site and you should see the Book button already on your WordPress site.

book-button

Now, once a traveler clicks on this button, which is floating and always visible, they see a booking widget just as you customized in the BNBForms dashboard:

hotel-booking-system-bnbforms

On the next step, guests can check for the availability of all your properties:

code-to-create-a-hotel-booking-system-from-scratch

Opening the availability calendar for individual rooms, they can see available and unavailable dates, color-coded.

availability-calendar

Once your guests decide on the room, they can also opt for extra services, or change the room rate.

rate-bnbforms

If you enable payment options, guests can also pay for their booking. It’s also possible to choose the pay on arrival option or a wire transfer.

You can require guests to pay a full or deposit price.

payment-method-online-hotel-booking-system

Upon a successful submission, they will receive a notification that their reservation is received.

reservation-received-custom-hotel-booking-system

The final receipt and order summary will appear on the final page.

booking-status

That’s it! Your guest has received an email notification, the admins also got the respective emails. As for the bookings management, there are tons of option, for example, you can:

  • view bookings in a calendar:
bookings calendar bnbforms
  • Add new bookings in the admin dashboard:
  • View the revenue stats and the number of bookings you got in a certain period of time.
revenue

There are many more tools you can use to manage your bookings and clients! As you see, adding booking form to WordPress shouldn’t necessarily require a plugin, you can have a dedicated centralized dashboard, which is separate from your site.

Final word: How to add a booking form to WordPress 

Since this is a hotel booking form WordPress being in the core of the BNBForms platform adapted to multiple networks, you can use our service with peace of mind that it will work perfectly with WordPress.

So with the BNBForms vacation rental software service you can work with unlimited properties and reservations, with no restrictions. All the tools described you can get per one fixed yearly subscription price ($119 per year), free for a month.

You can use it for your WordPress website for hotels, vacation rentals, inns, campsites, or even pet hotels, where daily rentals are applied. So let us know if you know any better way to add a booking form to WordPress!