How to create a multilingual WooCommerce booking site (in just a few minutes)

You can make a WooCommerce booking site multilingual in minutes. Bookings for WooCommerce comes with translations for multiple languages built in, so the moment you install the plugin, its booking interface will automatically display in the correct language for your site. If you want to have more than one language available, you just need the right multilingual plugin.

In this article, we’ll look at how to create a multilingual booking site in WooCommerce quickly and easily – so that your bookable products’ availability will always be correct – whatever language the customer books in.

After reading this guide:

• Your customers will be able to:
  • Browse your booking products and pick their dates in their own language
  • Get through checkout without running into English-only text
• As the store owner, you’ll be able to:
  • Let customers make their bookings in any of your site’s languages
  • Ensure nothing gets double-booked
  • Add any new languages you wish

We’ll assume you already have WooCommerce and Bookings for WooCommerce installed and ready to go.

What are the advantages of a multilingual booking site?

Reaching customers in their own language ultimately means more revenue. According to RWS’s Unlocking Global Understanding report, which surveyed 6,500 consumers worldwide, over four in five customers won’t buy from a brand that doesn’t offer support in their own language. Every language you add opens your booking store to customers you couldn’t convert before.

As a customer, making a booking can be tricky at the best of times – but it’s much easier when all the information is in your own language. Offering multilingual booking pages removes one of the most common reasons people abandon a booking part-way through. When someone can read your availability, prices, and booking form in their native language, they can book with confidence.

Using the methods in this article, your bookable products’ availability is synced in one place, so nothing gets double-booked. A slot taken by a French-speaking customer shows as unavailable to everyone else straight away.

Which booking sites benefit most from going multilingual?

Any booking site that sells to visitors from outside its home market has the most to gain, which makes tourism and travel sites great fits. Their customers often book from abroad, before they arrive, and while reading in a second language.

Common examples include:

• Tour operators and activity providers, such as walking tours, boat trips, and guided experiences
• Equipment and gear hire in tourist areas, such as bikes, skis, paddleboards, and cameras
• Accommodation taking direct bookings, such as B&Bs, guesthouses, and holiday rentals
• Airport transfers, car hire, and other travel services
• Classes, workshops, and events that draw an international audience

If most of your bookings come from local customers who share your language, a multilingual site doesn’t matter so much. But if you sell to travelers or in a mixed-language city, offering their language removes a real barrier to booking.

What languages does Bookings for WooCommerce include?

Bookings for WooCommerce is fully translation-ready and ships with translations for several languages, including:

• French
• German
• Italian
• Portuguese
• Portuguese (Brazilian)
• Spanish

If your site’s language matches one of these languages, the booking interface appears in that language automatically. You can set your site language under Settings > General in the ‘Site Language’ field.

If the language you want isn’t currently included, just ask us to include a translation in the next update. Create a pre-sales ticket here and let us know what language you need.

To translate the plugin yourself or just reword specific strings on the front-end, take a look at the options later in this article.

Which translation method should you use for your booking site?

The two plugins that we recommend to make your WooCommerce booking site multilingual almost instantly are TranslatePress and Weglot. Both get you to the same result – a site where your customers can pick from a list of languages that you offer and make their booking in their preferred language. Let’s look at both multilingual plugins.

TranslatePress

TranslatePress runs entirely on your own server. It translates your pages as they load, stores every translation in your site’s own database, and gives you a visual editor to manage them yourself. It also detects the translations that plugins and themes already ship with and reuses them automatically, so their interfaces come pre-translated for the languages those plugins support.

Pros and cons of TranslatePress

What works well:

• Your translations are stored in your own database, so you own them and they move with your site if you ever migrate it.
• It works with any theme or plugin, because it translates the rendered page rather than relying on how each plugin is coded.
• It reuses the existing translations that plugins and themes already include, so you don’t re-translate interfaces that are already covered.
• The visual, front-end editor lets you translate content in context and see exactly how each page looks.
• There’s a free version, and the core plugin is a one-time cost rather than an ongoing per-word charge.

What to keep in mind:

• You do more of the work up front than with Weglot, because you’ll need to translate the content on product pages, and automatic translation relies on connecting an engine like DeepL or Google Translate.
• Some features, including the SEO add-on and automatic translation, need the premium version.

Weglot

Weglot works from the cloud. It automatically detects all the content on your page, translates it through its own translation engine, and serves the translated version back – with very little hands-on work from you. Because it translates your site’s output directly, it supplies its own translations for everything on the page rather than drawing on the translations a plugin already includes.

Pros and cons of Weglot

What works well:

• Setup is fast – Weglot detects and machine-translates your content automatically, so your site can be live in multiple languages within minutes
• It’s hands-off, picking up and translating new content as you add it without any manual steps
• Translated pages are served from Weglot’s global network, so they load quickly for international visitors
• It handles multilingual SEO for you, including hreflang tags, translated URLs, and metadata
• Everything is managed from a single dashboard, with a visual editor for refining translations

What to keep in mind:

• You will need a premium plugin for WooCommerce
• It’s a subscription, priced by word count and number of languages, so the cost grows as your site does
• Your translations live on Weglot’s servers rather than your own, so they stop appearing if you end your subscription
• You have less granular control, since Weglot translates your page output with its own engine rather than using translations a plugin already provides

Let’s look at how to implement both multilingual plugins for a booking site.

How to create a multilingual booking site with TranslatePress

To use TranslatePress to make your bookings site multilingual, follow these steps:

Step #1: Install the plugins

If you don’t already have Bookings for WooCommerce and TranslatePress installed, install and activate them as the first step.

Step #2: Run the TranslatePress set up wizard

The TranslatePress wizard launches automatically after activating the plugin and will quickly let you configure your multilingual site. It allows you to:

• Choose which languages you want to support
• Configure the front-end language switcher so that customers can easily toggle between different languages
• Decide whether to enable automatic translations

The wizard only takes a couple of minutes. Once you’ve completed it, your site is multilingual and ready to start accepting bookings.

Step #3: Create your first bookable product

To create your first bookable product in your site (f you haven’t done so already), refer to our support doc on how to create a bookable product. This will explain how to:

• Set your booking unit (e.g. hour, day, night, week)
• Configure minimum and maximum booking periods
• Set prices per booking unit
• Configure every other aspect of your bookable product

With your booking settings in place, you can use TranslatePress to translate the product content itself, including page title, content, short description, etc. Refer to this guide on how to translate WooCommerce products using TranslatePress. It includes a manual method and an automatic method using either Google Translate or Deepl.

Now that your bookable product has been created and translated, customers can start to make their bookings in the language of their choice.

How to create a multilingual booking site with Weglot

To use Weglot to make your bookings site multilingual, follow these steps:

Step #1: Install the plugins

If you don’t already have Bookings for WooCommerce and Weglot installed, install and activate them as the first step.

Step #2: Create an API key

Once you’ve activated Weglot, you’ll immediately be prompted to create an API key. This only takes a few seconds.

You’ll then be prompted to configure the plugin. This includes:

• Choosing which languages you want to support
• Configuring the front-end language switcher so that customers can easily toggle between different languages

Once you’ve completed these steps, your site is fully multilingual and all your content will be available to customers in your chosen languages.

Both these methods – TranslatePress and Weglot – are quick and painless. Now let’s look at how to run a single language booking site and how to translate Bookings for WooCommerce into your own language.

How do you translate Bookings for WooCommerce into your own language?

If your store only needs one language rather than a multilingual switcher, you have several options for translating Bookings for WooCommerce into your preferred language. If the plugin doesn’t already ship with the translation you want and you prefer to create the translation rather than ask us, take a look at the options below.

Option #1: Reword strings for a single-language site

Bookings for WooCommerce uses several text strings in fields on the front end – e.g. ‘Start Date’, ‘Book Now’, etc. If you want to translate or update these strings:

• Go to WooCommerce > Settings > Bookings > Calendar
• You’ll see a list of available labels with placeholder text
• Just update the labels you want to change

See this support doc for more information.

Option #2: Use Loco Translate to add extra languages

Loco Translate is an easy method because it works entirely inside your WordPress dashboard (and it’s free).

Install and activate it, then go to Loco Translate > Plugins and select ‘Bookings for WooCommerce’. Click ‘New language’, choose your language, and translate the strings in the built-in editor. Loco Translate saves the translation files in the right place for you, so there’s nothing to upload.

You can also take a look at this support document for a more detailed guide.

Option #3: Use Poedit to create a new translation file

Poedit is a desktop app for editing translation files directly. Open the plugin’s .pot template file in Poedit by browsing to bookings-for-woocommerce/languages/bfwc.pot, create a new translation for your language, and translate each string. Poedit generates the matching .mo file when you save, which you then upload to the /languages/ folder so WordPress can load it.

Whichever method you choose, translating the plugin only changes its wording – your bookings, availability, and settings will all stay exactly as they are.

Multilingual bookings – recap

That’s how to create a multilingual WooCommerce booking site quickly and easily. We looked at why the plugin is multilingual out of the box, the two quickest ways to translate the rest of your store using TranslatePress and Weglot, and how to translate the plugin into a single language with Loco Translate or Poedit.

Bookings for WooCommerce lets you accept date-based bookings through standard WooCommerce products, with shared availability calendars that keep bookings in sync whatever language the customer uses.

The plugin is compatible with all themes and page builders, including Astra, Flatsome, and Woodmart, and page builders like Elementor and Divi. If you have any questions, our world-class support team is on hand to help. And it’s backed by a 14-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it risk-free.