Get started with the 7 best WordPress booking plugins in 2022

Are you looking for a way to manage your rental bookings on your WordPress site?

If you have a business that relies on customers booking your properties, venues, or rental products, it’s really important to have a solid online booking system. More and more customers want to make bookings online at their own convenience, and your business needs to adapt to increase sales and improve customer satisfaction.

If you want to let customers make rental bookings on your WordPress site, using a plugin is the best way to do it. In this article, we’ll take a look at the top 7 WordPress plugins for rental bookings.

Why use a WordPress rental booking plugin?

If you use a plugin to set up an online booking system directly on your WordPress site, users can select a booking date for rental products and pay you directly from the site.

By setting up a booking calendar on your site, you are also less reliant on third-party sites that charge you a fee whenever someone books your products. For instance, if you rent hotels on a third-party site such as Booking.com, you will be charged a commission every time a booking is made for your property.

On the other hand, plugin licences usually have an annual fee that is more reasonable in the long run for your business. In addition to this, some plugins also offer a lifetime licence option in the form of a single payment.

Having an online booking system in your WordPress site’s backend also makes it much easier to keep track of available inventory, your customers, your booked dates, and everything else you need to successfully run your rental booking business.

Additionally, if your business offers various services, properties, or products as rental booking products, you can embed multiple booking calendars on your site. This way, depending on your rental booking business and the products you want to rent out, you can adjust the booking settings according to your unique requirements.

For instance, if you rent out hotel rooms and boats, you can let guests book a boat for a one-day minimum while hotel rooms can only be booked for a 2 nights minimum slot.

What to look for in a WordPress rental booking plugin

You need to consider your specific business needs when it comes to accepting online bookings. That’s why it’s important to have a plugin that offers you lots of flexibility for you to set up online bookings on your WordPress site exactly as you need to.

Ideally, you want to choose a plugin that offers extensive rental booking features, such as the ability to add a booking calendar to your site so customers can select the dates they want to book, the option to view and manage all bookings using the default WordPress admin panel, and the ability to embed a booking calendar anywhere on your site without needing any prior coding knowledge.

A good plugin is easy to set up and offers you full control over how bookings can be used on your WordPress site. You want to have the ability to set minimum and maximum booking lengths, block out specific booking dates and automatically calculate the booking cost while also letting customers book products individually or in multiples.

Additionally, you want to offer your customers an easy way to manage, view, and cancel bookings whenever they need to. This helps enhance the customer experience on your rental bookings site and increases customer satisfaction.

Top 7 rental booking plugins for WordPress

Let’s dive deeper into the best rental booking plugins for WordPress. It’s important to note that some of the plugins we list will work just fine on standard WordPress sites, but others have to be integrated with a WooCommerce site.

If you are an online business that runs on a WordPress site, it makes sense to set up WooCommerce anyway. It’s one of the most popular eCommerce solutions for WordPress sites, its core features are free to use, and it will run just about anywhere you can get WordPress hosting.

You can easily set up rental bookings on WooCommerce using most of the plugins we mention below. In addition to this, since WooCommerce comes with multiple payment gateway options, accepting your customer’s booking payments is simple and straightforward.

#1. Bookings for WooCommerce

Bookings for WooCommerce is the top plugin on our list, and it works great for all kinds of rental bookings such as properties, venues, and other rental products like cars or drones.

Bookings for WooCommerce integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and offers you full control over every aspect of your booking product. This means you can set booking units by day, night, or by week, set minimum and maximum booking lengths, and allocate the product quantity to be booked singly or in multiples. For instance, you can let customers rent a hotel room for 2 nights or let them book a venue for a minimum of 3 days.

Using the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin, you can also set restrictions for the booking periods and create a unique user experience on your site. For starters, you can set booking start days so customers can only start their booking period after a specific day.

For example, you can set it up so that all bookings start on Mondays only. Similarly, you can also set a booking buffer period, so there’s enough time for you to arrange logistics between booking days. For instance, you can make sure that bookings can only be made two days after the previous booking ends.

In addition to this, Bookings for WooCommerce also lets you set postponed starts to your booking products. This way, users can make bookings in advance, giving your business more time to make arrangements and deliver the booking product to your customer quickly. This is particularly great for products that have to be prepared such as custom swag bags, cakes, or bouquets.

Bookings for WooCommerce also comes with a lot of flexible pricing features. One example of this is seasonal pricing, meaning you can charge higher or lower prices for specific periods in the year. It also lets you set a discount based on the total number of days a customer makes the booking. For example, you can offer a 10% discount if users book a gallery venue for four days instead of three.

Using the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin, bookings are added directly to the customers’ carts, and they can check out to confirm the booking. This makes booking an incredibly easy process for customers. Once the customer has made the booking, they will receive an email notification containing all the booking details.

Bookings for WooCommerce plugin integrates perfectly with WooCommerce Product Add-Ons Ultimate – a plugin that lets you add extra, fully customisable options to your bookings products. This way, you can create booking products and showcase additional product options on your WooCommerce site. For instance, if you rent hotel rooms, you can let customers select breakfast or laundry options as add-ons.

The basic version of Bookings for WooCommerce can be used on one site, but you can also upgrade to the pro version and use the plugin on unlimited sites!

#2. WooCommerce Bookings

WooCommerce Bookings is a simple plugin that’s designed to let you create bookable products on your WooCommerce site.

This is a very popular choice for WooCommerce businesses, as this is the official rental booking plugin made by the developers over at WooCommerce. The plugin makes it very easy to create booking products and be very specific about the time slots you set. This way, whether you want to offer online class bookings with fixed time slots, or offer hotel bookings and let customers select from a range of dates, the plugin is a solid option.

Additionally, you can also set the minimum and the maximum number of participants and customise the pricing of your booking product accordingly. This way, you can charge extra if customers want to bring extra participants to the venue. The plugin even lets you set up confirmations, reminders, and free cancellations for customers who have already made their bookings on your site.

However, this plugin lacks the functionality to set up buffers between bookings or block out double bookings, which are booking options that you get in many of the plugins in our list. Compared to Bookings for WooCommerce, this plugin is more expensive.

#3. Rentle

Rentle is a free-to-use WordPress bookings plugin that lets you create advanced booking products on your site.

For starters, you can set up a booking calendar with real-time inventory management. This gives you a better idea of which dates your products are already booked and makes it easy for you to manage all booking requests from your site.

The Pro plan comes with additional features such as multi-location support and multi-language options. You can also package products better which is a great way to sell booking bundles and increase the average order value on your WordPress site.

Rentle works seamlessly with default WordPress, but it’s worth noting that you get many of the same features it offers by default in WooCommerce, without needing the plugin. For instance, Rentle integrates with payment methods directly such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, credit cards, and other local payment methods. However, WooCommerce does this as well, so as a store owner this wouldn’t be a particularly noteworthy feature for you.

Rentle offers a Lite and Core version with varying pricing plans depending on how many features you need. It’s also important to note that the most advanced plan is quite expensive, especially if you’re comparing it with a feature-rich plugin such as the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin.

#4. RnB – WooCommerce Booking & Rental Plugin

RnB – WooCommerce Booking & Rental Plugin integrates with your WooCommerce site.

Using the plugin, you can add unlimited rental products to your WooCommerce site and easily keep track of them using a maintenance and blocking calendar. In addition to this, you can also add a “Request for Quote” button to your bookable products. This way, customers can negotiate pricing. You can set custom pricing for these customers so that they’re more likely to check out from your site.

Other notable features include hourly range pricing, easy inventory management and variations, unlimited payable resources, and persons.

#5. Booqable

Booqable is a professional WordPress bookings plugin that makes it easy to create bookable products and accept user bookings.

Other than creating professional-looking bookable products on your WordPress site, the plugin also lets you easily keep track of products you rent using a solid inventory management system. You can also set tiered pricing structures and advanced pricing for bookings, so it’s easier to charge customers a fair rental price according to your unique bookable products.

In addition to this, Booqable also integrates with major payment gateways like PayPal and Stripe. This way you can let customers easily pay using popular payment methods when making online bookings from your WordPress website. As we’ve discussed, this feature is only handy if you don’t have a WooCommerce store.

#6. Lodgify

Lodgify is a bookings plugin designed for property rental businesses that want to offer their customers an easy way to make bookings online.

Using the plugin, you can turn your ordinary WordPress site into a multi-property booking portal. You can showcase a search box, let users view search results with a map view, and create a dedicated page for listing each of your properties.

Additionally, if you also promote your properties on external listing websites such as Airbnb and Booking.com, Lodgify also lets you synchronise multiple calendars and booking data.

#7. Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce

Booking and Appointment Plugin for WooCommerce offers an all-in-one solution for offering your customers an easy way to make reservations and bookings online from your site.

You can integrate the plugin on your WooCommerce site and set it up for your property rentals, product rentals, and appointments. The plugin lets you create bookings with simple, variable, grouped, bundle, composite, and subscription products on your WooCommerce site.

Customers on the front end can search for booking availability by the dates they want to make bookings. Even if a customer makes a mistake when selecting dates from the single product page, they can update the booking directly from the cart and checkout page.

The best WordPress plugin for rental bookings and appointments

The plugins we listed above, though similar, may have specific features that make sense for your business. However, in most cases, we recommend our top option: Bookings for WooCommerce.

The plugin is very versatile and ideal for all kinds of property rentals, venue rentals such as galleries or events halls, or product rentals such as drones, cars, or boats. It comes with a multitude of settings for creating bookings according to your bookable products and business model.

It’s important to note that you can’t set up hourly bookings using this plugin. Bookings for WooCommerce only lets you offer property, venue or a product to be booked for at least one day or night.

Beyond that, the flexibility you have is vast, making it the best option for most businesses. The plugin is extremely simple to set up, so you don’t need to be tech-savvy to get started.

Once you get the Bookings for WooCommerce plugin, install and activate it on your WooCommerce site. Create a new rental product by navigating to Products → Add New.

Set basic product details and select Booking using the Product Data dropdown menu. Here, you can set all your booking details including Booking unit, Max bookings per unit, Standard cost, Buffer period, as well as the Max booking length and Min booking length.

Once you’re done specifying basic details, you can start specifying un-bookable dates or charge higher rates for specific dates using the Add Date Range button. You can set the Cost per Unit field to a higher or lower price depending on the period of time. You can even offer a discount if customers book the product for more than a specified amount of days.

Once you’re ready, click on the Publish button to continue.

Customers can now select their Check in and Check Out dates directly using your WooCommerce site.

They will be shown the pricing according to their selections so they can add the product to their cart and checkout.

Ready to set up online bookings on your site?

Having an online booking system on your WordPress site is a great way to automate bookings for your business. This also reduces your reliance on third-party booking sites while helping you generate more revenue. As a result, it can also help your business grow and maximise sales in the long run.

While there are many options for booking plugins that let you create bookable products, Bookings for WooCommerce is the best plugin available for all types of rental booking businesses. The plugin is very easy to set up, even if you’re not very tech-savvy, and offers lots of flexibility to set up bookings for your properties, venues, or products.

Ready to start offering online bookings on your site? Get Bookings for WooCommerce today!