Appointment Hour Booking – Booking Calendar vs Checkfront Online Booking System

Appointment Hour Booking is a WordPress plugin for creating booking forms for appointments with a start time and a defined duration over a schedule. The start time is visually selected by the end user from a set of start times calculated based in the “open” hours and service duration. The duration/schedule is defined in the “service” selected by the customer. Each calendar can have multiple services with different duration and prices. This plugin is useful for different cases like booking of medical services where services with different duration and prices may be available, for personal training sessions, for booking rooms for events, for reserving language classes or other type of classes and other type of services/resources booking where start times are selected and the availability is automatically managed using the defined service duration to avoid double-booking (the booked time is blocked once the booking is completed). Main Features: Easy visual configuration of calendar data and schedules Working dates, invalid/holiday dates and special dates can be defined Supports restriction of default, maximum and minimimum dates Open hours can be defined for each date Each calendar can have multiple services defined Each service can have its own price and duration Start-times are calculated automatically based in the open hours and service duration Available times are managed automatically to avoid double-booking Multiple services can be selected on each booking Services can have multiple capacity Automatic price calculation Customizable email notifications for administrators and users Form validation and built it anti-spam captcha protection Manual and automatic CSV reports iCal addon with iCal export link and iCal file attached into emails Calendar available in 53+ languages Multiple date formats supported Blocks for Elementor and Gutenberg Multi-page calendars Printable appointments list Features in commercial versions: Visual form builder for creating the booking form fields Booking form can be connected to payment process (Ex: PayPal Standard, PayPal Pro, Stripe, Skrill, Authorize.net, TargetPay/iDEAL, Mollie/iDEAL, SagePay, Redsys) Payments are SCA ready (Strong Customer Authentication), compatible with the new Payment services (PSD 2) – Directive (EU) Addons for integration with external services: reCaptcha, MailChimp, SalesForce, WooCommerce and others Addons with additional features: appointment cancellation addon, appointment reminders addon, clickatell and twilio SMS add-ons, signature fields, iCal synchronization, Google Calendar API, Zoom Meetings … Appointment Hour Booking can be used for: Booking services or resources: Define schedule, open hours, services, prices and durations and let the calendar plugin manage the schedule. Sample cases: Medical services, personal training, resource allocation, booking rooms, classes, etc… The services can have a maximum capacity (example: number of persons that can book/attend the service at the same time). The default capacity is 1. If the service capacity has been set to 1 the time-slot will be blocked for new bookings after getting one booking. If the service capacity has been set to a greater number (example: service with capacity 10) the time-slot will be blocked after filling the capacity (example: after getting bookings for a total of 10 persons). This feature is described in detail at https://apphourbooking.dwbooster.com/blog/2019/01/24/bookings-for-multiple-persons/ The Troubleshoot Area Use the troubleshot if you are having problems with special or non-latin characters. In most cases changing the charset to UTF-8 through the option available for that in the troubleshot area will solve the problem. You can also use this area to change the script load method if the booking calendar isn’t appearing in the public website. The Notification Emails The notification emails with the appointment data entered in the booking form can sent in “Plain Text” format (default) or in “HTML” format. If you select “HTML” format, be sure to use the BR or P tags for the line breaks into the text and to use the proper formatting. Exporting Appointments to CSV / Excel Files The appointment data can be exported to a CSV file (Excel compatible) to manage the data from other applications. That option is available from the “bookings list”, the appointments can be filtered by date and by the text into them, so you can export just the needed appointments to the CSV file. Other Versions and Features The free version published in this WordPress directory is a fully-functional version for accepting appointments as indicated in the plugin description. There are also commercial versions with additional features, for example: Ability to process forms/appointments linked to payment process (PayPal, Stripe, Skrill, …) Form builder for a visual customization of the booking form Addons with multiple additional features Payments processed through the plugin are SCA ready (Strong Customer Authentication), compatible with the new Payment services (PSD 2) – Directive (EU) that comes into full effect on 14 September, 2019. Please note that the pro features aren’t advised as part of the free plugin in the description shown in this WordPress directory. If you are interested in more information about the commercial features go to the plugin’s page: https://apphourbooking.dwbooster.com/download

Checkfront is an Online Booking System designed for your tour, activity, rental or accommodation business. Checkfront helps streamline the reservation process and grow your business by allowing you to manage availability and inventory, learn about your customers, automate communications, access valuable insights, and plan your day to day operations. Your guests can view your availability and book directly from your WordPress website at whatever time suits them. They can easily submit their details, sign digital waivers and documents, review their booking history, and make an online payment — all from a desktop or mobile device. This plugin provides a powerful real-time booking interface that blends in with your existing WordPress theme by connecting your Checkfront account to your WordPress site. Features include Display real time availability, take reservations, bookings and process payments online within your website Automatically send confirmations, alerts, invoices, and customized follow-up to customers, staff and partners Collect information for each participant with Guest Form and plan your day in advance with the Daily Agenda Over 50 additional integrations including MailChimp, Zoho, Google Apps, Xero, and Twilio SMS Create Customer Accounts for customers to review booking history, store autofill details and (optionally) modify future bookings from a personal login Sync your availability with OTAs like Viator, Expedia and TripAdvisor Detailed analytics and reporting Track third-party referrals and commissions with Partner Accounts Responsive, mobile-friendly booking process and back-end Support for multiple languages and international currencies Multi-gateway payment processing including Stripe, Square, Paypal, Authorize.net, SagePay & dozens more SSL support keeps the customer on your website while making payment Support for shortcodes, or custom theme pages in WordPress. Tailored onboarding session and a 24/7 support team No commissions! Checkfront integrates seamlessly into WordPress and does not force customers off to an external website to process bookings or view availability. Checkfront keeps consumer data secure and separate from WordPress. The combined CMS features of WordPress with the power, flexibility and security of the Checkfront back-end make for an industry leading booking management system. See Checkfront and WordPress in action here. Installation Install the Checkfront Booking plugin in your WordPress admin by going to ‘Plugins / Add New’ and searching for ‘Checkfront’, (or) If doing a manual install, download the plugin and unzip into your /wp-content/plugins/ directory Activate the the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress Configuration Create your Checkfront account Setup you inventory and configure your account on Checkfront Enable the Checkfront booking search widget in WordPress Create a WordPress Post and embed the Checkfront booking system by using the shortcode: [checkfront] (see the plugin for more options to pass to the shortcode) If you wish to use a theme template instead of a shortcode, see the checkfront-custom-temp late-sample.php provided with the plugin Frequently Asked Questions Checkfront WordPress FAQ General Checkfront FAQ Additional Support and Documenation Screenshots Checkfront Dashboard WordPress code generator within Checkfront Booking Interface integrated into WordPress Booking Interface within Checkfront Checkfront Guest Form