Free Hotel Booking Plugin – MotoPress Plugin Review

Jan 29, 2019 | WordPress Plugins

Are you looking for a Free Hotel Booking plugin for WordPress? This is the solution! Because free is always in the budget. MotoPress released a hotel booking plugin that is packed with loads of features!! You’ll watch to watch this tutorial through to the end. It’s amazing how much you can do in the budget of free!

Full Transcript:

Hey, y’all, I’m Kori Ashton and you are watching this video more than likely because you’re trying to find a solution inside of WordPress to help you reserve a room, book a hotel room, have some sort of reservation/booking feature on your WordPress website, and guess what, y’all, I have found it. All in the budget of free.

hotel-booking-plugin-motopress

Oh, it gets so good! Yes, there’s a premium version. Yes, it gets amazing, but the free version is what I’m about to showcase for you. It is extraordinary what you get for that and then of course, if you have just a little wiggle room in your budget, you can go up just a little bit further and go all out Premium.

Let’s go take a look. So I’m gonna show you a detailed look at MotoPress’ brand new hotel booking plugin. Now, this, of course, is the light version that lives over here on wordpress.org in the repository, but in and of itself it has a lot inside of the free version.

Features

So I’m gonna show you right now how to go in your dashboard, install it, and optimize some of the free version and then we’re gonna go even deeper into the Pro version. Let’s go take a look. So this is the beauty of it.

Online Search Availability Form

This online search availability form. So there’s a form that visitors can come to your website, select dates of when a room might be available, how many adults, how many children, and you can open it up and say Book Room and it’ll go into the search and look at your listings.

Accommodation details

You have many different types of attributes like bed size, capacity over all, you can add in all sorts of other accommodations like WiFi or Fire Pit, you know, different ideas that you might have available. You can add in all of those details.

Booking Calendar

There’s a booking calendar right here. Really cool user interface so they can select the dates. From here checking in to here checking out. This is another incredible feature.

Season Pricing

Now, this one is seasonal pricing so let’s say you know that in the summertime for South Padre here in Texas, it’s gonna be packed out and you have a room for rent. Hey, we’re gonna hike those prices up. Well, you certainly don’t wanna go in there and manage that by yourself, manually having to do that.

So you’re gonna set that from the get go and this system is so smart, it will know when those dates are applied to go ahead and boost those prices. Gotta love that.

Variety of Rate

You can also have variations of room rates. If you wanna include some amenities. Something like adding in breakfast. You can toggle it up and do an upsell.

Weekly & Monthly Rates

Weekly and monthly rates, look at that option.

Extra Services

So if you have an extended stay, you can have that included inside of here, and then again, add those extra services. Maybe you wanna add in transportation that you’ll go pick them up. Concierge-style service, right?

Booking Multiple Accommodations

What if they wanna come in and reserve multiple rooms? Love that feature.

Booking Rules

All sorts of booking rules. So this is important for those who might have a little bit more complex bookings. You’ve got that capability inside of here.

iCal Syncing

Now get excited for this, you guys. If you’re actually running Airbnb, booking.com, if you’re over inside of TripAdvisor or hotels.com and you’ve already got some sort of affiliate network there, you wanna pull those out, put them on your WordPress website. This syncs with iCal. Mind blown!

Variable Pricing

Another cool feature is variable pricing, so if you have many more guests and you need to do a quick upcharge, you have the ability to do that as well.

Multilanguage Support

The plugin itself is ready to be multi-lingual. You can’t beat that, so as you’re having guests from all over the world get ready to come in and stay with you here in San Antonio, Texas, or wherever you are, this is the tool, it’s ready to be translated. Look at this right now. There are 14 languages, already right now ready to go. I’m sure they’ll be adding even more.

Online and Offline Payments

This is something really extra as well. Maybe you want them to just reserve it now and pay when they arrive. You can go that option.

WooCommerce Integration

It also easily incorporates as an add-on inside of WooCommerce.

Other Features:

  • Taxes and fees get set up
  • Discount coupons
  • automatic email notifications to your visitor, to your guest.
  • Booking confirmations, immediately. You can have this thing even set up and send out a confirmation email to them. They have to respond to that email in order to solidify the reservation.

I mean, you’ve got all sorts of really dynamic options. This team here as MotoPress, I’ve worked with them on several other projects. Seriously, their support is absolutely fantastic. You’ll wanna connect with them on this.

Installation

So let’s go look now at how to install it. Okay, headed into the WordPress dashboard, into the site that you wanna tinker and play with this, and of course, please, best practice is stop right now, if you’re trying to install this and tinker around on the live site, slow down. That is not best practice. I need you to be absolutely certain that you have a backup in place of whatever website you’re playing around with and ideally, you would be managing this in some sort of staging environment, a sandbox that you can really tinker and have a lot of fun with without having any of your traffic see this or have anything break on your website. So we don’t want that to happen, but right up above me right here is where you’re gonna come search and you’re gonna be looking for Hotel Booking L-I-T-E, Lite.

And that’ll pull this one up right here. So I went ahead and clicked Install and of course, you clicked Activate. And as soon as you do that, we transfer over to this page right here and you’re gonna notice up at the top, there’s a little bit of a directional cue for us. It says install the pages, so let’s read the instructions really quickly.

Booking confirmation and search resolve pages are required to handle bookings. Press Install Pages and basically, it’s gonna do it for us. Here we go, y’all. Install the pages.

Now if we were to head over to our Pages area and view all pages, of course, we’re gonna find those in here. Here are some of ’em right here. How nice is that those are already included? And by the way, this works on absolutely any WordPress theme.

You can take this plugin and put it into any theme and it’s fully responsive. You’re not gonna have any sort of wonkiness or breaking issues, especially if that theme is up-to-date and so is this MotoPress Hotel plug-in. So now you’re gonna see right away, over here, that we have some more custom post types inside of our left-side navigation. We have Accommodation and Booking.

accomodation-booking-hotel-booking-plugin-motopress

Now, don’t get intimidated by all these options sitting here. It actually moves pretty quickly to get it set up.

If you go into Accommodation Type, what’s great about this plugin and the developers of this plugin, they’ve been very thoughtful for us. They’ve given us a lot of information here. These are not physical accommodations, but they’re types like standard room, right? They’re room types. So you see, it took me 14 minutes to pause the video for a second and go create this.

Check this out, I’m gonna click View and show you what I just was able to build out in just less than 15 minutes. There’s my cover picture of the room. Here’s this beautiful gallery that I was able to add, the details of the room, and the different amenities that are all clickable, so that if you wanna find other rooms that have those same amenities and then here’s our availability calendar for booking, right.

Behind The Scenes

Oh! man, this gets you pretty excited. Let’s look behind the scenes just a little bit. So then clicking on the Accommodation Type and I’ll show you how to add one ’cause its literally just click Add New.

You’re gonna give it a name, you’re gonna give it a description and then kinda work down the page. Obviously, this is Yoast, so I can cinch that up. You can throw in a quick excerpt if you like. It depends on your theme as to whether or not that’s gonna display.

You can add in the capacity of the room down here. There’s that. You can put in a view, if that’s possible in the room. The bed type, there’s that available.

We’ll click here for the adding of a service. Over here on the right side, you’re gonna see the different amenities and of course, you can add whichever ones you offer by clicking Add New Amenity and then saying laundry service. Add New, there you go. Adds to the list, super simple to do there. So if we keep scrolling down, you’re gonna see the gallery for the room. Just by clicking there, you add whatever pictures you want in there to the gallery, and then you’re gonna be able to set your featured image.

Doing all that super easily and of course, the first time you do this, you’ll be clicking Publish, after that, you’ll be updating it. Go and view it and again, this is what it did for me. It has this beautiful featured image up here.

Ashe Theme

The theme that I’m using right now is called Ashe, A-S-H-E, it’s a free theme. So right now, I’m working all in the budget of free. This is a free plugin so far and this is a free theme I’m using.

This is the gallery, though, look at this. This beautiful, open lightbox happens that you can scroll through. I didn’t have to code anything. All those features are already inside of there and again, there’s the amenities and the availability calendar. All of that inside the budget of free.

Support/Training/Premium

Just an amazing, I absolutely love this thing. They also have incredible support. They’ve got an entire YouTube playlist here for how to handle every single one of these things. So if I went too quickly for you, please come over here. I’ll put the link to this playlist down below so that you can come check this app.

Each and every one of these features are gonna be detailed out in how to address them, how to use them inside of your booking options and when you’re ready to go Premium and go Pro, it’s only $50. That is it. There’s your license. If you’re a freelancer or you’re a small agency and you know that you’re gonna be helping other clients have this, go ahead and invest and buy the unlimited license. That gets you free and clear across the board to handle this on any WordPress website here, moving forward.

Conclusion

What do you guys think? How cool is this? I don’t know about you, but this is one of the things I love about WordPress. There’s so much free options out there and it’s great developers like MotoPress who lead the way and they’re offering so much to us in the budget of free.

Give them a shout-out. If you’re using this, please tell them thank you. If you need support from them, obviously get over to their support area, connect with them. I’ll put the link to that in the Description Box below.

Give ’em a shout-out over on Twitter, too, if you’re using this and making money with it.

I’ll see y’all next time. Bye, everyone.