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How do I allow multiple bookings for one appointment slot?

I am having this issue, and every other community question I see, does not answer my question clearly. We just spent about 3 days installing Appointments+ to our site and after day 3 just realized that once a single user books an appointment it blocks off all the other slots that are under the capacity field for one provider.

See I was under the impression that once you create a service, add a capacity number, it would allow for up to that many slots to be booked.

The services we offer are guided, with a max number of 6 people per guide. So in one time slot, we need to book a max of 6 different people… meaning 6 individual bookings or doubles whatever… One day a person my want to come alone, another day a family may want to book 2 spots, etc…

I understand that is not possible to adjust the QTY by a customer on the booking calendar, but I was suggested to add the services for 1 person, 2 people, 3 people, etc to allow multip pricing and multi-booking. So now that this is done and over with, we run into another problem. The fact that it makes the date “Busy” the first time someone books an appointment, leaving the other 5 spots to rot.

We used Events Manager Pro, still have it for back-up if needed. Events Manager Pro provides live booking features with the ability to close those slots that have been booked for one appointment and allow the other 5 to still be available for purchase until all are gone.

Anyone has any idea how to fix this, before we go back to our old system? I absolutely love the model and calendar features. It looks clean and clear, but is not worth losing potential customers due to this feature not being clear or even available…

Oh and by the way, please give me something that does not involve MarketPress, because that won’t work for us. We already have e-commerce and it works perfect for our needs.

Thanks,

Olga

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 6:25:26
  • Tyler Postle
    • Recruit

    Hey Olga,

    Hope you’re doing well today and thanks for your question!

    The best way to do this would be with dummy providers. If there is 6 spots then create 5 dummy providers(plus your actual provider) and make sure you assigned your actual provider to your dummy providers, this way you receive all the emails for the appointment creations :slight_smile:

    You can assign your main provider user to the dummies in the Appointments > Settings > General tab.

    This way you now have 6 spots. The service capacity is more for when you have less capacity than providers. Otherwise it will always assume if a provider is doing a service then he/she is busy – but that is why we created the dummies feature :slight_smile:

    Of course, now your next question will be what about booking multiple appointments at a time?

    I know you said not to mention it, sorry! but that does require MarketPress, so you can add them all to the cart. Otherwise Appointments will be booked one at a time.

    Are your customers paying over the site? I’m just wondering because if they aren’t then booking individually is actually quite quick!

    Another option could be to use our Events+ plugin. Not sure if you have looked into that yet or not :slight_smile: You can set events to repeat, so you would really only need to set events for 1 day, then repeat them every day. Or whenever your working days are.

    Look forward to hearing back on this Olga! More than happy to discuss it further :slight_smile:

    Cheers,

    Tyler

  • Mohamed Zamir
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Hey, I think the staff/team here is relatively nice and helpful! and they solved this issue couple of times. I had the problem too but i went through the forum and found the answer ^^ ! but here's a guide: PS. If the dev. here wants to use it feel free *thumbs up*

    1. under the Admin Panel fine Users and click on Add New

    This should bring you to a page for you to create users, in Appointment+ case it would be translated to a Service provider (which will be covered later)

    2. Add as many user as you want, But for your case add 5 more . for the picture I've attached i've only created 3, sufficient for my service

    3. Go to settings and click on the Service Providers tab.

    4. Add New service provider and choose relevant User/ Service provider.

    5. Since your services provided is only applicable to one choose that exclusively.

    Test it out, works fine for me. Cheers :slight_smile:

    [attachments are only viewable by logged-in members]

  • Olga
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Thanks Tyler,

    Already tried the dummy providers also. One thing that was never taken into consideration for this dummy provider idea is that in order for anyone to do this, you have to create an email for each one. A valid email address for each user. So I ran out of real emails to use as dummy providers. Even if in some remove universe, I would make up emails that would work for this it would look bad on the front end. Right now as it is, it looks bad that we have 1 service listed twice (once for 1 person and once for 2 people), then imagine how much worse it would look if we had a list of repeated providers (in which for our case, are specific locations) …

    I can not use Market Press, thanks for pointing it out. Market press is too limited for our needs and I have already tested it to erase all doubts. Repeated events is already working with the current Appointments model, is the rest that is not working for our needs.

    By the way we provide a long list of services, not gigantic, but about 10 or so.. list is already long enough with duplication, we can not do this with locations (dummy providers) as well. It would get too confusing.

    I love the features to close out dates and allow providers to take time off. That is all wonderful indeed, just wished this would be the one plugin that would have worked for us. After all, it wasn’t free, so I was hoping its capabilities met our needs.

    The crowds like it, the test users loved it… but from end does not work for our business structure. :slight_frown: I am so sad about this.

    Thanks,

    Olga

  • Olga
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Yea Mohamed, just realized this is nothing new… I had already tried that route, still does not work for adding more availability to an appointment. Look

    [attachments are only viewable by logged-in members]

  • Olga
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    And let me add, I don’t mind the staff… I think the customer support has been great and very quick. I don’t believe this is a staff issue, is more of a plugin capability issue. Maybe it wasn’t meant for it to work standalone and by this I mean, apart from MarketPress. The plugin itself appears to be a standalone for single appointments… Would work great for a salon hair stylist or a doctor, but without MarketPress (which is not simple to use) it does not work for business like ours.

    I am giving it another day or two, just to rule out all possibilities of it actually being customizable to our needs.

  • Tyler Postle
    • Recruit

    Hey Olga,

    Yes, with dummy providers you don’t actually have to use valid email addresses, they can just be made up since you will be assigning the dummy providers to an actual user, that means all emails get routed through to the user they are assigned too :slight_smile:

    I do see how this limits you too. The solution we have put in place for multiple booking is MarketPress and unfortunately that won’t work for your needs :slight_frown: sorry about that Olga!

    I’m more than happy to help out with any further questions you have here.

    Look forward to hearing back!

    Cheers,

    Tyler

    PS. Zamir, thanks a ton for chiming in here :slight_smile: always nice to see the community helping eachother out. Sending some points your way.

  • Olga
    • WPMU DEV Initiate

    Hi Tyler,

    Thank you and everyone else here who offered sugestions. We have tried just about every sugestion and angle.

    Unfortunately, Appointments+ is not built to meet our needs at this time.

    The good news is we reached back to our previous provider and were pleased to hear their new updates have allowed the complete utilities and customization abilities that we need, so we are back in business.

    Thanks again for all the help.

    Kind Regards,

    Olga