I have many clients who operate health & wellness companies (ie. massage therapy, acupuncture etc.) They need the Bookings extension to automatically pad bookings to include time to turn around the rooms or admit new clients. For example:
If a client books a 1 hour massage at 2:00, the next available appointment cannot be available until 3:15 because they need that time to clean the room (new linens etc.) and admit the new person, even though on the customer would be booking & paying for one hour.
Thank you!
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Last updated: August 15, 2022
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Hi, as @Michael Dorchain and others reported:
The buffer is added to all available slots and not just after confirmed bookings! Thus removing a huge part of the slots available!!
This is not profitable with our business and many staff members available but not bookable, even though there’s no bookings on these blocks! There should be an option fo this. Currently this is not a ‘real’ buffer to me. Really disappointed. Thanks for considering.
This idea is not ‘complete’. The answer Matty provides is not a solution for the problem. Please read the comments for what is the real question.
Unfortunately, the Woo Commerce booking availability is not fluid (as of May 2016), so the buffer periods are hard-coded into the availability schedule.
Why can’t this extension attach the buffer period only to actual bookings?
I don’t fully understand why the buffer was added to all time slots and not just after confirmed bookings. This removes a good part of the slots available, making this feature not as useful as we would expect.
This absolutely a MUST HAVE feature amigos…
Many businesses need to maximize booking time and thus, the Buffer Period setting must allow the possibility to apply the padding only after after and before a booked block or group of blocks.
I might loose a client just because of this missing feature…
I will “maybe” try to dig into the booking extension code if I have time… and see if I can get some patch going. Any help to save me time will be much appreciated guys… so if any of you already know what hooks can get me going or understands the way block scheduling is generated, feel free to share 🙂
Thanks!
This is a really big deal, especially for bookings that don’t require admin confirmation. Let’s say I want to make my event space available for 2-hour time slots, but I know I need ½ hour to clean between bookings. If I define the fixed block as 120 minutes, then it’s possible for 2 customers to book and pay for contiguous time slots, leaving me no time to clean. The only solution is to define the fixed block as 150 minutes. This is all well and good in terms of not creating overlapping events, but it’s terrible UI. Now I have to make sure to put display multiple warnings in the ordering process to remind customers that what they seem to be booking is not what they’ll actually get. I’m sure there are many possible uses for the Booking Extension that have similar issues. We should be able to specify padding for the Resource, the Bookable Product, or both (with options to add or overlap).
Agreed, my company rents packrafting equipment and this is a huge issue.
A customer finds the raft they want off our website and books it for a 3 day trip. They make their payment, we receive notification, we ship out the raft.
Because it takes 2 days to ship the raft to them and 2 days to ship it back, the raft is *actually* booked/unavailable for 7 days.
I don’t want to charge the client for days that their equipment is in the mail – only the days that they’re actually using the raft. And I don’t want someone else to be able to book that raft for a day it’s being shipped.
When someone rents a raft, I need there to be a way to automatically make the product unavailable for 4 additional days on the backend. For UI/simplicity’s sake, I want the customer to only see that they’re booking and paying for their equipment for the dates they need it.
Having padding time for the Bookings extension would save me a ton of headache right now.
This is for me too, as I rent paintings and photographs to customers which have to send it back to us, before we are able to rent it again. This needs in most cases few days for shipping back to us.
I’m really surprised that this hasn’t been implemented or acknowledged by the Woo team yet.
To anyone struggling with this, while it’s not ideal and might not work for everyone, we can work around it by setting something like 15 minute “bookable = no” intervals on the product level/resource rules. (i.e. 10:00 am – 10:15am Bookable = no)
From my testing it appears to work but can be a bit of a hassle if you work different hours 5 days a week.
Give us a real solution Woo! 🙂
Yeah, I tried Amber’s solution on our staging site, and it works fine, but it only makes sense if you have fixed time slots. Not at all how we actually want to offer this particular service. It would be far preferable to let someone pick one of several start times and durations. Having dug around in the code/API, it seems like it’d be possible to do this via a plugin and action hook. I.e. any time a booking is created, check to see if it’s a product that needs padding, then make the resource unavailable for the appropriate time before/after. I have a rough idea of how to do it, but it doesn’t seem worth the effort, only to worry about whether a future update would break or replace it.
You got my 3 votes! Wish I could vote more. I’m a real estate photographer and being booked back to back is nearly impossible to execute. Usually it takes approximately 30min between each shoot to get to the next location.
Amber thanks for the work around, I will try this until Woo hears our please 😉
P.S. would love to vote all 10 votes on this one!
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes please.
Make this expandable to days as well. If I ship gear, I need the padding time to cover shipping time when the gear is returned.
I’m surprised the WooThemes folks never came by this page to notify us they were working on it, but Padding has been introduced today (they use the name “Buffers”) in WooCommerce Bookings 1.8.
It’s great that it’s there, with a caveat: from what I can tell during some (brief) testing, it doesn’t seem to work dynamically. That is, you set up your block lengths and your buffer times, and it creates a fixed schedule of block start times (after a few different adjustments, I can’t tell how it calculates these). This may not be problem for most folks, but it means: you can’t have totally flexible start times. I.e. if you want to let people rent your party room for 2 hours with a 30-minute buffer, you can’t let them just pick any old start time in 30-minute increments, you have to just offer the start times that Bookings creates.
Also, say you create a product with one block/buffer setting, then create a booking for it. If you update it later, the available blocks that show up don’t know anything about the buffers from the previous setting. That is, creating a booking doesn’t actually mark the resource as unavailable during the pre/post buffer periods. So if you use buffers and you change settings on a product, you may have to manually fix up availability during buffer times of anything booked before you made your changes!
Plus it’d be grand if variation of the same product ie Massage could have different duration ie 30mn, 45mn…