WordPress Based Open Source Tour Booking Using Woocommerce and WPTravelly Plugins

By: Joseph de Souza

Open Source Tour Booking System – How To Create A Free Online Booking System

Here are the details to develop an open source (under GNU General Public License) free tour booking system based on WordPress and WooCommerce.   We can have two types of tour booking systems the first one is a full fledged system where we can enter the complete tour description, general information, the day to day schedule, along with an image gallery, frequently asked questions, tour guide details, activities, Places You'll Visit, as well as the Day wise Details and the itinerary. You can also put your contact details and related tours.



  

  

Tour Booking System Backend

Firstly we have the Add New Motorcycle Tour under Motorcycle Tour that we can click to enter a new tour. We can also click All Motorcycle Tour to view all the tours and then click on the one that we wish to edit.

The display setting section provides away for you to control all the parts that you wish to display and also those which you do not wish to display. In case you do not wish to display certain sections, you can disable it here.
Now this is the back end. Here you can enter all the text in tour description and then the other settings, there is the general information, date configuration, pricing. The display of the various sections can be controlled by the display settings.

Configuring The Tour Dates

Regarding the date configuration there are three options. There are three types of dates, fixed date, particular dates and repeated dates. The first option is particular dates where you can enter any set of dates for that tour, the second option is fixed dates – only one set of dates can be entered and the third option is repeated date repeated dates means you can have them repeating every month on the same day or every year.   

Configuring the Prices and Types of Seats Available

In case you wish to control the exact number of seats available for a particular tour then you have you will have to have a separate booking page for each particular date for example in a tour booking system for a motorcycle tour which provides different brands of motorcycles with varying prices we can just have each date is the separate tour booking page. In this manner we can control the number of motorcycles available of each brand for each tour date for that particular tour.
Then there is a pricing here. You can name the type of the ticket by using the translation settings. Here, I have put different types of motorcycles available and their corresponding price (rental for the tour) and under extra service I have put Pillion.   


So that means only when the main service is selected, then your additional extra service options will be available to the visitor.

How Does The Booking Process Work?

The booking process will work this way: As soon as customer books a particular motorcycle on a particular to date for a tour, then the seats available (to book) for that particular brand of motorcycle will get automatically get reduced by one. Suppose there at 10 bullet 500cc motorcycles available for another tour as soon as 10 people book The Enfield bullet 500 motorcycle no further bookings will be accepted .
In case we are having a full tour booking website then only one page of each tour should have the full description and all the details, the remaining pages for the same tour should be developed as only a bare bone booking system with very little details. Ideally containing only the booking section and the dates.
All the dates which are available for a particular tour should we put on the main page of that tour. The second way the second option is to have a separate website and link each date to the respective tour booking page of that particular date.
In the second option each tour booking page will be only system with very minimal details as I have implemented here for a client .


  

The Checkout Process

There is also the possibility of having different currencies as well as different languages. Here I be implemented this system in two languages English as well a German and two currencies Euro and US dollar.
Using this system it is very easy to book a tour you just have to click book now after selecting the type of tour you want and the selected tour goes into the cart from where you can check out.   


The last phase in the check out is entering your details and selecting the payment gateway. In this particular system there are two payment gateways you can either pay by bank transfer or use the regular payment gateway to pay by card or Revolut Pay.   


  
After you have done this and accepted the terms and conditions you can successfully check out. Immediately on completion of the booking process you will get a custom email from the website.

The Customised Customer Email

Immediately on completion of the booking process you will get a custom email from the website. Again a free open source plugin is used to customise the email sent to the customer. You can add a logo and lot of other details besides that you can add another special line at the end is controlled by code custom code.   


All orders are placed on hold unless the payment is done at the time of check out.   

WordPress and WooCommerce Based Tour Booking System - Plugins Used

The following plugins be used in the development of this Tour Booking System based on WordPress, first of all WooCommerce and then the WP Travelly plugin. Besides this a lot of other plugins where used which a listed below
1) Classic Editor
2) Email Template Customizer for WooCommerce
3) Revolut Gateway for WooCommerce
4) TranslatePress - Multilingual
5) Travel Booking Plugin For WooCommerce – wptravelly
6) UpdraftPlus - Backup/Restore
7) WooCommerce
8) Wordfence Security
9) WP Mail SMTP
10)WP Super Cache
11) WPCode Lite
12)YayCurrency
13) Yoast SEO
14) Astra Theme
  

Open Source GNU GPL Booking System - Additional Features

This entire system is fully open source and all plugins are free (Under GNU General Public License). In case you don't not require any additional features for example the date configuration in the WP Travelly plugin will give you only fixed dates and repeated dates. Now in case you want to prevent bookings once the seats for that particular tour date are fully booked, then you will have to use fixed dates and make a separate page for each tour date of that particular tour. Secondly the currency plugin only supports three currencies in the free version.   
Additional customisations are done by adding code snippets in the WPCode Lite plugin. The checkout screen has been customised by custom CSS added to Additional CSS.

Video of Wordpress & Woocommerce Based Tour Booking Website

   And Finally here is a video to illustrate the working of WooCommerce based tour booking website. The full details are demonstrated of how this can be used by a website visitor to book a tour. The backend is also shown so that you can check out the plugins used

About The Author

Joseph de Souza is a leading Freelance SEO consultant and Web developer in Goa, India with more than 17 years of experience in internet marketing.
He has a proven track record and has has helped several companies increase their traffic many times over and thereby increase their revenue and profits.
Besides English, Joseph has also successfully optimized two German language websites and a Danish language website and obtained outstanding results.