Booking Activities 1.6 : Export, Booking without account

Two major improvements have been made to this new version.

Export: export your events in iCal format, and your bookings in iCal and CSV format. Then, sync them with your calendar and spreadsheet apps.
Book without account: allow your customer to make a reservation without creating an account. The WooCommerce “Guest checkout” feature is supported too.

Many of you have requested these two features, and we thank you for that! Your requests help us understand your needs and make Booking Activities move in the right direction.

Book without account

In order to make a reservation, your customers could log in or create a new account. A third option is now available: Book without account.

The customer will have to fill the same fields: first name, last name, email, phone, but these data will be bound to the booking instead of the user account. The notifications and the booking list are compatible with them, you don’t need to change anything.

You can enable or disable this option (as well as the two others) in the “User data (login/registration)” field settings, in the form editor.

Activate the desired login options and customize the labels

The WooCommerce “Guest checkout: Allow customers to place orders without an account” option is now supported.
You can also book for your customers without having to create an account for them thanks to the Order for Customers add-on.

Export events and bookings to iCal format (.ics file)

A new icon appeared on the “Calendar” field, in the form editor.

Export events from the “Calendar” field

It allows you to export the events you can see on the calendar. So you can filter the calendar as you wish and then export only the desired events.

When you click the icon, a dialog containing an URL and an “Export” button appears.

The URL is the events feed, the button is the instant export

Click the button to immediatly get the iCal file (.ics) containing all the events that you can see on the calendar at that moment.
The URL is an event feed. You need it to synchronize this calendar to your calendar apps (such as Google Calendar). If an event appears or disappears from this calendar later, it will also appear or disappear from the synced apps too. Similarly, if you change the “Calendar” field filters, the synced apps will be affected.

Be careful, your applications never sync in real time. They can synchronize every 24 hours or more. It is therefore normal that your changes are not reflected immediately on your applications.

Provide your customers with their own iCal feed

Your customers can also export and sync the events they have booked. You just need to give them their URL.
Use the new {user_ical_url} tag in the notification sent to the customer when his booking is “booked” or “pending”. You can put this tag in a hyperlink to make clickable, and get the iCal file.
If the customer has an account, the URL will provide all the customer’s bookings, past and future. Else, it will provide only the current booking.

Export your bookings in CSV format (.csv file)

The backend booking list can be filtered as desired and provide a lot of data. You can now transpose this list to your favorite spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets …) to exploit data. It allows you to create a new organization, make statistics, or easily get data previously inaccessible.

First, filter your booking list as you wish. The bookings you can see are the bookings you will export. Then, select the “Export” action above the list, in the “Bulk actions” selectbox.

Export your booking list according to filters

A dialog ask you what data you want to export among a very complete list. Validate the dialog and, just like when you export events, you will have an instant export button, to get the .csv file right now, and an URL to sync the list (filters applied) with your spreadsheet.

Export your bookings and any data related to them

Import or Synchronize on third-party apps

Now that you have your .ics or .csv file, or your URL, you want to import the file or sync the URL in your favorite app. You have to check your app documentation to know how to do.
For example, here are the docs for Google:

Don’t forget: it is normal if the synchronization isn’t immediate, it only depends on your app, Booking Activities always provides real-time data.

Customizable user booking list

The [bookingactivities_list] shortcode allow you to display your customers booking list, if they are logged in. Now this shortcode has a lot of attributes that allow you to filter the bookings displayed. For example, you can write: [bookingactivities_list from="today" status="delivered,booked,pending" per_page="20"] to display only the active bookings taking place today or later, whithin the limit of 20 rows per page. See the complete list of attributes here.

The list is now paginated. Your page loads faster, and looks lighter.
You can also observe better performance while loading the bookings lists (on the backend too).

Other small features

New booking status: Delivered
How to know if a booked booking has been honored? Now you can flag the booking as “Delivered” if the customer has attended the activity. It is a way to permanently “close” the booking.

New booking status: Refunded with coupon
Booking Activities allows you to refund a customer with a coupon worth the price paid for the reservation when it is used with WooCommerce. Until now, there was no difference between a booking refunded with cash, and a booking refunded with a coupon. Now it is explicitly mentionned.

New notification tag: {price}
You can use this new tag in your notification to display the order item price bound to the reservation. This tag is working for bookings made with WooCommerce, and with Prices and Credits add-on.

New option before deleting everything
When you uninstall Booking Activities, it is its last chance to remove all its data and leave your database clean. That’s why it did it. But it is no longer the case. Now you need to activate an option in Booking Activities settings to allow it to remove data on uninstall. You won’t loose your data accidentally anymore.
If you have bought add-ons and if you want to properly delete everything, you need to delete the add-ons first, and Booking Activities last.