A family taking two rooms, or a guest booking this weekend and a night next month, can put every room in a basket and pay for the lot once. The whole basket arrives in your front office as one booking with a row per room, and the guest doesn't have to go through the card form three times.
Nothing to switch on. Any room type you've published for online booking can go in a basket.
Before you start
Read Take room bookings on your own website first — the basket sits on top of it. Rooms only appear if they have an active rate plan.
What the guest does
- Searches dates on your booking page and opens a room.
- Picks a rate and taps Add to basket instead of Pay & confirm.
- Adds more rooms — any room type, any dates, in the same basket.
- Gives their name, phone and email once, at the basket.
- Pays one deposit covering every room.
They can still book a single room straight through without the basket. Most people do, and nothing about that flow changed.
Rooms are held, not booked, until the money clears
This is the part worth understanding, because it's what you'll see in the front office.
- While a room is in someone's basket it is held for 20 minutes. It stops showing as available to other guests — including to your own online booking page — but no reservation is created, so it does not appear in your advance bookings, your calendar or your arrivals list.
- Adding another room resets the clock on the whole basket, so a guest who takes fifteen minutes choosing their second room doesn't lose their first.
- The clock is also reset when they start paying, so it lasts through the card form.
- If they walk away, the hold lapses on its own and the rooms go back on sale. Nobody needs to cancel anything.
- The moment payment is confirmed, the whole basket becomes one real advance booking with a row per room, and the deposit is receipted against it.
The guest sees a countdown on their basket, so a released room is never a surprise to them either.
What you'll see in the front office
- One advance booking, with one row per room. A booking has always been able to hold several room types over several date ranges — that's what the rows are for — so a basket is exactly one booking. Each row carries its own room type, arrival date and nights, and each is checked in, moved or cancelled on its own.
- One deposit, split across the rows. The payment produces a single receipt against the booking, and each row carries its share. At check-in each room's share comes off that room's folio.
- Rooms are not pre-assigned. Every row is "any room of this type" — your front desk picks the actual room at check-in, exactly as with a phone booking.
- Two rooms of the same type are two rows, not one row saying "2". That's what makes them show correctly on the calendar and in your occupancy counts.
What the guest receives
As soon as the payment is confirmed, the guest gets one confirmation email for the whole basket. It lists every room and arrival, and attaches a calendar file with one entry per stay. The confirmation screen has a View your booking button that opens the same booking page the email links to.
Tips
- A basket holds up to 10 rooms. Beyond that it's a group booking and belongs on the phone, where you can agree a rate.
- Held rooms count as unavailable in your own occupancy view. If you're wondering why a room shows as taken with no reservation against it, someone probably has it in a basket right now. Wait twenty minutes.
- A guest paying for a room already in their basket is not double-charged. Their own held rooms don't block their own checkout.
Common problems
"A guest says they paid but only some rooms are booked." Unlikely — every room in a paid basket is written as one booking in a single step, and the system deliberately books them even if a hold lapsed while the guest was paying. Check the payment reference against Advance Bookings. If a room was sold to someone else while the guest was paying you'll have an overbooking to resolve; it is recorded in the application log.
"A guest paid online but I can't find the deposit anywhere." Open the booking and look at its deposit. If it is blank, the money reached your payment provider but never became a receipt. There is one usual cause: the card gateway has no settlement account against it. Go to Setup > Payment methods, find the method for your gateway, and set the bank or cash account the money settles into. Until that is set the system has nowhere to post an online payment to, so it leaves it alone rather than guessing. Once it is set, tell your supplier which bookings were affected — their deposits can be posted for you without the guest paying again.
"The guest name on an online booking looks wrong." Online bookings before this was corrected could attach to an existing guest who happened to share an internal number — an unrelated person entirely. If you see a booking whose guest does not match the contact name and phone on the payment, do not check it in: the folio would go to the wrong person, and to their sponsor if they have one. Report it and it can be repointed at the right guest.
"The basket says the rooms are no longer held." The 20 minutes ran out. The guest adds them again — availability at that moment decides whether they're still there.
"A room shows as unavailable online but the calendar shows nothing." Someone has it in a basket. Holds are invisible to the front office by design: showing abandoned baskets as reservations would fill your arrivals list with bookings that never happened.
"Can I release a hold manually?" There's no button, and there shouldn't need to be — the longest a hold can survive is twenty minutes from the guest's last action.