Take room bookings on your own website

Guests pick their dates, see your rooms with photos, choose between rates — room-only or with breakfast, refundable or cheaper-but-not — pay a deposit, and the booking lands in your front office ready to check in.

No separate booking site, no channel fees, and the availability they see is the same availability your front desk sees.

Before you start

• An online payment gateway must be on (Paystack or Stripe), or guests can't pay the deposit. See Setup → Storefront → Online payments.
• Your company profile has your name, address, phone and email. They appear on the guest's confirmation email and booking page, and guests' replies to the email come to your email address.
• Your rooms exist as room types (Item Type = Reservation) with rooms attached, which is the normal hotel setup.
• Each room type needs at least one rate plan. This is the important one — see below.

Steps — one-time setup

1. Add photos

Open the room type and add pictures to its gallery. The first one is the main photo guests see; the rest appear as a slideshow they can click through. Landscape photos look best.

2. Create rate plans

A rate plan is one option the guest can choose. Open the room type and go to the Online rates tab.

Quickest way: click Use standard rates. That loads the three most hotels sell — Flexible, Non-refundable and Bed & Breakfast — already priced against this room's own rate. Adjust anything you don't like, then press Save rate plans. Nothing is saved until you do.

To build them yourself instead, click Add plan for each. A typical pair:

For each plan you set:

• Plan name — what the guest sees. "Room Only", "Bed & Breakfast".

• Price adjustment — a fixed amount or a percentage on top of the room's own nightly rate. Negative is normal for a non-refundable rate; the discount is what pays for the restriction. The Guest pays figure updates as you type so you can see the result.

• Can be cancelled and free until — untick it for a non-refundable rate. Tick it and set how many hours before arrival the guest can still cancel free.

• Includes breakfast — tick it, then pick the item breakfast is billed as. The list shows your Charges items, the same kind of item the rest of a room bill uses. Then set Amount/person, which is a money figure per guest per night — not a percentage. It's multiplied by the number of guests on the booking, so 3,000 for two guests adds 6,000 a night.

  If the list is empty, create the item first: Items → New, Item Type = Charges, named something like "Breakfast".

• Deposit % — what the guest pays now. Non-refundable rates normally take 100%; refundable ones take a part and the rest is paid at the hotel.

A room type with no rate plan is invisible online. That's deliberate — a room with no price and no cancellation policy has nothing to sell. It's also how you take a room type off sale: deactivate its plans.

3. Share the link

Your booking page is at /rooms on your own web address. Put it on your website, your Instagram bio, a WhatsApp broadcast, or print a QR code for the front desk.

What the guest does

1. Picks check-in, check-out and how many guests. A room opened from your room list before searching asks for the dates first, and shows no prices until they're chosen, so nobody books a stay they didn't pick.
2. Sees only the room types that are free for every night of their stay — a room that's free tonight but taken tomorrow isn't offered for a two-night stay.
3. Compares the rates, with breakfast and cancellation spelled out on each.
4. Picks a rate and chooses how many rooms of that type they want.
5. Is offered to sign in or create an account first (optional), so the booking is saved to their account. They come back to the same room, dates and rate, with their details filled in. Or they simply continue as a guest.
6. Enters their details and pays the deposit. While they are on the payment page the room is held for them for 20 minutes, so nobody else can take it. The booking itself is only made once the payment goes through: a guest who cancels or closes the payment page leaves no booking behind, and the room is free again when the hold runs out.
7. Lands on their booking page and gets a confirmation email — see below.

Guests wanting several rooms of the same type book them as one reservation with a row per room — the same shape your front desk creates by hand. Guests wanting different room types, or the same room on different dates, use the basket instead — see Guests booking several rooms in one payment.

What the guest receives

The moment the deposit is confirmed, the guest gets an email from your business with:

• The booking code (6 letters and numbers, like K7PX4M — what the guest quotes at reception), each room with its arrival and departure dates, the rate and its cancellation terms.
• The stay total, the deposit paid and the balance due at the hotel.
• A View your booking button. It opens the guest's booking page, which always shows the current state: a room your front desk cancels shows as cancelled there.
• A calendar file attached. Opening it adds the stay to the guest's calendar — Apple, Google, Outlook or any other app. Each stay is an all-day entry from arrival to departure. The booking page also has Google Calendar and Outlook buttons.

The email is sent once. Refreshing the booking page never sends it again.

If your business can't send email, the booking page tells the guest to bookmark the page instead of saying a confirmation was sent, because that link is how they view, change or cancel the booking.

When the guest loses the link

Guests who booked without an account can open Find my booking (/room-booking/find: in the top menu of your room pages, on the /rooms page ("Already booked? Find my booking") and on the sign-in page). They enter the booking code and the email they booked with, and the link is emailed to them again, always to the email on the booking, never to one typed on the form.

The form tells the guest what happened:

• Found: "We've emailed the link to l•••@b•••.com". The address is masked, so the guest knows which inbox to check without it being shown to anyone.
• Not found: the reference and email don't match a paid booking. It doesn't say which of the two is wrong, and keeps what they typed so they can correct it.
• Found, but the email couldn't be sent: try again shortly or contact the hotel.
• Too many tries: one device can make 5 attempts an hour, so nobody can work through guesses.

If the guest opens that emailed link while signed in to their account, the booking is added to the account. Signed-in guests can also start this from My account → Add a booking you made without signing in.

The booking page also offers the guest an account with your business (optional — booking never needs one). See Guest accounts on your booking pages.

Guests can also cancel from the booking page: at once with a full refund inside the rate's free-cancellation time, otherwise as a request you approve or decline. See Guests cancelling online bookings. They can change the dates, room or rate too, paying any difference online — see Guests changing online bookings.

What you see

The booking appears in Front office → Advance Bookings as a normal booking, ready to check in. Nothing special to learn.

A booking for three rooms shows three rows, one per room, each "any room of this type" until your front desk assigns one at check-in. That's what keeps your occupancy counts and calendar right.

The deposit is recorded against the guest as money held — the same way a deposit taken at your front desk is — and it comes off their bill automatically at check-in.

Who the booking belongs to

An online booking is always paid by the guest, on a new guest record. The website never matches a booking to an existing guest, customer or company by phone number or email, because anyone can type those.

• Booked without signing in → a new customer and a new guest record, both for this booking.
• Booked while signed in → the guest's account's own customer, with a new guest record for this stay. See Guest accounts.

When the same phone number and surname had earlier stays paid by a sponsor (for example an employer), the booking page and the check-in wizard show a yellow Returning guest — usually paid for by a sponsor notice naming the sponsor. Confirm who pays before you check them in. See Advance bookings.

Tips

• The availability count is real. Every room card says how many of that type are free for the whole stay, and it turns red when it's down to three or fewer. It's the actual number, not a marketing trick — and it's the ceiling on the quantity a guest can pick, so nobody can book five of a room you have three of.
• The online price starts from the room type's billing rate. The rate plans work from the rate on the room type's advance-booking billing interval (Daily, if it has one), the same rate check-in bills. If that interval has no rate, the room type's selling price is used. At check-in the folio keeps the booking's price for the booked nights; if the guest stays longer, the extra nights bill at the normal rate.
• Prices include your room taxes and service charge. The taxes set on the room type (main tax, other tax) and its service charge are added to the room price, after any plan discount, exactly as check-in bills them. The guest sees a Taxes & service charge line, the total and the deposit include it, and the price per night shows "incl. taxes & service charge". Breakfast is not charged room tax.
• Guest count is PER ROOM. A search for two guests booking two rooms is priced as two guests in each room — which matters on a breakfast rate, where that's four breakfasts. The guest's price breakdown spells this out line by line so it isn't a surprise at the desk.
• Breakfast is billed as its own line. That's why the plan asks which item — it keeps breakfast in food & beverage revenue instead of inflating room revenue, and your kitchen can see the covers coming.
• Test it yourself first. Open /rooms on your phone and book a night with a test card, then check the booking appears in Advance Bookings.
• Changing a plan doesn't change existing bookings. A guest who booked a refundable rate keeps that policy even if you change the plan later.

Common problems

• The guest didn't get the confirmation email → check the email address they typed on the booking in Advance Bookings, and ask them to look in spam. They can always open the booking page again from the confirmation screen; the link in the email is the same page.

• The email shows the wrong business name or address → fix your company profile; the next email and the booking page use the new details.

• A room type doesn't appear online → it has no active rate plan. Open it, go to the Online rates tab, and click Use standard rates or add one yourself.

• Photos don't show → the pictures are attached, but the room type still has no active rate plan. Images follow the same rule as the room itself.

• "No rooms free for those dates" but you know rooms are empty → check Advance Bookings for reservations you'd forgotten, and the room blocks / out-of-service list. The online page uses exactly the same availability your front desk does, including blocked and out-of-service rooms.

• Guest paid but the booking shows no deposit → the payment cleared but your payment method has no destination account set. Nothing is lost — open Setup → Payment gateways, set the account, and record the receipt manually for that booking.

• An online booking with no deposit is blocking a room → from an older version, which wrote the booking before the guest paid. Cancel it in Advance Bookings (or ask support to clear them all). New online bookings only appear once the payment is confirmed.

• A room shows as taken for a few minutes, then frees up → a guest started paying for it and didn't finish. The room is held for 20 minutes during payment, then released on its own.

• Guest says they were charged twice → they weren't; a payment that hasn't confirmed yet shows as pending on the confirmation page. Ask them to refresh rather than book again, and check Paystack before refunding.