The Booking Engine is the booking form that takes direct bookings for your properties, on your own website or on your Smoobu booking page. To get it ready for guests, you set per-property fees and rules, then the global settings: currency, payment methods, and the guest form. Everything lives under Configuration > Booking Engine.
Before you start
You need these in place before you set up the Booking Engine:
- At least one property in your Smoobu account. See How do I create a property in Smoobu?.
- Prices set for every property you want guests to book. A property without prices doesn't appear on the booking page at all.
- A decision on how guests should pay. The options are explained in What payment methods can I offer?.
The three tabs, and where each setting lives
The Booking Engine page has three tabs. Accommodation settings holds everything per property: fees, prepayment, booking rules, plus the photo and marketing title. Booking System Settings holds everything global: currency, payment methods, and the form guests fill in. Embed in website holds the code you paste into your own site.
Money settings that many hosts look for under Configuration > Properties actually live here: the cleaning fee, the prepayment, extra-guest prices, and the property photo for the booking page are all on the Booking Engine page. The Properties page keeps operational settings such as check-in times and buffer days. Extras like breakfast or bike rental are set up on the Accommodation settings tab as Additional Items: see Offer extras and upsells to your guests.
Steps
- Open Configuration > Booking Engine. You land on the Accommodation settings tab.
- Pick a property in the Accommodation Selection list at the top. To apply the same settings to several properties at once, use Edit in Bulk.
- Fill in the per-property fields: the Cleaning fee (an amount or a percentage, added to every booking), Min. days between Booking and Arrival (how close to the arrival date guests can still book), and Extra guests / night together with the guest number the surcharge starts at.
- Set the Prepayment, the share of the total the guest pays at booking. Two values behave the same way: 0% and 100% both charge the guest the full amount at booking. To let guests pay nothing online and pay later instead, don't use 0%; offer Invoice (Bank Transfer) as a payment method. The smallest partial prepayment is 1%.
- Click Save, then repeat steps 2 to 4 for each property.
- Switch to the Booking System Settings tab and pick your Currency. All prices shown and charged through the Booking Engine use this currency.
- Turn on the payment methods you want to offer and pick a Default payment option. Stripe and PayPal have to be connected before their options can be switched on; the full setup is in What payment methods can I offer?.
- Work through the sections further down the same tab, one by one: Contact (choose for each guest field whether it's optional, required, or hidden, and whether guests enter one total guest count or adults and children separately), Legal requirements (the links to your Terms and Conditions and your privacy policy), Details (how those links open), Successfully booked (what guests see after they book), and Custom style (the form's colors, covered in Change your Booking Engine's colors, photos and texts).
- Click Save.
Check it worked
Click Preview at the top right of the Booking Engine page. Your booking page opens and shows your properties with the prices and fees you set. Then run a booking yourself from start to finish without charging real money: How do I make a test booking? shows how. Once everything checks out, put the Booking Engine on your website: Add the Booking Engine to your website.
Common problems
A property is missing from the booking page
Properties without prices don't appear to guests or in the preview. Set prices for the missing property, and it shows up. If you only see some of your properties, the missing ones almost always lack prices.
I can't find the cleaning fee or prepayment on the Properties page
These fields aren't on Configuration > Properties. They live on the Accommodation settings tab of the Booking Engine page, because they belong to how the property is sold rather than how it's run. The Properties page keeps settings like check-in times and buffer days.
Related articles
- Add the Booking Engine to your website
- What payment methods can I offer?
- Change your Booking Engine's colors, photos and texts
- Offer extras and upsells to your guests
- How do I make a test booking?
Still stuck?
If these steps didn't fix it, contact the Smoobu team: open the Help menu to open a ticket or book a call slot, or use the chat bubble in the bottom-right corner. To get the fastest answer, please include:
- Your Smoobu User ID (in the profile-icon menu, top right).
- The property name or ID, if it's about one property.
- The Booking ID, if it's about one booking (Bookings, then View more).
- The channel name, if it's about channel sync (Booking.com, Airbnb, Vrbo, and so on).
- A short step-by-step: what you did, what you expected, and what happened.
- Screenshots or a short screen recording of the problem.
- Your browser and operating system, if something looks wrong on screen.
Comments
4 comments
I am wanting to know if smoobu is compatible with "off the beaten track" which is a NZ booking platform. Thanks Ange
Kia ora Angela!
We can connect https://offthebeatentrack.co.nz/ to Smoobu if their listing calendar includes iCal (99% of portals do!).
This guide will show you how to do so.
Reach out to support@smoobu.com if you run into any issues :)
Thanks
Erika from Smoobu
It would be really good if my guests could use booking tool in Lithuanian.
Hi Agne,
The Booking Tool switched according to the browser, and Smoobu does require a simple translation to be done first (preferably by someone who speaks the language fluently to make sure it's correct).
Quite a few of our customers are happy to translate the file for us in order to get the Booking Tool in their preferred language. If this is something you'd like to do please contact us at supporten@smoobu.zendesk.com to request the translation file :)
Many thanks!
Erika
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