How do I make a test booking?

Before you share your Booking Engine with guests, run a trial booking yourself: you see exactly what a guest sees, and you can check that prices, fees, and extras come out right. The safe way is to book with a payment method that moves no money, either Invoice (Bank Transfer) or Pay upon arrival.

Before you start

Have these in place before you test:

• Your Booking Engine is set up: .
• Prices are set for the dates you want to test. A property without prices does not show in the Booking Engine at all, and every night of the test stay needs a price.
• You have reviewed which payment methods you offer: .

There is no test mode for card payments

If you want to test a card payment through Stripe or PayPal, know this first: Smoobu has no test mode, so a card booking charges the card for real. To keep the cost minimal, set the property's price for one night to 1 in your currency (in Pricing), book that night with your real card, cancel the booking after testing, and set the price back. Cancelling the booking does not return the money on its own: Smoobu doesn't process refunds, so refund the charge yourself in the payment provider you used (Stripe or PayPal), where the original payment was taken. For a first check of the booking flow itself, the no-money methods in the steps below are enough and avoid this altogether.

Steps

1. Open Configuration > Booking Engine.
2. Click Preview at the top right. Your Booking Engine opens in a new window, exactly as a guest sees it. Open it in a private browser window to view it as a guest rather than as a logged-in host.
3. Pick a property and dates and continue to the booking form.
4. Fill in the contact fields with your own details.
5. Pick Invoice (Bank Transfer) or Pay upon arrival as the payment method. With both, the booking completes without any money changing hands.
6. Complete the booking.
7. When you are done checking, open the booking in Bookings, open its details, and click Cancel to remove the test booking from your calendar.

Check it worked

The test booking appears in Bookings with the channel Website, and the total matches what you expect: the nightly price plus your cleaning fee, extras, and any extra-guest charges. If you have automated messages set up, the test booking triggers them like a real booking, so you can check those too.

Common problems

A property doesn't show in the Booking Engine

The usual cause is missing prices. A property only appears when the searched dates have prices set, and a stay is only bookable when every night of it is priced. Set the prices in Pricing and search again.

The preview shows all my properties, even though I selected one

The in-Smoobu preview always combines all your properties, regardless of any per-property selection. To test a single property's widget, use the per-property code from the Embed in website tab on your own page instead. And when a property is missing from the preview entirely, it has no prices set.

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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.