Charter Boat Bookings

Charter Boat Bookings is a boat booking system for captains. Use WooCommerce for reservations – Sunset Sails, Daysails, Sportfishing, Inshore Fishing

WooCommerce Bookings Extension

Charter Boat Bookings is a WooCommerce Bookings extension for tour operators specifically designed to take reservations for Charter Boats. Built to suit the business needs of Sailing Charters, Fishing Charters, Sportfishing, Fishing Guides, even Duck Hunting Guides. This WordPress charter boat booking system includes industry specific features including weather predictions and sunset dependent products. Book private or per person charters, and set your maximum passenger capacity. Minimize refunds with built-in reservation fee and final balance.

This is the Lite version of Charter Boat Bookings and available here in the WordPress Plugin Repository for free use. If you are interested in more features, please do consider upgrading to Charter Boat Bookings Pro. Charter Bookings is boat reservation software. It is not a general reservation system for tour operators that has been adapted into an online boat booking system. The target users for this plugin are owner-operator captains with no code writing expertise or agents developing an e-commerce website for captains. The dashboard has as few settings as possible to set up a typical sailing or fishing schedule and take paid reservations, manage availability, and communicate effectively with your customers. I am very responsive to texts, messages here, and email. If you call me, it may be tough to get a response right away…sorry babies crying and kids running around all the time.

Talking on the phone is a scheduled ahead thing for me…just because of my kiddos. My typical office hours are 3am ET – 7am ET and 10am ET – 2pm ET. If you need a support appointment, email or text me.

Background

Developed by a team with more than 40 combined years experience within all aspects of the charter industry: daysailing, bareboat charters, inshore fishing charters, sportfishing charters, marina management, and even fleet management.

Designed to scale with your business from the ground up, Charter Boat Bookings is offered in two versions: Charter Bookings Lite and Pro. The free version available here will support a single boat in day charter business – fishing, sailing, or pleasure trips. The premium version offers more features and flexibility. Please check it out.

Features

Weather Prediction: Product listings and single product pages connect with the OpenWeather API so that they can show accurate wind and weather prediction for up to five days in the future. The weather is volatile, and the charter boat industry is depends on the weather. Refunds are potentially the most challenging aspect of charter boat business management. Showing your customers the weather conditions and wind speed/direction before they book helps naturally shift customers into a better customer experience and minimize refunds. This plugin relies on OpenWeather API, and you must register with their site in order to use their weather predictions and this plugin.

Sunset Products: Create sunset sails or sunset fishing trips that dynamically adjust to your location’s actual sunset time by calculating the actual sunset and sunrise for your location. Sunset products calculate start time by backing out the duration of the charter from civil twilight so that you are back at the dock safely before dark, but your guests enjoy the most beautiful sunset colors the sky has to offer.

Minimize Refunds With Two Payments: When your business is weather dependent and advance booking deposits are the norm, refunding deposits due to bad weather can become a real headache. The customer demands associated with refunds can quickly cut into your cash flow and potentially lead to sticky situations that could ruin your reputation.

Manage Cash Flow:Charter Boat Bookings helps you better manage your cash flow by splitting the total charter fee into a smaller up-front reservation payment and a larger final payment. The product settings allows you to control the total cost of the payments as well as the up-front reservation payment. The system then automatically sets the due date for the final payment to 3 days prior to the charter and notifies your customer to pay the final balance. Three days is a carefully considered window: weather predictions usually become accurate 3 days prior to the charter, plus most credit-card merchant processors take 3 days to deposit credit card payments into your bank account. In short, the Charter Boat Bookings plug-in helps you better manage your exposure to weather-related refunds.

Manage Orders: Each booking links to the reservation and final balance order within the bookings admin menu. This helps you administrate charter booking orders just as you would any other WooCommerce Order.

Schedule Reminders: Daily charter schedule emails to the captain so keeping track of your charter schedule has never been easier. Email shows the schedule for the upcoming 5 days of charter with links to the customers email so contact is simple. Charters show up on your email schedule two days prior to the customer final balance due date and show whether the balance is paid or pending.

Of course it does that:
* looks great and works great on mobile
* unlimited bookings
* unlimited users – admin or shop manager or agents – there is no limit
* invoicing, reporting, projecting sales
* promo codes, pricing management, inventory management
* your choice of payment gateway
* double bookings or overbooking is not allowed and charters that are not available cannot be purchased
* shows availability calendar
* customer balance due reminder notification
* weather forecast shows within product listing and ‘book now’
* forecast considers the charter start time and renders the closest forecast (accurate within 3hrs)
* forecast displays wind speed and direction
* charter durations can be 4hr or 8hr
* sunset charters adjust start time based on duration set and arrival back to dock at civil twilight
* availability dynamically considers the start time of sunset charters

Please consider upgrading to Pro version which offers many more features you may find useful in your business.

INSTALLING CHARTER BOAT BOOKINGS PLUGIN IS EASY

1. From the dashboard of your site, navigate to Plugins –> Add New.
2. Select the Upload option and hit “Choose File.”
3. Follow the on-screen instructions and wait as the upload completes.
4. When it’s finished, activate the plugin via the prompt. A message will show confirming activation was successful.