User Interface and Options for Booking Manager

Hello there,

We are using the Rooms module in a production environment (https://www.rasc.ca/events). We needed to do a series of overrides to make the booking engine useable and I think that most of these are worthy of community consideration.

Page Title
The page title can be an important part of the marketing campaign. The ability to change the default message to something would be useful.

--> Add a user-defineable title allowing people to override title with something like "Choose your ideal cottage or cabin"

Explanatory Message
The Rooms Booking form is an important area where the potential guest needs to make their key decisions.

--> It would be very useful to add a user-defineable text block, controlled by configuration, to the top of this page for optional instructions, advice and caveats.

Seasonal Schedule
The Arrival Date and Departure Date default to the "How soon a booking can start" variable and the Departure Date defaults to the Arrival date plus one (I think). In a number of vacation and conference scenarios the arrival and departure dates are limited by policy. In our case we are only offering rooms from 2013-06-25 until 2013-07-02 inclusive. While I can control this with room availability, it would be much better from a customer service standpoint if they did not have to advance the Javascript calendar by five months to get to the right starting point. The "How soon a booking can start" restriction should work in concert with this feature.

--> Suggestion: Optional default start date for Javascript calendar controlled via configuration so that the calendar defaults to the right starting point.

Number of Rooms, Number of Guests
The system defaults to 0 to 10 for both of these search criteria. In our case the number of people per room is strictly limited by policy to 4. It would be useful to be able to set system-wide maximum and minimum values on these items for searches to set expectations correctly.

--> Maximum and minimum Number of Rooms, Number of Guests as a user-defined parameter.

Note that these configuration points belong logically on the /admin/rooms/config/bookings page.

We are available to assist with QA of these features if they are created.

Thanks for your consideration!

Denis Grey
Royal Astronomical Society of Canada
2013 General Assembly: https://www.rasc.ca/events