Currently when creating a room, the administrator can select a default availability state for that room. This is used as the default state in the availability calendar, and also as the state that the room reverts to when an existing booking is altered (eg if dates are changed, or room re-assigned by administrator).

In my test site I have set the default availability state to "unavailable". This means that unless I have explicitly marked a room as available for a specific date range, all future dates are "unavailable". However choosing this setting means that if a booking is altered manually (eg shortened), the dates that are no longer covered by the booking are set to unavailable, even though I had previously marked the whole surrounding date range as "available".

Could the current default availability state setting be split into two independent settings?

  1. default state on room creation
  2. default state to revert to when a booking is altered

Some alternative ways of achieving the same level of flexibility would be:

  1. Create a new "no bookings accepted after this date" setting option. This would mean that site administrator could prevent bookings beyond a certain date in the future, while setting the existing default availability state to available (revert to "available" if existing booking altered, no new separate setting required)
  2. Add a field to the availability record for a given room, so that if the state changes from "available" to "booked" (eg when a guest completes a booking), and then is manually altered, the state reverts to the previously state that existed prior to the booking being made (eg "available") again, even if the default availability state is set to "unavailable".

Comments

ben.hamelin’s picture

ben.hamelin
he/him
Primary language English
Location Adirondack Mountains, NY
commented

From my experience, it would make sense to ALWAYS make an altered booking "AVAILABLE" unless you chose to override that.
If a booking is moved to another unit or deleted altogether, the first assumption would be that it HAD been available, and so now should be again.

However, I could see the use case where a room required maintenance, or some other exception where you would be moving a booking to another room, but want to keep the original room unavailable.

Perhaps a "New Status for Current Room" drop down could be added to the edit booking form, conditionally? The field would only be presented if the room assignment was changed. The default could be "AVAILABLE" with the option to override as required.