Vacation Rentals

[jan444]

Hello, we are managing a Vacation Rentals website with an old software, and we are considering using The Events Calendar.

Every House on our project has an associated Calendar, with busy and free dates, and people is be able to search “by date” and find the free dates for different Houses in the search results (AirBnB-like).

So we would like to know:

1- Can the Event Calendar suit a project like ours, where people search for FREE dates, rather than EVENTS? I’d say it’s not going to work because EC focus on finding “busy” slots -instead of free ones-, and our clients would search the opposite.

2- How can we assign Calendars to Houses? After people perform a seach, we want to show a list of Houses (rater than just Events).

3- Could we search by Duration between dates? That is, people select a range of dates, and, additionally, a block of time they have to spend (predefined durations like “7 days”, “15 days”, “30 days”)

4- Can we EXPORT iCals?

Any thoughts from your part will be clarifying and very much appreciated!

Many thanks,
Jan444

[Sky]

Hi Jan!

It’s hard to say one way or another if the Events Calendar will fit your particular needs without knowing all the details. However, I will try to answer your more specific questions.

With the Events Calendar, you can assign categories and tags to each event. With Events Calendar Pro, you can use a shortcode to add multiple calendars to pages or posts throughout your site. The shortcode allows you to specify a particular tag or category to display. So, if you assigned a unique tag or category to each house, you would be able to display events specific to the house.

Using our Filter Bar plugin, you can allow people to filter by these categories and tags, or, custom fields that you create. So you could add a “houses” filter that let people choose events connected with it in that way too. To show a list of all the houses would require creating a custom template, but it could be done.

I do not know of anything like what you describe with duration of dates. You can search events by day, week, or month, but that does not sound like it will meet your needs for that aspect.

The calendars do have a link for exporting the events in an ical format. You can read about this functionality here.

I hope that helps! Let us know if you have any other questions. All of our premium plugins have a 30 day refund policy, so feel free to try the plugins out to see if you can get the outcome you are looking for.

Thanks,
Sky

[jan444]

Hi Sky, many thanks for the infos.

After reading the “Sync vs. Export” part in the article you linked, I wonder if any sync feature is considered in the future? So far, the .ics needs us to manually click on a button to generate it and download it.

“Out of the hat”, would it be complicated to code our way through an automatic server-side generation of .ics files, to grab and paste their URLs elsewhere for synching purposes?

Event Post Type

I see that we can add all kind of content and custom fields to an Event, so we could get our “House” contents and put them there and keep only 1 post type to work with, and have everything together – calendar and contents, so that is great.

Regarding the filters, that is great and very useful too.

Marking events

The only thing that I see it could be a problem for us is the way to mark Events / Free Dates.

On a booking logic, you mark dates to make them busy and un-interesting, instead of free and interesting. You mark the un-interesting days.

However with Events is the opposite. You mark Events to make them stand out on the calendar (and thus searchable).

Would it be easy for us to mark an Event that spans over months and months (so it means free dates)? Can we then un-eventify certain single days, as we keep receiving booking orders?

One Calendar per Event

Finally, can we show on the Event page a calendar with that very same Event days only -not other Events-? Can we use for that purpose the tag/category feature you mentioned?

I can see some serious bumps in the road, so we may go for a specialized plugin instead, but we wanted to explore the EC.

Many thanks for your help,
Jan

[Sky]

Jan,

As much as we’d like you to use our plugins, I think it’s worth mentioning that there are plugins out there specifically for booking that will probably meet your needs better than trying to make the calendar do something that it’s not equipped to do. However, I will try to answer your questions and leave it up to you to determine if that is the case.

You can also export events using the default WordPress “export” functionality, which exports an XML file. Many of our users use a plugin called WP All Export to do more complicated stuff with event data.

I’m not sure what would be involved in custom functionality for automatically generating ics files. That is a little beyond the scope of what I can assist with in the forums.

As far as marking the days without events: as I said earlier, this seems like it would make all of this way more complicated than it should be. Not sure how that would work.

Lastly, you can use categories or tags to display a single series of events on a calendar, as you are describing.

I hope you figure out how to achieve what you’re trying to do here. If you do manage to get it working with our plugins, please share your workflow here on the forums for others to learn from.

Thanks,
Sky

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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