Venue Booking Software With Deposits, Peak Pricing and No Double Bookings

The word integrated hides a lot. Some systems take a booking and send an invoice for you to chase. Others hand the payment to a separate provider with its own login and its own fees. What you want is simpler: the hirer confirms, the card is charged for the deposit or the full amount at that moment, and the money arrives in your own Stripe account. Nothing to chase, nothing to reconcile.

Look next at how prices are set. If you have to type a quote for every evening or weekend hire, you will be back to enquiry forms within a month. The system should hold your peak and off-peak rates per space and show the hirer the right figure for the slot they choose.

Then check the calendar. Every room, court or desk needs its own, and a slot that one person has taken must not be shown to the next. Finally, the hirer should be able to do all of this without an account, on your own website or on a hosted one, at any hour. BookingMachine was built around those four requirements, and the free plan lets you confirm them with no card.

Set each space up as a service in the unit you sell it in: a meeting room per hour, a studio per half day, a hall per day, a desk per day. Give it a base price. Then add a price variable called something like When, with options for weekday daytime, weekday evening and weekend. Each option can be a fixed price, an amount added or taken off, or a percentage.

Add a second variable for set-up if you offer it: room only, with AV and catering set-up, with event staff. The hirer picks from both as they book and watches the price update. A Saturday hall hire with staff costs what you said it should, every time, and nobody on your side touched a calculator.

Because the price is on the page, hirers who were only going to haggle do not get as far as your inbox, and the ones who book have already accepted the figure. For corporate hirers who need a formal document, send a quote they can accept online and follow it with an invoice.

A venue has one thing to sell, and once a date has passed it is gone. That is why the deposit has to be taken at the moment of booking rather than requested afterwards. Set the percentage per space. A hall might take half, a meeting room might take full payment. The card is charged when the hirer confirms, into your own Stripe account, and the balance is charged when you mark the hire complete or sent as an invoice.

The effect on no-shows is direct. A hirer who has paid turns up, and one who cancels late has still covered part of your loss. Put your cancellation terms on the booking page so they are agreed before the card is charged.

Online payments are part of the paid plans, and you apply for payments once your account is set up. Until then the booking page, quotes and invoices work on the free plan, so you can build the rooms, the prices and the hours before any money moves.

A coworking space, a rehearsal studio with a key code, a sports hall that opens at six: these run for longer than any front desk. Self-service booking means a member or hirer picks a slot at midnight for seven in the morning, pays, and receives the confirmation email with the details they need. Your dashboard shows the booking when you log in.

Set each desk, room or court up with its own hours, which may be all day and all night. Regulars can set a booking to repeat, so the Tuesday evening five-a-side holds its court each week. Add a second site as a location and both buildings appear in one dashboard.

Put the booking widget on your website with one line of code, whether the site is on Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, Webflow or Shopify. Put the QR code on each room door so someone standing outside an empty room can book it there and then. If you have no website, the free hosted one lists every space with photos and prices, and can run on your own domain on the Pro plan.