FAQ Q199: Can I let my clients reserve multiple resources in a single reservation?

Yes, there is a shopping cart feature. You can switch it on in Site Settings / Active features. Once switched on, your clients will need to check out to finish the reservation and will be able to put multiple items into their shopping cart.

There are two versions of the shopping cart, Quick add to cart where the customer only selects the date fields (and possibly other fields which affect the price) in a lightbox, without any redirection. At the checkout they fill out the personal details. The second shopping cart implementation (the default) always displays the full reservation form. It's also possible to mix the two methods of adding items to the shopping cart, for example the "main" item which could be an accommodation could be added by filling out a full form and additional items like extra activities or items (bikes etc.) could be added using a special tag which works using the "quick add to cart" method. Please note that 'quick add to cart' only works with advanced integration (meaning the customers reserve on your website and not on planyo.com).

Default shopping cart implementation


With the default shopping cart, the first reservation is done normally, that is, the reservation form is filled out and then the customer is taken to a page controlled by a template (you can also edit it in site settings / templates). This template normally displays the contents of the shopping cart, the checkout buttons and optionally suggestions of other items which can be reserved. This suggestion is implemented in form of a search. The search can find items available in the exact same period as the first item reserved (e.g. January 1-7) or you can use the flexible search which will find items which can be reserved for any duration within the original dates (e.g. on January 2nd). This type of search is great if you want to offer e.g. rooms as well as tours. This way, before checking out, your customers can see a list of tours available within the reserved dates. If the customer adds further items to the shopping cart, the personal details will be already prefilled for them.

Quick add to cart


The 'quick add to cart' shopping cart implementation works best for reservation of physical items such as photo equipment, bikes, or other items. You can switch it on globally in Site settings / Active features. When you do this, on the reservation form layout page you'll see a new checkbox which you can select for each reservation form item in order to include it in the quick add to cart lightbox. By default only the items which determine the time/date, quantity, units used are included. You can include any other reservation form item as well but usually you'll only want to include the items which determine the price or which are specific to given resource type. The other items will be filled out at checkout.

Whenever an item is added to the shopping cart using the 'quick add to cart' method, the customer continues looking at the page where they clicked the add to cart button, no redirection is done. In order to provide feedback to the customer about the new item being added to the cart, it's best to include the shopping cart widget on your page (using the $(shopping_cart_widget) tag for example or by including the shopping cart widget anywhere on your website). Planyo will automatically update the quantity of the items in the shopping cart (assuming you used either our widget or special shopping cart tags from Q206).

When the customer arrives at the shopping cart page (use the links from Q206 or the shopping cart widget) and they click the checkout button, planyo presents them with a big form which includes all personal details fields as well as the other custom fields which weren't added to the quick add to cart lightbox. In case you have different, resource-specific, reservation forms, planyo uses the form of the first resource added to the cart.

Another method of using the 'quick add to cart' implementation, used when this feature is not selected in Active features is by using the $(add_to_cart_url) tag, see the details in Q204.

IMPORTANT: The quick add to cart will work as expected (lightbox with just the minimal form items) only for the first 20 resources listed on a page. Further resources on the resource listing page will redirect the customer to the full reservation form. If you don't ever want this behaviour, then in Active features you should enable paging using the option Max. results per page. By default paging is disabled.

Recurring reservations, return trips etc.


Note that the shopping cart has a few other associated features: recurring reservations, return trip, and 'allow customers to choose multiple dates on the reservation form'. All of them make the reservation process much quicker when reserving multiple dates because this can be done on a single reservation form. See Q153 for the details. All these features will use the shopping cart to add multiple dates to the cart and will work with both the default cart and the quick add to cart implementations.

Reserving multiple resources with packages and bundles


Another way to let your customers make a reservation for multiple resources (with rental happening during the same period for all resources) are packages and bundles. Here the advantage is that you can set a special price when multiple items are reserved together. The packages and bundles must be predefined by the administrator first (specific items will make up a package or bundle), so it's a different solution than the shopping cart. See Q232 for more info on packages and Q261 on bundles.
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