General setup

We have many customers that are using Vik Booking for a hostel. However, it is necessary to properly configure the plugin in order to let the customers book “beds” rather than “rooms”, if the occupancy of your rooms is configured as a dormitory.

For a hostel you should treat the “rooms” as “beds”. In order to do that, your room types in Vik Booking should have a number of units available equal to the total number of beds that can be booked. For example, if a shared dorm has 15 beds, you should create a room type in Vik Booking with 15 units available.

The maximum number of adults allowed per “room” should be set to 1, just like the minimum, because the customers will be booking beds, and so one bed is only for one person. You can also adjust the various Search Parameters to control the “Search” Widget or other booking forms of the plugin, to define that the maximum number of adults per room (per bed in your case) is always 1.

Vik Booking supports any pricing model according to the OpenTravel standards, but in your case the “Occupancy Pricing” is useless because you always have an occupancy of 1 adult per room (per bed). However, from the page Rates Table you can define the exact costs for any length of stay (“LOS” Pricing Model), so you can set up, for example, the pricing from 1 night up to 6 to $20/night, and the pricing from 7 nights and more to $18/night.

The only thing you cannot setup is a sort of a discount per number of beds booked. This function is not available, as it would be like offering a discount to customers that book a “Double Room” and a “Single Room”. Discounts “per quantity” are not supported, as the pricing is defined either at Room or Rate Plan level. Booking two or more rooms (beds) will simply produce a sum of the cost of each room (bed) booked.

The last action you should take to finalize the setup is to override some default language definitions. For example, any occurrence of “room” should be overridden to “bed”. You can consult our tips to make an override of words and definitions here.