What is the difference between common search form and availability form of specific property?

There are two types of forms to check the availability of the properties in the Hotel Booking plugin:

• Common Availability Search form
• Availability form of the specific accommodation type (property)
   

Common Availability Search form

It can be added in the following ways:

- This form allows you to make a common search across all the accommodation types on your site. By default, it lists all the available accommodation types for the searched period on the Search Results page, no matter what capacity you selected. Since Hotel Booking plugin v 5.1.0, it is possible to limit search results based on the requested number of guests.

Why Search Results page displays all accommodation types no matter what capacity is selected?

- Since this form is used to check the availability of all accommodation types, it can neither show the booked dates nor the blocked dates for a specific accommodation type in the date pick calendar. It may show the booking rules that are applied to All Accommodation types and the booked-out dates - the dates when all accommodations are booked.
- The common search form can be extended with Attributes to filter the search results by certain parameters. You can learn more about Attributes here.

Availability form of the specific accommodation type (property)

It can be added in the following ways:

- You need to indicate the ID of the specific accommodation type this form is related to.

- By default, this form redirects a visitor to the search results pages as well as the common search form. If this specific accommodation type is available, it will be displayed as a first result on the page, and below you will see other available properties for the requested period.

- However, this form also allows you to show the booked and blocked dates of the property. For this, you should navigate to Accommodation > Settings and enable the Skip Search Results option. Once it is enabled, the date-pick calendar will display available and not available dates of the specific property. Moreover, it will let the visitor check availability and proceed to checkout without leaving the page. There are additional options under Skip Search Results:

• Default - Check-in/-out forms without capacity parameters
• Show price for the selected period - Check-in/-out forms without capacity parameters, but it allows the guest to see the price before visiting a checkout page. It is useful when you use variable pricing per length of stay
• Show price together with adults and children fields - Check-in/-out forms with capacity parameters (adults/children or guests). It is useful when you use variable pricing per length of stay and per number of guests.

Related Article: How to set up Hotel Booking for a single property rental?