The Hotels engine manages properties, room types, guest reservations, extras and housekeeping, with date-range availability that prevents overlapping stays. It is one of four verticals that ship in the Tiger Booking Pro add-on — the free wordpress.org plugin contains the Appointments engine only, and does not include the Hotels code at all.
Where: WP Admin → Tiger Booking → Hotels (Dashboard, Hotels, Rooms, Reservations, Extras, Housekeeping, Users & Roles) — menu items that exist only with the Pro add-on installed.
Which build has this
Tiger Booking ships as two plugins that run side by side. The free one is the whole appointment booking system; Tiger Booking Pro is an add-on installed alongside it — you never uninstall or replace the plugin you already have, there is no data migration and no downtime.
- Free plugin — the Hotels module folder is not in the download. No Hotels menu, no Hotel settings tab, no hotel screens in the app. Restaurant, Fitness & Classes and Hourly Rental are absent for the same reason.
- Pro add-on installed and licensed — the module registers itself, its tables are created on activation, and its menu appears. Switch it on or off at any time under Settings → Modules.
- Pro installed but not licensed — the module is visible and honest about what it needs: its endpoints answer
402and its screens say a licence is required. No table is dropped and no reservation is deleted, and reactivating restores exactly the modules that were on before.
Getting started
When the add-on puts new engines on the site, the setup wizard reappears once to ask which of them you actually run, and then offers each one its own minimum setup. The Hotels step is Set up your property: one property and one room type is enough to take a real reservation — suites, extras and housekeeping can wait.
Hotels & rooms
The engine is organised top-down: a hotel (property) contains one or more room types.
- Hotels — each property with its name, description, location, star rating and pricing. This is what the Hotels Grid widget lists.
- Rooms — room types under a hotel, with capacity, bed types, a nightly price and images. Rooms feed the Hotel Rooms Grid widget and the booking flow.
Reservations
Under Reservations you see and manage every stay. A reservation is a check-in / check-out date range against a specific room, and availability is computed across those ranges so the same room can never be double-booked for overlapping nights. As with appointments you can browse, filter, open, edit, change status, and create a reservation by hand on a guest’s behalf.
Extras, housekeeping & staff
- Extras — optional add-ons (breakfast, parking, late checkout) a guest can attach to a reservation for an additional charge.
- Housekeeping — a room-status board for tracking cleaning and turnover between stays.
- Users & Roles — hotel-specific staff accounts and their permissions, which also drive the hotel portal at
/portal/hotel. - Roster — weekly shifts for hotel staff. This page appears only when Staff roster is switched on for Hotels under Settings → Features; it is off by default.
Hotel dashboard
The engine’s own Dashboard surfaces occupancy and upcoming arrivals, so front-desk staff can see who is checking in and out today.
Shared settings
Hotel reservations use the same platform features as every other engine:
- Deposits — Settings → Hotel has its own Require deposit at booking toggle and deposit percentage, on top of the site-wide policy on the Payments tab. Both need the add-on, since taking a deposit needs a gateway.
- Notifications — reservation confirmation, check-in reminder, check-out confirmation, room change/upgrade and cancellation emails, plus daily arrival and departure digests for admins. These appear on the Notifications screen once the Hotels engine is active.
- Pricing — rooms and hotels support base, season and peak-day rates, which the grid widgets can display as the advertised price.
- Analytics — hotel figures are folded into the cross-engine Analytics screen, which can also be filtered to one engine at a time.
Troubleshooting
There is no Hotels menu.
Either you are on the free wordpress.org plugin, which does not contain the Hotels code, or the module is switched off. Install the Tiger Booking Pro add-on alongside the free plugin, then check Settings → Modules.
The Hotels screens say a licence is needed.
The add-on is installed but the site has no active licence. Your properties, rooms and reservations are all still there — activate a licence and the screens return with the data intact.
A room shows as unavailable for open dates.
Availability blocks any range that overlaps an existing reservation. Look in the Reservations list for a stay covering those nights, including one still pending payment.
Rooms don’t appear on the front end.
Confirm the Hotels module is active, the room belongs to a published hotel and has a nightly price set, and — for the widgets — that the grid is not filtered to a different property.