Tiger Booking Pro is an add-on, not a replacement. It installs alongside the free Tiger Booking plugin from wordpress.org and extends it. You never uninstall a working booking system in order to pay for it: nothing is removed, nothing is migrated, and there is no downtime.
Where: WP Admin → Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin, then activate. Licensing is at Tiger Booking → License, a screen the add-on brings with it.
What the add-on adds
- Four booking engines — Hotel, Restaurant, Fitness & Classes, and Hourly Rental.
- Online payments — Stripe, PayPal, Square and Razorpay, plus card-on-file, deposits and no-show fees.
- Calendar sync — Google Calendar and the OAuth client behind it.
- The integrations hub — Zoom, Slack, WhatsApp, CRMs, and outbound webhooks with HMAC signing.
- Coupons and the waitlist.
- SMS reminders through your own Twilio account.
- Customer document uploads at booking time, with a signed viewer.
- Licensed updates for the add-on itself.
None of those files exist in the free download. That absence — rather than a switch — is what makes the free plugin genuinely unlocked, with nothing disabled, badged or advertised.
Installing
- Keep the free Tiger Booking plugin installed and active. The add-on needs it and declares the dependency, so WordPress 6.5 and later will enforce it for you.
- Upload and activate Tiger Booking Pro from Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
- On activation the add-on creates its engines’ tables, restores each module’s remembered on/off state, and refreshes permalinks — so the new menus are there on the very next screen rather than after a reload.
- Activate your licence at Tiger Booking → License.
- The setup wizard reappears once, on a step asking what do you run? Tick the engines you actually operate. Nothing is switched on until you say so, and each engine you pick then offers its own minimum setup — for Hotels, one property and one room type is enough to take a real reservation.
Your existing services, staff, bookings, customers and settings are untouched throughout. There is no import step because there is nothing to import.
Licensing
Entitlement comes from your Tiger Elements account key — one key unlocks every Tiger product, and there is no separate Booking key to manage. The account server issues a signed, domain-bound token that your site verifies locally, so checking a licence makes no network call on a normal page load. A site that loses internet access keeps working for the whole grace window the server issued, and a licence API timing out never switches a booking system off. Only a genuinely expired or revoked licence does, and only after grace.
What happens when a licence lapses
Expiry is deliberately non-destructive:
- No table is dropped and no row is deleted. Hotel reservations, restaurant covers, coupons, waitlist entries and payment records all stay exactly where they are.
- The paid endpoints answer
402and the screens explain what they need, rather than failing in a way you have to guess at. - Your module choices are remembered. Reactivating restores exactly the engines that were switched on, not a default.
The free plugin carries on running as it always did throughout.
Deactivating or removing the add-on
Deactivating Tiger Booking Pro takes away the Pro surfaces and nothing else. No table is dropped, no row deleted, and everything comes back untouched if you reactivate later. Your appointment bookings are entirely unaffected, because they never belonged to the add-on.
The one thing to know: with the add-on gone, its engines’ data is still on the site but has no screens. Export anything you need first if you are removing it for good.
Updates
The two plugins update from different places, and neither interferes with the other. The free plugin updates from wordpress.org like any hosted plugin. The add-on updates through its own licensed channel, under its own plugin slug.
Troubleshooting
“Tiger Booking Pro needs the free Tiger Booking plugin.”
The free plugin is missing or deactivated. Install and activate it; the add-on switches itself on, and your data and settings are untouched in the meantime.
“Tiger Booking Pro needs a newer version of Tiger Booking.”
Update the free plugin. The add-on attaches through published seams and checks the free plugin is new enough to offer them, rather than assuming.
“The installation looks incomplete.”
The add-on found the free plugin but not the attachment points it needs, which usually means a partial or hand-patched install. Reinstall the free plugin.
The Pro menus are there but every screen asks for a licence.
The add-on is installed without an active licence. Activate one at Tiger Booking → License; nothing was lost while it was inactive.
I activated the add-on but see no new menus.
Check Settings → Modules — an engine has to be switched on as well as installed. If the setup wizard offered you the “what do you run?” step and you skipped it, nothing was switched on, which is intended.
Do I have to remove the free plugin?
No — and you should not. Both plugins are meant to be active at the same time. The add-on ships no copy of the free plugin’s files, so removing the free one leaves the add-on with nothing to attach to.