Availability decides when customers can book. Tiger Booking resolves real, bookable slots from each employee’s working hours, minus holidays and existing bookings, then applies the booking rules you set — so double-booking is prevented automatically.
Where: WP Admin → Tiger Booking → Availability, plus the timing controls in Settings → Appointment.
Working hours & holidays
The Availability page manages two things:
- Working hours — the weekly hours each employee is open for bookings. Slots are only offered inside these windows.
- Holidays / days off — specific dates that block all slots (public holidays, vacations, closures).
The scheduling engine starts from an employee’s working hours, subtracts their holidays, subtracts any slots already taken by confirmed bookings, and returns what is genuinely free. Because availability is computed per employee, one busy staff member never blocks the whole calendar.
Booking rules
Open Settings → Appointment → Booking Rules to shape how those free slots are presented:
- Time Step (min) — the slot interval, in minutes (for example a 15- or 30-minute grid).
- Min Notice — how many hours ahead of “now” a customer must book; blocks last-minute reservations.
- Max Advance — how many days into the future the calendar is open.
- Max Per Customer / Day — a cap on self-service bookings per customer per day (0 = unlimited).
- Require customer phone number — makes phone a required field on the form.
Each service’s own duration and buffer time (set on the service) also feed the engine, so a longer service consumes more of the grid and the buffer keeps a gap before the next appointment.
Reminders
The same settings screen has a Reminders card: switch Send appointment reminders on, choose how many hours before the appointment to send (Send Before), and pick the channel (email or, where configured, SMS). Reminder delivery relies on WordPress cron running on schedule.
How a slot is chosen
- The customer picks a service (and, in institution mode, a staff member).
- The engine reads that staff member’s working hours for the requested date range.
- It removes holidays and any already-booked times, then slices the remainder into slots at your Time Step.
- It hides slots that fall inside Min Notice or beyond Max Advance, and shows the rest.
Troubleshooting
No slots appear at all.
Confirm the employee assigned to the service has working hours set on the Availability page, that the date isn’t a holiday, and that Max Advance is far enough ahead to include the day you’re testing.
Reminders aren’t going out.
Reminders are sent by a scheduled task. If WordPress cron is disabled or your site gets little traffic, wire up a real system cron so scheduled sends fire on time.