Tiger Booking has no customer login. Someone booking with you does not create an account, does not choose a password, and never sees a dashboard. What they get instead is a thank-you page, a confirmation email, and a signed self-service link that opens their own booking and lets them cancel it without signing in to anything. All of this is in the free wordpress.org plugin.
Where: the thank-you page is mapped at Settings → Pages; the emails are at Settings → Notifications; the self-service page is served by the plugin at
/api/booking-manage.
Immediately after booking
When a customer completes the flow they are sent to your thank-you page — Booking Received at /booking-confirmed/ if the setup wizard created it for you. The redirect carries a marker in the query string so a tracking snippet can tell your booking confirmation apart from anything else landing on the same page, which makes it the right place to put conversion tracking.
The default wording deliberately does not say “confirmed”. A booking taken through the public widget is saved as pending; only you, or a policy transition, moves it to confirmed — because that is where the deposit and consent checks live. Promising a confirmation you have not given is how somebody turns up to a slot that was never approved. Edit the page’s copy freely; the slug stays booking-confirmed so existing links and tracking keep working.
The confirmation email
The Booking Confirmation notification is what the customer keeps. Its subject and body are yours to edit under Settings → Notifications, with merge tags for the details they need — {{clientName}}, {{serviceName}}, {{date}}, {{time}}, {{employeeName}}, {{location}}, {{amount}} and {{bookingId}} among others.
Depending on what you switch on, the same lifecycle can also send a reminder, a cancellation confirmation, a post-booking follow-up and a review request.
The self-service link
Every booking can be opened through a signed URL of the form /api/booking-manage?id=…&exp=…&sig=…. The signature is the credential: it is checked before any booking data is shown or changed, so no login is needed and no session is created. Links carry an expiry — ninety days by default — and are signed with a per-site secret.
Opening a valid link shows the booking’s details and, when it is still pending or confirmed, a cancel action. Cancelling:
- moves the booking to cancelled through the normal status transition, so your policy and notifications apply exactly as they would from the admin;
- emails you a short heads-up naming the guest, their email, the reference and the total, with a reminder to refund manually if you took a payment;
- tells the customer plainly if it can no longer be cancelled, and shows the current status instead of failing silently.
An expired or tampered link gets a plain “this booking link is invalid or has expired” page rather than any booking data.
Getting the link to the customer
This is the part to be clear-eyed about. The endpoint and the signing are built and working, but the current build offers no merge tag for the link in the notification templates and no button in the admin to copy one, so on a stock install a customer will not receive it. Treat self-service cancellation as available to your site rather than as something your customers can use out of the box.
Until there is a merge tag, the practical routes are the ones below.
How customers change a booking today
- They contact you and you make the change from Tiger Booking → Bookings, where you can reschedule, confirm, cancel or mark a no-show. The matching notification goes out automatically.
- Your cancellation policy still applies. A cancellation inside your cancellation window counts as late and can carry a fee — see Payments & deposits. On the free plugin, where there is no payment gateway, fees are not assessed.
- Their history is kept against a single customer profile matched on contact details, visible under Tiger Booking → Customers.
What customers never see
Worth stating plainly, because it comes up: there is no customer-facing area listing past bookings, no stored payment methods on the customer’s side, and no document library. Staff sign in to the staff portal, and hotel users to the hotel portal with the Pro add-on — customers sign in to neither.
Troubleshooting
Customers say they never got a confirmation.
Check the Booking Confirmation notification is switched on, then check delivery. WordPress’s default mail often lands in spam; switch Settings → Notifications → Email Delivery to SMTP and use Send test.
A customer’s manage link says it has expired.
Links carry an expiry and are signed with a site secret. Rotating that secret invalidates every outstanding link at once, by design.
A customer cancelled but the slot is still blocked.
Cancelled bookings release their time. If the slot is still unavailable, look for a second booking covering it — including one still pending.
Bookings arrive as pending and stay there.
That is the intended default: the public widget cannot confirm on your behalf. Confirm from Bookings, and note that stale pending bookings are cancelled automatically by a daily scheduled task.