Tiger Booking is a modular booking platform. It ships as a lightweight kernel plus self-contained modules — you turn on only the verticals your business needs, and the admin menu, settings tabs and front-end assets all adapt to match. A disabled module loads no code, so it adds zero overhead.
Where: WP Admin → Tiger Booking (the first launch opens the Setup Wizard); modules are managed under Tiger Booking → Settings → Modules.
Two builds
Everything below says which build it belongs to:
- Tiger Booking — the free plugin from wordpress.org. It contains the Appointments engine and all the shared screens.
- Tiger Booking Pro — a separate add-on plugin that installs alongside the free one (you keep both active). It adds the Hotels, Restaurant, Fitness and Rental engines, plus payments, SMS and the other paid subsystems.
First run: the Setup Wizard
On the very first visit the plugin opens the Setup Wizard. It is six short steps, and every one of them can be skipped:
- Your business — name, logo, timezone and currency. Used on your booking page and in every confirmation email.
- What kind of business — the business type (salon, clinic, barber, and so on). This only renames screens so they read the way you talk: Services becomes Consultations, Employees becomes Practitioners.
- Just you, or a team? — choosing solo hides every staff screen and drops the “choose a person” step from the public form.
- What do you offer — two or three starter services, changeable at any time.
- When are you open — your weekly opening hours; these are the times customers can pick from.
- Your booking page — creates the public page people book on.
Each step saves itself the moment you leave it, so a wizard you abandon halfway still leaves the site in a coherent state. Skipping a step writes nothing at all — it does not save a blank over your existing answer.
If, at step 2, you say you run a hotel, restaurant, gym or rental business, the wizard stops the appointment flow and shows you a short explanation instead: the free plugin does not contain those engines, they come with Tiger Booking Pro, and the appointment side keeps working meanwhile. Nothing there is a locked or greyed-out upsell — the code for those modules simply is not present in the free build.
Running setup again
Go to Settings → General and click Run setup again. It is safe to use as often as you like: every step merges rather than replaces, so re-running the wizard to change your opening hours or your business type does not delete services, bookings or anything else you have added. That is also why it is not in the Danger Zone.
The modules
The Appointments engine is bundled in the free wordpress.org build. The other four are part of the Tiger Booking Pro add-on and arrive when you install it — the free build has no downloader and cannot fetch them.
- Appointments (free build) — services, employees, availability and time-slot bookings for appointment-based businesses.
- Hotels (Pro add-on) — room types, nightly rates, extras, housekeeping and date-range reservations.
- Fitness & Classes (Pro add-on) — class types, instructors, schedules, passes and credit packs.
- Hourly Rental (Pro add-on) — rent spaces and equipment by the hour with multi-resource, conflict-free scheduling.
- Restaurant (Pro add-on) — table reservations with dining areas, party-size availability and deposits.
Turning modules on and off
Open Settings → Modules. Each engine gets one on/off switch, and engines can run side by side — a venue that takes both appointments and table reservations can have both on.
A business type is not a peer of those engines. It is a preset of the Appointments engine: it ships no screens of its own, it borrows the engine’s and renames them. So it is not a separate toggle — it is a select inside the Appointments card (and on Settings → Appointment). Exactly one member of the family is active at a time, and switching the Appointments engine off turns the active business type off with it.
Module changes are staged: the screen tells you there are unsaved changes, and the page reloads after you click Save Changes so the menus and tabs rebuild to match.
How the admin is organized
The whole navigation lives in the WordPress submenu under Tiger Booking — the app does not render its own sidebar. Each active module contributes its own section pages (for example the Appointments module adds Dashboard, Bookings, Services, Employees, Availability and more). Shared pages sit alongside them: Customers, Locations, Analytics, then an operations group holding Reviews and Activity Log (and Waitlist when the Pro add-on is active), followed by Settings and Tools.
When two or more engines are active, page titles are prefixed with the module label (“Hotels: Rooms”) so same-named screens stay distinguishable. A single-module site sees clean, unprefixed titles.
What’s on the Tools page
Tiger Booking → Tools holds housekeeping utilities: seeding and clearing demo data, sending a test email to check your mail setup, and the switch that decides whether the plugin’s data is deleted when you uninstall it. The setup wizard is not re-triggered from here.
Troubleshooting
I don’t see a module I expect.
A module only shows menu items and settings tabs when it is both present on the site and switched on. If it is Hotels, Restaurant, Fitness or Rental, check that the Tiger Booking Pro add-on plugin is installed and active — the free plugin does not contain those engines. Then open Settings → Modules and switch the engine on.
How do I start over?
Go to Settings → General and use Reset & Start Over in the Danger Zone. It deletes every booking and all module data, turns off every business module, and re-runs the setup wizard, while keeping your branding, email templates and license. You have to type RESET to confirm, and it cannot be undone. If all you want is to revisit your answers, use Run setup again higher up the same page instead — that destroys nothing.