A location is a place your business operates from: a clinic’s second branch, a salon’s third shop, a tutor’s two teaching rooms. You assign staff to the branches they work at, and when there is more than one, customers are asked to choose before anything else. Locations are in the free wordpress.org plugin in full.
Where: WP Admin → Tiger Booking → Locations. Staff are assigned to locations on the employee record under Employees.
The noun changes with your business type
Locations are relabelled by the active business type, like everything else. A salon manages Salons, a barber manages Shops. This article uses “location”; your screens will use your own word.
Adding a location
The Locations screen lists your places in a grid or a list, searchable by name, address or phone, with the number of staff assigned to each. Each record holds:
- Name — e.g. “City Centre”. This is what customers see.
- Address — street, city, postcode. Shown to customers when they choose a branch, like a store locator entry.
- Phone — also shown publicly.
- Taking bookings — an active flag. An inactive location is kept but never offered.
- Internal notes — parking, keys, alarm codes. Only your team sees these; they are stripped from anything a visitor can read.
Locations are ordered, so you control which appears first.
Assigning staff
Open an employee under Employees. When your site has more than one active location, the record grows a Works at block with a checkbox per location. A person with no boxes ticked works at every location — that is the deliberate default, so adding a second branch never silently strands your existing team.
The assignment is what drives the public flow. Once a customer has chosen a branch, only the staff who work there are offered, and the services on show are the ones those staff deliver. Choosing a branch with no staff assigned therefore leaves nothing to book, which is usually the first thing to check when a branch looks empty.
What locations do not do
A location records where a booking happens. It is deliberately not treated as a thing that can be occupied, so a branch is never “fully booked” as a unit — a shop with six chairs is not limited to one appointment at a time. Occupancy still belongs to the person: the same stylist cannot be double-booked, and that check does not care which branch each booking is at.
The public location chooser
When two or more locations are active, the booking flow opens on a Choose a location step showing each branch with its address and phone, ahead of picking a service. With one location — or none — the step does not exist: a single-premises business gains no extra step, no progress dot and no extra click.
There is no switch to turn the chooser off. It appears when there is a genuine choice to make and is invisible otherwise. If you do not want customers choosing, mark the branches you do not want offered as not taking bookings.
A single-premises site still stamps its one location on every booking, so your records and reports stay consistent if you open a second branch later.
Deleting a location
Deleting a location clears its staff assignments as part of the same operation, so nobody is left pointing at a branch that no longer exists. Bookings already taken there keep their history.
Troubleshooting
Customers aren’t asked to choose a location.
You have fewer than two active locations. Check that each branch you expect to be offered has Taking bookings switched on.
A branch offers no services or no times.
Services shown at a branch are the ones its assigned staff deliver, so a branch with nobody assigned has nothing to offer. Either tick that branch on the relevant employee records, or leave an employee’s boxes all unticked so they count as working everywhere.
Staff show as available at two branches at once.
That is expected — an unticked employee works everywhere. It does not allow double-booking: overlapping bookings for the same person are still refused regardless of branch.
The Locations menu is missing.
It is a shared screen and is registered on every build, including the free plugin. If it is absent, check that your user has the capability to manage the plugin’s pages.