The first time you open Tiger Booking, a setup wizard walks you through the six things a booking site needs before it can take a real booking: who you are, what kind of business you run, whether you work alone, what you sell, when you are open, and where customers book. It is entirely in the free wordpress.org plugin, and every step is optional.
Where: WP Admin → Tiger Booking on first run. Afterwards, Settings → General → Run setup again.
How the wizard behaves
Three design rules are worth knowing before you start, because they change how carefully you need to treat it:
- Each step saves on its own. Leaving a step applies it immediately, so a wizard you abandon halfway leaves a coherent site rather than a half-finished transaction.
- Skipping writes nothing. A step you pass over changes no setting and creates no record.
- Re-running is safe. Every step merges rather than replaces. A service you renamed stays renamed, a person you added is not duplicated, and settings you have since edited by hand are not blanked out.
Nothing in the wizard downloads anything. The business types it offers are data that already ships with the plugin.
Step 1 — Your business
Used on your booking page and on every confirmation email. It collects your company name, a logo (picked from the media library), your address and phone, your timezone and your currency.
These are not new settings invented for onboarding — they write into the same places Settings → General already reads, so you never end up with two homes for the same fact. A timezone your server cannot resolve is discarded rather than saved, because every slot calculation depends on it. A currency you choose is also added to the picker list on the Settings screen, so it does not later read as an unsupported value.
Step 2 — What kind of business
Six business types ship with the plugin: Salon, Clinic, Barber, Therapist, Trainer and Tutor. Each card shows a description of what that trade gets, and a preview of the wording you will see.
A business type is an identity for the appointment engine, not a separate engine. Choosing one does three things:
- Relabels the interface. A salon’s Services become Treatments, Employees become Stylists, Customers become Clients and Locations become Salons. The relabelling happens at display time, so no stored service, employee or booking is rewritten — switching type changes only what things are called.
- Sets the starting service list that step 4 offers, so a clinic opens on “General Consultation” rather than a generic placeholder.
- Turns on any extra screens that trade wants. A salon, for instance, gains the walk-in queue.
Choosing a type only ever moves that one family — the sibling types and the appointment engine they belong to. It never switches off another engine you had already ticked.
“I run something else”
The step also has an exit for businesses none of the six fit — hotels, restaurants, gyms and hourly rentals. Taking it records your answer and does nothing else: no preset is activated, no module changes, nothing is locked. The wizard then tells you which engine you would need instead of walking you through configuring practitioners for a business you do not run. Those engines are part of the Tiger Booking Pro add-on. You can carry on using the appointment engine or pick a business type later, with nothing to undo.
Step 3 — Just you, or a team?
Two choices, and they change the shape of both the admin and the public flow:
- It’s just me — no staff screens, and customers book you directly with no “choose a person” step. If your site has no staff record yet, one is created for you from your business identity, named after your company, with the role Owner. If you already have staff, nothing is touched.
- We have a team — people are managed under Employees, and customers pick who they see.
This is the same Business Structure setting you can change later under Settings → Appointment.
Step 4 — What you offer
Two or three starter services, pre-filled from your business type, each with a title, description, price and duration. Edit them, add rows, or clear the ones you do not want.
This step adds. It never deletes and never rewrites: a service whose title already exists is skipped and left exactly as you have it, which is what makes re-running the wizard harmless.
Step 5 — When are you open
A seven-day grid of opening hours — Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 by default. These become the working hours customers can pick from.
The hours are written against your staff, because a schedule has to belong to somebody. Any breaks already recorded are kept, and so are the hours of anyone the step is not setting. A day whose end time is not after its start is ignored rather than silently closing the day.
Step 6 — Your booking page
The last step creates the public page people book on. It reuses an existing Book Now page if you have one, otherwise looks for any page already carrying a booking shortcode, and only creates a new page if neither exists — so this button cannot leave you with two booking pages.
A created page is titled Book Now at /book-now/ and contains the booking shortcode for your engine ( for appointments). A companion Booking Received page at /booking-confirmed/ is the thank-you page customers land on afterwards — a good place to attach conversion tracking. Both are mapped under Settings → Pages.
The finish screen
The wizard ends on an honest checklist rather than a congratulation: business details, business type, team, services, opening hours and booking page, each marked done or not, with what is missing spelled out. “Not set — nobody can pick a time until you add them” is the sort of line to act on before you share the page.
Running it again
Open Settings → General and click Run setup again. Because every step merges, this is a safe way to revisit one decision without disturbing the rest.
The wizard also reappears by itself, exactly once, when your site gains booking engines — which is what installing the Pro add-on does. It then asks a different question: what do you run?, a multi-select of the engines now installed, with nothing switched on until you say so. Each engine you pick then offers its own minimum setup. Losing engines never triggers it, so deactivating the add-on and reactivating it later is not treated as news.
Changing your business type later
Business types are no longer separate module toggles. Under Settings → Modules, Appointments is a single switch with the business type as a select inside it. Switching Appointments off switches its business type off with it.
Troubleshooting
I only see six business types — where are Hotel and Restaurant?
Those are engines, not business types. A business type is pure configuration over the appointment engine you already have; an engine is a whole vertical with its own tables and screens, and the non-appointment ones ship in the Tiger Booking Pro add-on. The wizard deliberately does not list them as greyed-out cards.
I picked the wrong business type.
Pick another one. Nothing stored is rewritten — only the labels change — and the admin page addresses stay the same, so existing bookmarks survive the switch.
The wizard reopened on a site I had already set up.
Your site gained a booking engine, almost certainly because the Pro add-on was activated. It opens once on the “what do you run?” step and will not ask again for that same set of engines.
I skipped a step and want to set it now.
Everything the wizard writes is an ordinary setting or record: identity under Settings → General, services under Services, hours under Availability, and pages under Settings → Pages. Or just run the wizard again.