Can I use HBook for a hostel?

Yes, you can perfectly use HBook for dormitory with beds. Your customer will book one or several beds in dormitories.

📘 Instructions

Create your Accommodation types as “Bed in dormitory”, and not “Dormitory”. The “Minimum occupancy”, “Normal occupancy” and “Maximum occupancy” are set to 1 person.
Indicate the number of beds in the dormitory room as the “Number of accommodation of this type”.
If you have different dormitories, and wish to present them separately to the customer, you will create one Accommodation Type for each dormitory.

Let’s take the example of a hostel with 3 dormitories:

4-bed women dormitory
6-bed men dormitory
8-bed mixed dormitory

You will create the accommodation types as follows:

“Bed in 4-bed women dormitory”. Number of accommodation of this type: 4.
“Bed in 6-bed men dormitory”. Number of accommodation of this type : 6.
“Bed in 8-bed men dormitory”. Number of accommodation of this type : 8.

Enable Multiple accommodation booking in HBook > Misc > Multiple accommodation booking. By doing so, a customer can book various beds in a single reservation.

In HBook > Text, you can change any text displayed by HBook.

Can I show how many beds are left for each dormitory?

Yes, you can display in the search results the number of beds left for each dormitory that has availability. There are settings for this feature in HBook > Search form > Accommodation selection.

You will set “Display number of available accommodation” to “Yes”.
You should modify the “Threshold to display number of available accommodation” to the number of beds of your bigger dormitory, which means that it is always displayed.

I have a mix of private rooms and dormitories. How can I set up HBook?

For your private rooms, the Accommodation Type will be the room. For your dormitories, the Accommodation Type will be 1 bed in the dorm room. This is the main difference to correctly set-up HBook for a mix of private rooms and dorm beds.

You may wish to have separate booking pages for Private rooms and Dormitories. We recommend using the Accommodation List on each page.
You may wish to adjust the Multiple accommodation settings for each Accommodation Type.

If you have mainly private rooms, then you may set to exclude “On global search only” all your accommodation types that are for beds in dormitories. Your client will be able to book, in a single reservation, various private rooms (of the same type, or of different types) or various beds in a same dormitory. But they will not be able to book beds in different dormitories in a same reservation.

If you have mainly beds in dormitories, then you may set to exclude “On global search only” all your accommodation types that are Private rooms. Your client will be able to book, in a single reservation, various beds (in different dormitories or in the same dormitory), various private rooms of a same type. But they will not be able to book different private rooms (of different types) in a same reservation.

You can learn more about Multiple accommodation booking functionality here.