Make Your Own Booking Widget

Introduction

Making your own booking widget is not hard. It only involves opening the booking page and optionally passing some information to it.

Common ways to open the booking page are using an HTML <A> link or using a <FORM> with selectors and inputs.

We will only focus on the technical aspects of getting the form to submit information, we will not worry about styling, javascript and CSS, that is completely up to you.

Modify to suit and paste the samples into your web page.

Create a Form

A basic HTML FORM can be created like this

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://www.beds24.com/booking2.php">
<input type="hidden" name="propid" value="2035">
<input type="submit" value="Book Now">
</FORM>

It is very simple and will show a "Book Now" button and open the property with the specified propid.

Collect Check-in Date

The Check-in date can be sent to the booking page using any of the paramentes at Developers

There are some very nice jQuery ways to collect a date but this example will use a standard HTML selector for the day and a selector for the month and year.

It is possible using jQuery or javascript to keep the select options up-to-date with the current month/year but that is beyond the scope of this How To.

<FORM METHOD="POST" ACTION="http://www.beds24.com/booking2.php">

<select name='fdate_date'>
<option value='1'>1</option>
<option value='2'>2</option>
<option value='3'>3</option>
<option value='4'>4</option>
<option value='5'>5</option>
<option value='6'>6</option>
<option value='7'>7</option>
<option value='8'>8</option>
<option value='9'>9</option>
<option value='10'>10</option>
<option value='11'>11</option>
<option value='12'>12</option>
<option value='13'>13</option>
<option value='14'>14</option>
<option value='15'>15</option>
<option value='16'>16</option>
<option value='17'>17</option>
<option value='18'>18</option>
<option value='19'>19</option>
<option value='20'>20</option>
<option value='21'>21</option> 
<option value='22'>22</option>
<option value='23'>23</option>
<option value='24'>24</option>
<option value='25'>25</option>
<option value='26'>26</option>
<option value='27'>27</option>
<option value='28'>28</option>
<option value='29'>29</option>
<option value='30'>30</option>
<option value='31'>31</option>
</select>
<select name='fdate_monthyear'>
<option value='2014-08'>Aug 2014</option>
<option value='2014-09'>Sep 2014</option>
<option value='2014-10'>Oct 2014</option>
<option value='2014-11'>Nov 2014</option>
<option value='2014-12'>Dec 2014</option>
<option value='2015-01'>Jan 2015</option>
<option value='2015-02'>Feb 2015</option>
<option value='2015-03'>Mar 2015</option>
<option value='2015-04'>Apr 2015</option>
<option value='2015-05'>May 2015</option>
<option value='2015-06'>Jun 2015</option>
<option value='2015-07'>Jul 2015</option>
<option value='2015-08'>Aug 2015</option>
<option value='2015-09'>Sep 2015</option>
<option value='2015-10'>Oct 2015</option>
<option value='2015-11'>Nov 2015</option>
<option value='2015-12'>Dec 2015</option>
<option value='2016-01'>Jan 2016</option>
<option value='2016-02'>Feb 2016</option>
<option value='2016-03'>Mar 2016</option>
<option value='2016-04'>Apr 2016</option>
<option value='2016-05'>May 2016</option>
<option value='2016-06'>Jun 2016</option>
<option value='2016-07'>Jul 2016</option>
</select>
<input type="hidden" name="propid" value="2035">
<input type="submit" value="Book Now">
</FORM>