If you rent out kayaks, bikes, boats or golf carts and your site is on Wix, you've probably tried Wix Bookings first. It's free and it's already there. It also wasn't built for rentals, and you can see that on a lot of real booking pages. Here's what goes wrong and what your options are.
Disclosure: I built one of the options below (Beacon Bookings). The rest of the facts come from Wix's own help pages and the App Market, so check them yourself.
What Wix Bookings is built for
Wix Bookings sells appointments, classes and courses. An appointment is a service with a fixed length that one client books. A class has a set time and a number of spots. That's a good fit for a haircut, a yoga class or a guided tour at 10am.
A rental is different. The customer decides how long they want it, often how many of it they want, and the price usually drops for longer rentals. Wix's help center even has a feature request page for "allowing clients to set the duration of a service", which tells you it isn't there.
The workarounds I keep seeing
I went through a few dozen rental businesses' Wix booking pages. The same patterns come up again and again:
- A service per length. "Kayak 2 hours", "Kayak 4 hours", "Kayak 8 hours", repeated for every boat. One pontoon company I looked at had two boats times three lengths, so six services for two boats.
- A service per group size. "Group of 2", "Group of 3", all the way to "Group of 10", each at a different price.
- An "Additional Day" service that the customer is told to book together with the first day.
- The deposit as its own service the customer has to remember to add.
- Multi-day rentals set up as 15-minute appointments, because an appointment can't span two days.
- Two identical boats listed as "Boat A" and "Boat B", because a service can't say "we have two of these".
All of these work, sort of. They also mean the customer does the math, the calendar doesn't know how many you have left, and you check every booking by hand.
Your options
1. Keep Wix Bookings and live with the workarounds. Free, already installed, and fine if you rent one thing for one fixed length.
2. Wix Rentals. Wix now has its own rentals app. It lets customers pick how long, priced per hour or per day, with buffer time between bookings. Two catches from Wix's own overview page: it's "available only on Wix Harmony" (Wix's newest editor), and online reservations need a Business Premium plan. Hourly rentals run from 30 minutes to 24 hours and daily rentals from 1 to 8 days, going by Wix's developer docs. I couldn't find a way to book several of the same item in one booking. If your site is on Harmony, look at it first.
3. An outside booking system. FareHarbor, Peek, Checkfront, Booqable and similar tools are full rental and tour platforms. You link to them or embed them, and the booking and payment happen in their system, not your Wix store. Worth it if you want waivers, check-in, staff scheduling and so on. It's also a second system to pay for and learn.
4. A rental app from the Wix App Market. There are a few. TWICE Rentals is the most established, with a 14-day trial (2.6 stars from 18 reviews when I checked). Mine is below.
What I built: Beacon Bookings
Beacon Bookings is a Wix app that adds a booking form to your site and checks out through your normal Wix checkout. It works in the regular Wix Editor and Wix Studio. What it does for rentals:
- Customers pick how long (by the hour, day or night) and how many ("Kayaks: 2").
- An hourly rental can run overnight or for days, so one form covers 2 hours, a full day and a week. Pickup and return just have to fall in your open hours.
- You set capacity: 6 kayaks means the 7th booking for that time is refused.
- Customers can put several items in one order (two kayaks and a paddle board, or a bounce house and 40 chairs) and pay once.
- Set prices for longer rentals: "4 hours for $120" or "7 days for $300". The customer is charged whichever works out lower.
- A first-hour-plus-extra-hours price works too (a per-booking base price plus an hourly rate).
- Buffers, weekly hours and closed dates.
- The slot is held while the customer pays, so two people don't grab the last boat.
- On the paid plan, a refundable security deposit is added to the checkout as its own line, so you can refund exactly that amount from the order later.
- The booking form shows in your site's language (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French or German).
It's free for one rental type. The paid plan is $12 a month for unlimited rental types, resources (rooms, staff, specific boats) and deposits. It doesn't do waivers or add-on items like coolers yet.
It's on the Wix App Market: Beacon Bookings.
How to choose
- One item, one fixed length: Wix Bookings is fine.
- Your site is on Wix Harmony: try Wix Rentals.
- You need waivers, check-in and staff tools: an outside system like FareHarbor or Peek.
- You're on the regular Wix Editor and want customers to pick how long and how many, pay through your own checkout, and never overbook: that's the gap Beacon Bookings fills.
Top comments (0)