Introducing Rezdy Reloaded… and a little about doing Bookings with WordPress

Today I released my 13th free plugin in the wordpress.org plugin repository – Rezdy Reloaded. The plugin provides an elegant way to integrate Rezdy (popular booking software for tour & activity operators) with WordPress.

First up – yes, there are already dozens of bookings and events plugins for WordPress. I’ve worked fairly extensively with (and even favourably reviewed) most of the front-runners such as WooCommerce Bookings, Event Espresso, Booking Calendar, Bookly, Appointments+, The Events Calendar and more. But ultimately, my overriding feeling is that just because you could do bookings with WordPress, doesn’t mean it’s the best tool for the job. 

Rezdy Reloaded plugin leaves the heavy lifting to Rezdy, a dedicated (and very effective) 3rd party booking software, but still lets you manage the front end stuff on the WordPress side.

The background

Earlier this year I was approached by Matters of Taste Cooking School with a problem – their [simple_tooltip content=’They were using WooCommerce with a bookings extension that just wasn’t working effectively for them. They found it very hard to administer, things were constantly breaking, and their ongoing support & maintenance costs were skyrocketing. After an in-depth investigation, we decided that in fact WordPress was not the ideal platform for their day-to-day bookings and customer management.

I helped them transition back-end operations to Rezdy, a fantastic web-based booking software and CRM specifically designed for tour & activity operators. In the course of this project I trialed and reviewed countless bookings plugins, web apps and services. Rezdy measured up very well on features, but ultimately was chosen for it’s ease-of-use, well designed accessible UI, and excellent customer support. Perhaps most importantly, Rezdy offers a full suite of CRM capabilities (customer management, advanced reporting etc) which are absolutely essential for a bookings-based business.

Integrating Rezdy with WordPress

Rezdy do in fact offer their own plugin for integrating with WordPress. This had me excited initially. However once I got it up and running, I found it essentially just provides a shortcode that embeds the Rezdy hosted catalog (website) within an iFrame on any WordPress Page/Post. Like others, I found this was not really sophisticated enough for what I had in mind.

Introducing a new plugin… Rezdy Reloaded

Rezdy Reloaded is a neat integration between Rezdy and WordPress. It is based on a WordPress custom post type, allowing you to manage your tour info on the WordPress side, giving you full control over content, visual design and SEO. It displays the Rezdy booking widget to the right, sending customers over to Rezdy to complete checkout.

Key Features

  • Fully responsive
  • Works in all major browsers – IE9+, Safari, Firefox, Chrome
  • Gives you full control over your sales listings on the WordPress side – more advanced that the official Rezdy plugin
  • Customise base slug (default is “rezdy-items” but you might like to change this depending on your industry. Eg “cooking-classes”)
  • Custom post type supports categories, revisions, tags, excerpts & featured image
  • Display items in list or grid
  • Fully customisable using templating system

Demo

 

Other Notes

Whilst this plugin remains unofficial, it is published with the consent and approval of Rezdy. Rezdy’s lead developer Hugo was very helpful and consulted with me throughout the plugin development process. We both hope that Rezdy Reloaded plugin will be helpful to Rezdy users who require a advanced integration with WordPress.

Conclusion

If you are a tour or activity business (or building a website for someone who is), and rely on taking online bookings, then take a look at Rezdy, and consider my plugin Rezdy Reloaded for an attractive and user-friendly front-end WordPress integration.

4 thoughts on “Introducing Rezdy Reloaded… and a little about doing Bookings with WordPress

  1. Steven Held says:

    Hey Maeve been looking into Rezdy and your plugin Rezdy Reloaded for a client of mine operating tours.

    I was curious if Rezdy or your plugin allows for people to login on the WordPress side and make changes to bookings they have made? Example: Roger booked a tour to Italy. Next week, his friend Sally decides she wants to go on the tour with him. Can Roger login to his account and make this change? Like a Woocommerce type store?

    1. Maeve says:

      No, it does not provide booking management for customers. Think of it like this: All your bookings and related data is handled 100% on the Rezdy side. The customer is just viewing informational content on the WordPress site, then at the point they start interacting (eg browsing the available dates using the widget, visiting checkout to place a booking) they are actually interacting directly with Rezdy. Rezdy provides no other way to handle it at this point in time.

  2. Joe says:

    Hi Maeve,

    Awesome idea to get the default Rezdy plugin re-done. I’ve been looking into the integration and the default Rezdy plugin is just a total shambles.
    Considering they charge $140 a month for not even a full subscription, they could at least spend more time on making things working and look pretty. Anyway, I activated your plugin and it triggered fatal error.
    I activated it on WP 4.5.3 and Woocommerce 2.6.1. In your description it says compatible up to WP 4.4.4. Could it be the WP version?
    Back to the default Rezdy plugin now. This one works on my WP even though it states compatible to WP 3.9.

    Any ideas?

    1. Maeve says:

      Hi Joe, glad you like the idea of Rezdy Reloaded although sorry to hear it triggered a fatal error for you. It sounds like this is a problem that may need a few rounds of troubleshooting… let’s migrate this conversation over to the Support Forum where I can help you better > https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/reloaded-rezdy

      Thanks,
      Maeve

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