ARTIO Booking 
- Yes
The extension can be easily setuped to be used in different type of industries that have need for booking/reservation applications, such as car (or other) rentals, accomodation booking, facility (sport, recreation) reservation, conference room reservations, etc. To adapt it, no extra coding is needed, all can be configured from back-end.
* multi-level structure for bookable objects organization
(e.g. city → hotel → room or facility → hall → playfield)
* booking views: monthly / weekly / daily
* several booking methods (full day, hour-based, predefined time-range)
* configurable prices (different prices in different times / dates)
* object descriptions and properties, image gallery
* bookable extras and options
(e.g. navigation for car rental or set of rackets for tennis court booking)
* new! Google Maps integration
* PDF Invoices with customizable template/layout (requires add-on installed)
Why? I'll explain here:
1. You can't allow booking for more than 1 item/quantity. For example, you are in Car Rental business and you have 5 of the same model for rent and your customer would like to book 2 of them, they cant book 2 in a single. They have to make 2 booking separately. Does this make any sense?
If you're in hotel/hostel business, you have 5 Deluxe room and 5 Family room. Your customers would like to make a booking of 2 Deluxe room and 1 Family room for a family holiday trip. They can't, they cannot make the booking of 2 room type in a single booking. Does this make sense?
2. They don't collect all user data. For example: You're in Travel business and you would like to offer booking of travel package online. A customer would like to make a booking for his/her family and expect to submit all the family member details for the booking registration, they can't, means you as the business owner, can't collect customer's details, actually, they can't even set booking for X number of person. If their family member have 5 person would like to join this travel package, each of the family have to make each booking separately. Make any sense?
3. Event Booking, don't event think about it.
4. Customer Support, pre-sales questions, prompt reply. After sales support, sucks... They mentioned to post the order ID at the support forum before the support topic subject, so they can recognise paid customer and free version customer, fair enough. But after 1 day, I get no so-called priority support, no reply at all. Then I email them and ask why no reply, they replied me and said "Are you really mean it? Its just 1 day after you post the support question, your license support respond time is 2 days". See what I mean? They are free to reply my mail but don't bother to answer my support questions. Don't believe me? Just go into their support forum and see by yourself, see how much support questions is pending there with no reply.
My last email to them is asking for refund cause this component is useless. They IGNORE my mail.
CONCLUSION: Don't get near to this add-on. I burnt my money on this script. Its fine, I can afford that. But I just wish there will be no others will get their money burn.
For my money, I'll just take it as a donation to some begger on the street...
Hello,
I am not going to post our whole correspondence here, just to sum a few facts:
1. we have exchanged maybe 8 emails, we have honestly answered all your questions about functionality
2. you were reffered to try the free version and checkout the demo
3. there is manual and other infromation sources available
You were not happy that the component does not do all you want it to do. But we never claimed that.
And yes, you are right, currently, the component does not support multiple reservations. Each reservation must be done separatelly. This will be added in one of the next releases. It is not possible to develop a component matching 100% to everyone.
The point is, we have not claimed that, you had change to see this in demo and now you are complaining about this.
- the support forum is not very active and so don't expect responses.
- Unfortunately this extension isn't 100% stable yet so support is still
- no changelog for new versions
- no notification of new versions
- you pay for the commercial version but you still get very limited support
Overall, very frustrating to use this extension purely because the developer has not got good support and this is needed to help iron out the little issues remaining in the extension. However the overall concept of the extension is good and if the developer keeps developing and provides better support good be superb.
Hello,
I have to disagree slighly.
We try to answer the questions in forums as fast as we can.
As regards new version notifications, there is a version checker integrated and it shows what is your current and latest available version directly at Control Panel.
As regards the Changelog, we will work on that. I believe there is one, but maybe not publicly available.
E.g. when you want to book from the end of the month until the beginning of next month. Many times the start date is reset.
When a visitor forgets to fill in a compulsory field; you get an error message, AND a message that your reservation is made!
Too bad, since the concept is nice for many applications.
After some weeks trying to get it working, and because the forum at Artio doesn't seem to be really alive, I had to choose an alternative.
Hello,
this is a problem with incorrect language constants settings for some languages. Please, check for more details in our support forums.
I hope that the Coder will spend in the future a lot of time in the developement of this extension.
Thanks for your effort.
Hello,
thanks for your feedback. Well, you are right. But you need also to understand that this was just a first initial release and it is a very complex component. More features and options will be added in the next releases.
As example, the room (overnight) booking and payment integrations will be available in the next release coming within a few days.
Hello,
well, you are right. The overviewing documentation is still missing, but we are already working on it. We hope anyway, the component is so straightforward it should not be problem to understand how it works.
And where more difficult, there are tooltips available.
When a client rent your room, it's to sleep, so, the 'check in' is the first day and 'check out' the second day.
Artio calculate the price of TWO days and not one night.
So, unable to use it for B&B or Hotel. It's a pity...
Hope that problem will be resolved in the future...
