Hotale – Hotel Booking WordPress

A booking with no deposit can cost you the room twice

Someone books three nights for a long weekend and pays nothing up front. If they do not show up, the room sits empty, and you have already turned away the guest who wanted those dates. With a deposit collected, that same no-show hurts far less.

In lodging, the deposit separates a booking from an intention, and in Hotale being able to collect it depends on the gateway you choose.

Hotale, by GoodLayers, is a WordPress theme with its own booking system for hotels, apartment rentals, resorts with spas and bed and breakfasts.

Hotale's two payment routes, and which one takes deposits

• Direct route: PayPal and cards through Stripe and Authorize.net, with partial or full payment and up to five deposits.
• WooCommerce route: optional, it connects gateways built for WooCommerce, but it does not support deposits.
• Offline payment, in addition to online payment.
• Additional gateways such as PayUmoney, 2CheckOut, Network International and Instamojo, sold separately by a third party.
• Tracking: email notice of each payment, transactions in the guest dashboard and CSV export.

The consequence is concrete: if the only gateway that works for you exists only for WooCommerce, you will have to choose between charging with it and asking for a deposit.

From room search to the guest account

• Room search and shopping cart.
• Seasonal pricing and minimum stays per room.
• Additional services such as airport transfers, mandatory or optional, with their own price and dates.
• Coupons with an amount and validity dates.
• Manual management: edit orders and add bookings from the admin area.
• Customer account to manage bookings, view invoices and review rooms, with social login.
• Multiple currencies with a switcher in the top bar, and a customizable enquiry form.
• Multiple properties as locations, by category or custom filter.

iCal only covers room types with a single room

This is where the math matters. iCal sync works only with room types that have a single unit. A set of apartments, each created as its own type, fits; a hotel with twenty identical doubles under one type cannot sync them this way.

Booking.com offers iCal under its own conditions, which you should review yourself. Hotale's features do not include a channel manager.

The number of rooms of each type is set in its settings, but the theme has no option to show visitors how many remain.

Its own builder, no Elementor, and the first booking

Hotale is built with the GoodLayers drag and drop builder. The demo pages cannot be edited with Elementor, and even if you use another builder, it will not have the theme's own elements.

It offers 22 headers and 6 footers, and it is compatible with WPML.

The settings your server needs appear in the theme's own Server Status tab. The recommended sequence is this:

1. Upload hotale.zip under Appearance, Themes, and activate it. The goodlayers-core plugin installs right after.
2. Under Goodlayers, Getting Start / Import, review Server Status and import the demo in Import Demo. If it stops partway, run it again and it resumes where it left off.
3. Create each room under Room, Add New, with its prices and quantity.
4. Choose the gateway under Room Settings, Payment, and set up the deposit in the room settings.
5. Run a complete test booking with a deposit before going live.

Sunway and MotoPress, a different booking engine

Sunway relies on MotoPress Hotel Booking, lets you ask for the full amount, a deposit or payment on arrival, and syncs by iCal with platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com.

If you already have a theme you like, MotoPress Hotel Booking brings bookings as a plugin.

Hotale in five answers

Is WooCommerce required?

No. It is an additional payment route, useful for its range of gateways.

Can I collect a deposit through WooCommerce?

No. Deposits work with the direct route of PayPal, Stripe and Authorize.net.

Does iCal work for a hotel with many identical rooms?

Not under one type: sync only supports types with a single room.

Can it be edited with Elementor?

The demo pages cannot. They are made with the GoodLayers builder.

Does it handle several hotels on one site?

Yes, as locations, organized by category or a custom filter.