The customer dashboard is the part of your site where guests who booked with an account find their bookings. They see what is coming up, what they still owe and what you wrote to them, download their voucher and invoice, and change or cancel a booking while your rules allow it, without having to contact you.
PREREQUISITES:
- Solidres 4.7.0 or later, for the screens shown here
- Guests who book with an account: a property offers one only when its Booking tab says so, under When guests book. See Setting up a property.
Step 1. Check the User - Solidres plugin
In System → Manage → Plugins, search for User - Solidres and make sure it is enabled. It comes with Solidres, and it links each guest's Joomla account to their bookings.
Step 2. Create the menu item
In Menus, add a menu item to a menu your guests see, such as the user menu shown once they are logged in. Click Select beside Menu Item Type, open the Solidres group and choose Customer dashboard. Set its Access to Registered so that only logged-in guests see the link.
Step 3. Choose the customer user group
In Solidres → Options, on the General tab, Customer user group is the Joomla user group a guest joins when they create an account while booking. Registered, the default, suits most sites. Keep it different from the partner user group if you use the Hub.
Step 4. Let guests cancel online
Guests can see their bookings, change them and edit their profile without any permission: Solidres checks that each booking is their own. To let them cancel online, open Solidres → Options → Permissions, choose the customer user group and set Edit State to Allowed. Without it, the cancel button does not show.
When guests may change or cancel, and until how many days before arrival, is set per property on its Booking tab, under Changes and cancellations: Guests can change their booking, Guests can change the dates too, Changes allowed until (days before arrival), Guests can cancel their booking and Cancelling allowed until (days before arrival).
What your guests see: their bookings
My reservations lists the guest's bookings under three tabs:
- Upcoming: bookings whose check-out is today or later, the next arrival first. It is the tab the dashboard opens on.
- Past: bookings that ended, the latest first.
- Cancelled: cancelled bookings, the latest first.
Each booking is a card with the property's photo, name and address, a link to the map, the check-in and check-out dates, the number of nights, the total and what is still due. A booking you have not approved yet shows Awaiting approval. Manage booking opens it.
The Booking code search finds a booking by its code in all three tabs, and a guest who has booked more than one of your properties can show one property's bookings only.
What your guests see: one booking
Manage booking shows the booking the way a receipt does, starting with what the guest most often looks for:
- At the top: the property, the booking's status, its code, the check-in and check-out dates and the number of nights.
- What the guest can do: the buttons the guest may use, each with its last day under it. Cancel this reservation asks a second time, Yes, cancel this reservation, before it cancels, because it cannot be undone. Amend opens the booking form to change the booking. Download the voucher is offered on any booking that is not cancelled and, with the Invoice add-on, Download the invoice once you have issued one.
- Price: the total, what was paid, the balance due and any tourist tax paid at the property, then the payment method and status. Price details unfolds the full breakdown: rooms, extras, taxes, discounts, fees and the deposit.
- Your stay: each room with its rate, the guest's name, the occupancy and the room's extras, then the booking's own extras.
- Your details: what the guest filled in on your booking form, leaving out the fields they left empty.
- Messages from the property: the notes you chose to show the guest, with their date and their files. See Writing to a guest.
Add-ons add their own blocks, such as the tours booked with the stay with the Experience add-on. On a wide screen the price and the buttons sit beside the stay; on a phone everything follows in one column.
Guests who booked without an account find the same page through the booking tracking page, with their booking code and email address. It offers cancelling only, and lists the files of your messages without links to them: files can be downloaded by the logged-in guest the booking belongs to.
Writing to a guest
On the reservation screen in the administrator, the Notes tab takes a note and its files. Tick Show in customer dashboard to show the note to the guest under Messages from the property, and Notify customer via email to email it to them as well. A note without Show in customer dashboard stays between you and your staff, with its files. The guest sees the note's date but not who wrote it. See Managing reservations.
The rest of the dashboard
The dashboard's menu also leads to My profile, where guests keep their details up to date, and, with the add-ons that provide them, My feedback (Feedback), My wish list (Hub), My experiences (Experience) and My invoices (Invoice).
If your template overrides the dashboard
Solidres 4.7.0 rewrote My reservations. A template override of it made for an earlier version (html/com_solidres/customer/default.php) still shows, but lists the upcoming bookings only, without the tabs and the code search. Solidres → System Info lists it in the Template override check list: make the override again from the new file. See How to override Solidres layouts.