How to configure Experience

In the following tutorial we will use the term Experience. Depending on your business you can read it as “Tour”, “Activity”, “Excursion”, “Class” or “Session” — the plugin handles all of them.

STEP 1. Download and install

Download the Experience plugin from your Downloads page and install it with the Joomla Extension Installer. While you are there, also download any of the optional companions you want:

• Experience site modules — Search, Filter, List, Categories, Extras, Coupons, Book form, Tracking (see STEP 12).
• Extra payment gateways — Stripe, Authorize.Net, PayPal Pro, Omise, Alfa-Bank, PayKeeper.
• Solidres - Experience Invoice — adds an Invoices screen and PDF invoices for experience reservations.
• Solidres - Feedback — guest reviews and ratings on experiences.
• Solidres - Discount, Solidres - Advanced Extra, Solidres - Stream, Solidres - Hub.

After installing, open Solidres → System Info and confirm that the Experience plugin is enabled. When it is, a new Experiences section appears in the left-hand navigation bar with the following screens:

STEP 2. Choose your main activity

Go to Solidres → Configuration → Component and set Main activity:

• Property & experience (default) — both sections are shown.
• Property — the Experiences section is hidden, even though the plugin is enabled. Use this if you only sell accommodation.
• Experience — use this if you only sell tours and activities.

STEP 3. Categories and transportation

Categories

You need at least one category. Categories group your experiences and can be used to restrict a menu item or a module to a subset of them. Each category has a name, alias, image, description, published state and (for multilingual sites) a content language.

Transportation

Create every transport type your business uses, so you can attach them to experiences later. An experience must have at least one transportation assigned.

STEP 4. Extras

Extras are optional add-ons a guest can pick while booking — lunch box, hotel pick-up, equipment rental, insurance, and so on.

STEP 5. Coupons

A coupon is a code the guest types into the booking form. The plugin validates it and deducts the amount from the total.

• Coupon code — what the guest types.
• Amount and Is percentage — a fixed sum or a percentage of the total.
• Valid from / Valid to — the window in which the coupon may be used.
• Valid from check-in / Valid to check-in — the window the experience date must fall in. Use it for “20% off trips in November, book any time”.
• Quantity — how many times the coupon may be redeemed in total.
• Customer group — restrict the coupon to one group of customers.
• Experiences — restrict the coupon to specific experiences.

STEP 6. Discounts

Where a coupon needs the guest to do something, a discount is applied automatically when its condition matches. Discounts are evaluated in Priority order, and a rule with Stop further processing ends the chain.

Each rule has a Value that is either a fixed amount or a percentage, a validity window, and an Applied to list of experiences.

STEP 7. Custom fields

Experience ships with ten built-in customer fields: Title, First name, Middle name, Last name, Email, Landline number, Mobile phone, Company, Address 1, Address 2. They are what the guest fills in on the front-end booking form.

Open Experiences → Custom fields to add, edit, reorder, publish or unpublish them. Mark a field optional to make it non-mandatory. The available field types come from the Custom Field plugin (text, textarea, select, radio, checkbox, email, date, country, state…).

STEP 8. Guides

A guide is the person or team that runs an experience. Guides exist so that Solidres can stop the same guide being sold twice at the same time — even across two different experiences.

• Name — how the guide appears in the back end and in the front-end time slot picker.
• Status — unpublishing a guide immediately hides every time slot assigned to it.
• Partner — the Solidres partner who owns this guide (used with the Hub plugin).
• User(s) — one or more Joomla users behind the guide. Assign the actual staff member here so they can be reached through their Joomla account.

STEP 9. Time slots

Time slots let you sell the same experience several times on the same day — a 09:00 walking tour, a 14:00 one and an 18:00 one — each one run by a named guide, each one with its own remaining capacity.

Defining slots

Open the experience, go to the Time slots tab and add one row per slot. Each row has four fields:

What the guest sees

Once an experience has at least one time slot, the booking form shows the guides with their slots after the guest has picked a date and a number of participants. The guest chooses a slot, and the number of places left is shown next to it (subject to Show participants left in the configuration).

How availability is calculated

This is the part worth understanding, because it explains why a slot sometimes appears greyed out:

STEP 10. Create the experience

Now the main part. Go to Experiences → Experiences → New. You can hover over any field label to read its description.

Tab: General

Basic information about the experience. The required fields are Name, Categories, Transportations, Country, Base location, End location, Duration, Duration unit, Min participant, Max participant and Max group size.

Below the fields you will find the description editors: Short description (used in listings), Description, Long description, Pricing info, Price includes, Price excludes and Cancellation policy.

Tab: Publishing

This tab holds far more than the publish state. It is grouped into four blocks.

Publishing and menu

• Is private — once a booking on a date or slot is confirmed, that date or slot becomes unavailable to everybody else, regardless of how many places remain. Use it for privately chartered experiences.
• Status, Created, Created by, Modified, Modified by.
• Add to menu — create the front-end menu item for this experience right here: pick the menu, the title and the alias. If a menu item already exists, an Edit menu item link replaces these fields.

Deposit

Take part of the money now and the balance later:

• Deposit required — switch the feature on.
• Deposit type — Per booking (one deposit for the whole reservation) or Per person (multiplied by the number of participants).
• Deposit is percentage — treat the amount as a percentage of the total instead of a fixed sum.
• Deposit amount.
• Include extra cost — whether the extras are included in the amount the deposit is calculated from.

The guest can settle the outstanding balance later from the reservation detail screen in the front end.

Guest options

• Disable customer registration / Force customer registration — book as a guest, offer an account, or require one.
• Enable single supplement, with a value that is a fixed amount or a percentage — the surcharge for a solo traveller.
• Enable coupon — show or hide the coupon box on this experience.
• Collect guest info — when on, the booking form asks for details of every participant, not just the person paying. You choose which details individually: first / middle / last name, gender, date of birth, nationality, single room, dietary requirements and passport.
• Count children — whether children count towards the participant limits.

Display, media and SEO

Tab: Language associations

Only shown on a multilingual site with Joomla associations enabled. Link this experience to its translations so that the language switcher moves the visitor to the right version.

Tab: Contact

Business details used in the outgoing emails and, when enabled, in the front-end information block: company name, logo, email, phone, fax, city, country and state, plus WhatsApp and Facebook links.

Tab: Pricing

Prices are defined here; per-date exceptions belong on the Available dates tab.

Adults

Simple flat pricing — if every adult pays the same, just fill in Price per person and leave the table empty.

Pricing per booked number of adults — to charge less as the party grows, add rows to the table:

• Number of adults = 1 and Price = 10
• Number of adults = 5 and Price = 9
• Number of adults = 10 and Price = 8

That means (assuming the currency is US dollars):

• If the guest books 1 to 4 adults, the price is $10 for each adult.
• If the guest books 5 to 9 adults, the price is $9 for each adult.
• If the guest books 10 or more adults, the price is $8 for each adult.

Children

Children work the same way, with one addition: each row also carries an age range. Enter the base Price per child first — the age-range table only becomes active once that is non-zero. A row is from age, to age, number of children and price, so you can charge, say, nothing under 3, half price from 3 to 11, and full price from 12.

Tab: Available dates

By default an experience has no availability at all — nothing can be booked until you open some dates here.

• Click a date to mark it available. Click again to close it.
• Click a month name to open the whole month in one go.
• Hover a selected date and use Set pricing to give that single date its own capacity and price — useful for public holidays and peak weekends.
• Use the From / To pickers at the top with Set pricing to apply custom capacity and prices across a whole date range at once.

Per-date pricing accepts the same structure as the Pricing tab: a number of adults with a price, and child rows with age ranges. The quantity you set on a date overrides Max group size for that date only.

Tab: Time slots

Covered in full in STEP 9.

Tab: Payments

Enable and configure the payment gateways for this experience. Every installed experiencepayment plugin adds its own collapsible section here, so each experience can use a different set of gateways.

Bundled with the plugin: Bank Wire, Pay Later, Offline and PayPal. Available as separate downloads: Stripe (including Stripe Connect), Authorize.Net, PayPal Pro, Omise, Alfa-Bank and PayKeeper.

Each gateway also exposes a base rate surcharge, so you can add a card fee where the law allows it.

For any gateway that asks for a Success message, this text is a good starting point:

	<p>Thank you [CUSTOMER_FIRSTNAME] [CUSTOMER_LASTNAME]!</p>
	<p>Your reservation number [CODE] via [TOUR_NAME] has been completed successfully.</p>
	<p>We've sent a confirmation email to [CUSTOMER_EMAIL]</p>

Tab: Plugins

Appears only when a plugin has injected fields into the experience form. Each contributing plugin gets its own collapsible panel.

Tab: Stream

Back-end only. With the Solidres - Stream plugin installed, this tab shows the full audit trail of events recorded for this experience.

Tab: Custom tabs

Add your own tabs to the front-end experience page — itinerary, what to bring, FAQ, meeting point. Each tab is a title plus a rich-text body, and they are reorderable.

STEP 11. Front-end menu items

Installing the plugin adds four Joomla menu item types under Solidres:

STEP 12. Site modules

Publish these in Joomla’s Module Manager and assign them to a position and to the pages you want.

Search module options worth knowing

• Menu item id — the Experiences list menu item that receives the search.
• Base location / End location field type — render each as a free-text box (with optional autocomplete) or as a pre-defined drop-down list.
• Search by category and Show range box — toggle those inputs.
• Search range by date — add a date range to the form.
• Embed code — a ready-made snippet that renders this exact search form inside an <iframe> on an external website. Copy it from the module’s parameters and paste it into the other site; results open in a new tab on your Joomla site. Save the module once before copying, because the snippet contains the module id.

STEP 13. Global Experience configuration

Open Solidres → Configuration → Experience. These settings apply to every experience.

STEP 14. Reservations, statuses and origins

Experience bookings live in Experiences → Reservations, entirely separate from your accommodation reservations. Opening one gives you the guest’s details, the participants (adults and children), the extras, the invoice information, the IP address and language the booking came from, and the full payment history.

You can adjust the adults, children and extras of an existing booking and press Apply to recalculate the total, and you can export the list to CSV.

Statuses and Origins under the Experiences section are also experience-specific — editing them has no effect on accommodation bookings. Create the statuses that match your workflow first, then map them in Configuration → Experience.

STEP 15. Reports & statistics

Experiences → Reports & statistics is the experience dashboard. It shows hits and revenue for today, this month, last month, the last three months, the last six months and this year, a sales chart over time, and a top-experiences chart. The chart types and the top-experiences limit are set in the configuration.

STEP 16. Front-end management for partners

Experience owners do not need a Joomla back-end account. When the Solidres - Hub plugin is enabled, partners can manage their own business from the site itself:

• My experiences — create and edit their own experiences, including pricing, available dates and time slots.
• Reservations — view and manage their own bookings.
• Extras, Coupons and Guides — the same screens as the back end, scoped to that partner.
• Dashboard — their own reports and statistics.

Visitors who are not logged in are redirected to the Joomla login page and returned afterwards. The Partner field on experiences, extras and guides decides who sees what.

STEP 17. Optional add-ons

Troubleshooting