Question about booking workflow

[Andrew MacKenzie]

Hi,

I have an event which accepts PayPal bookings. When the user hits “book” it sends an email to admin saying there is a new booking, which is fine.

If the user then goes to the PayPal payment page and they do not pay, there seems to be no way to complete the transaction later. So is the intent that the admin manually follows up on “Pending” bookings?

This is confused by the statement on the booking form to the user which says “You have already booked for this event” because, unless I am missing something, there is no way for the user to actually complete that pending booking.

Can you elaborate on what the intended workflow is here?

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Andrew,

There is no way to complete an abandoned transaction. It’s intended that the user would go through the booking process again.

That that alert appears informing the user they’ve made a booking when the booking is still ‘pending’ is an oversight. This message currently appears for bookings which are not cancelled (or deleted), but that should probably include pending statuses too. There’s a difficulty here in that there are potentially situations where this might be desired (e.g. bookings where payment is intended to be made at the door) – Event Organiser is used for an incredibly vast range of different uses, so such cases can’t be ruled out. A change may subtly “break” the UX in such examples. In the next update there’ll be a filter to toggle this behaviour, but some consideration will need to given as to what the default value should be. I’m erring towards changing the current default behaviour, because it’s more likely than not that it’s undesired. There’ll be a announcement made prior to the next update.

As an aside in the plug-in settings, you can configure whether ‘pending’ bookings should reserve space. This should really only be done if there is likely to be a significant delay between a booking being made, and the booking being completed (paid for). (e.g. offline payments). For online payment gateways, a ‘pending’ is status is likely to mean an aborted booking, and can be considered as cancelled.

Lastly, if you wanted to implement the change now you can change line 166 includes/form-customiser/class-eo-booking-form-view.php which current reads:

}elseif ( 
   eo_user_has_bookings( 
      get_current_user_id(),  
      $this->form->get( 'event_id' ), 
      0, 
      eo_get_booking_statuses( array( 'name' => 'cancelled' ), 'names', 'not' ) 
   ) 
) {

(That is, it checks for any bookings by the current user of any status other than ‘cancelled’). And you could (for example) change that to:

}elseif ( 
   eo_user_has_bookings( 
      get_current_user_id(),  
      $this->form->get( 'event_id' ), 
      0, 
      eo_get_reserved_booking_statuses()
   ) 
) {

to check for any booking status which reserves the space(s) for the event (which may include ‘pending’ depending on the site settings).

[Andrew MacKenzie]

Stephen,

Thanks for the response. It’s clearer now. A couple of questions:

1. Any idea when this new version will be available with the switch you mention above?

2. Have you considered a way to complete a pending booking? I could envision a use case like:

   • user backs out of booking for some reason and booking appears as “pending” in admin
   • in admin console, there is the option to “send invoice” for the pending booking which sends an email with a link to the payment gateway(s)
   • then the payment gateway returns success on payment, just like it does when doing this from the web page (I assume it’s the return URL we pass to the payment gateway that tells EO of successful payment)
   • the booking goes from Pending to Confirmed

Cheers,
Andrew

[Stephen Harris]

Hi Andrew,

1) It should be in the next few weeks. A beta version will be available prior to then.

2). Yes, however the difficulty is that payment gateways behave differently, e.g. for some, such as Stripe, take the credit card details as part of the booking form. The potential choice of payment gateways also complicates this issue. I’m not ruling this feature out, but it’s something that will require some time.

[Author]

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