As you may or may not know, here at Olive & Lake, we love WordPress! Personally, I’ve been working with WordPress for our client websites for the last 15 years.
We’re also big fans of Bricks Builder. It removes a lot of the limitations that come with other page builders and themes. We can build exactly what we want without any limitations, and at the same time, it gives you, our clients, the ability to edit your own site with ease.
It’s the perfect combination for building high-quality websites while giving you full editing capabilities with just a small learning curve.
However, we did have a problem.
How can we get visitors to your websites to your booking engine as fast as possible?
Until now, we used the tools available to us including widgets from third-party plugins, or built-in Bricks elements like forms, buttons or links. They worked, but they had some clear limitations.
- We couldn’t customise them the way we wanted.
- They didn’t work well with custom post types like Packages or Special Offers without a lot of messy edits.
We made it work as best we could, but it was clear that we needed a better solution. So we started looking for something that could give us:
- A simple and easy to use solution.
- Fast loading and smooth redirects.
- The ability to track clicks and sales in Google Analytics.
- Support for multilingual websites.
We couldn’t find anything that did all of that.
So, we built our own.
What We Built
We built our own custom booking date picker, fully integrated into the sites we design and one that works with any booking engine. We mainly work with Mews and Cloudbeds, but sometimes we get clients using something else. It needed to work with everything.
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And it does.
It sounds simple. It’s just a date picker that redirects to a booking engine, right?
Well, yes. But once we started defining what we needed, the feature list started growing. Things like:
- The ability to set minimum and maximum check-in or check-out dates
- Offsets from today’s date
- Limit certain days of the week, like weekends only
- Advanced check-out limitations
We also needed it to work with custom packages, where the logic gets a bit more specific:
- Package coupon codes
- Custom redirect URLs
- Guest count or room type fields
- Auto-filled dates based on each package
- Multilingual support
- Dynamic content pulled from custom fields
And what if you’re a hotel group? You might need the same calendar to point to different booking engines depending on which hotel the user selects.
Then there’s design. Sometimes you don’t want a plain input field. You want a more visual way to show the date. Something with the month, day, and year laid out nicely and styled to match the rest of the site.
So no, it’s not just a date picker.
It’s a flexible, modular booking tool that works on any hotel website, in any situation, and doesn’t require a developer to manage.
That was the problem.
But I’m pleased to say, we built the solution.
What It Means for You
Well, the technical details behind it don’t mean much to you. What matters is that our workflow is now smoother, and you get a much more robust solution. That means:
- Visitors can book faster, with fewer clicks and less confusion.
- You get a fully branded booking experience that makes the connection between your website and your booking engine seamless.
- It works perfectly with packages, offers and any other custom post type.
- It works with every booking engine.
- It’s multilingual and tracks perfectly in Google Analytics.
- And most importantly, you don’t have to think about it. It just works.
Olive & Lake’s Bricks Builder Date Picker Solution
This is a tool we built in-house because we needed it. We needed it to streamline the way we work, reduce the time spent on repetitive setup, and give us more control over the booking flow.
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But more importantly, we built it to give you a better result.
A smoother experience for your visitors. A faster way to get people from your website to your booking engine. And a solution that looks and feels like it belongs on your site. And that’s because it does.
It’s now a core part of how we build hotel websites, and it’s one of the many reasons we can move faster, work smarter, and deliver a better experience for you and your guests.
Want to see how it could work on your site? Get in touch — we’d love to show you.