Hello,
Thanks for your message. The status of a rental order is given by the selected payment method at the time of booking. If you have configured some specific payment options, then you must be using the Pro/commercial version of the plugin, because the free version does not support payment options.
For any specific questions related to the Pro/commercial version of the plugin, we invite you to reach out to our support team by opening a ticket from our website. This way we will not go off-topic on this forum. Thank you!
Back to your main question: when the status of a rental order changes to “Confirmed”, the vehicle will result occupied on the booked dates. By changing the order status to “Cancelled”, you would free up the vehicle unit on the previously booked dates.
Instead, when the status of a rental order is “Pending” (Stand-by – Waiting for the payment or confirmation), the system will keep the vehicle occupied for the number of minutes defined in the Configuration page of VikRentCar. This is called “temporary lock”, and it’s useful for those who offer credit card payments so that users can get some time to complete and confirm their rental orders by placing a valid payment.
If you are currently using an “offline” payment method (“Cash”), then from the settings of this payment option you can choose whether the rental orders should automatically get the “Confirmed” status, or if they should remain as “Pending”. As stated above, you should not define any value for the configuration setting “Minutes of waiting for the payment”. If set to 0, then all rental orders with “Stand-by” status will not apply any temporary lock, hence the vehicle will still be available for booking.
You are free to adopt your own configuration settings and payment options according to your needs.
Feel free to open a ticket from our website should you have any other questions related to payments or availability.
The VikWP Team
