Rental bookings

Rental bookings are planned for HLB. They would let a business that rents out items, such as equipment, vehicles or party gear, take bookings for its rental listings and control when each item is available.

Global settings would set the rules for new listings and bookings, with some listing-level overrides. Settings would be grouped into four tabs:

• Booking settings: business hours, date-specific hours for holidays, timezone, slot interval, auto-confirm, a multi-item cart, away mode to pause online bookings, default rental times and an option to limit how close to the start time customers could cancel on their own.
• Notifications: booked, confirmed, canceled, rescheduled, reminder and follow-up messages, each sent by email, in-app, SMS or WhatsApp.
• Booking page: company logo and name, a page address, default location, light or dark theme and language.
• Payment: currency, required payment and security deposits.

Bookings would need to start and end within business hours unless an admin overrides them or the rental has default times, which would take precedence over business hours; the rental itself could run past closing time.

Blocked slots would handle times when an item is unavailable for reasons other than a customer booking, such as maintenance, internal use or an offline hold. From the rentals calendar view, you would pick blocked slot as the event type, choose the listing, a variant if it has one and the quantity to hold, add a title and set the start and end. The item would be removed from availability for that window, so customers could only book what is free. Blocked slots would show as gray blocks on the calendar. You could edit or delete them, and deleting would release the inventory again. Customers would see only the resulting availability, not the reason.