Add a short term hold on quotes

We launched our new site today and booked out quickly.  In the 8 minutes or so it took to launch and completely book out our 1 open month, we ended up with 10 bookings total and had 33 quotes preempted by other bookings.  That's 33 very disappointed people likely complaining in our social media now.  Is there any possible way to add like a 120 second block on the dates once a quote is generated through the wordpress plugin?  We'd like to prevent people from having dates booked out from under them while they are typing in their billing info.   Any ideas would be appreciated!

Hi Amber! What an amazing "problem" to have! We don't receive many questions about this so from a feature demand perspective, there are lots of other items already slated on the roadmap. In the future, we could look to add a Ticketmaster-like feature that locks in the dates and gives the users a certain amount of time to complete checkout, but that is not a trivial amount of work - and the booking portal (i.e., guest forms) work we're doing now has to all be in place. I might encourage you to make the above into a "Feature Request" and kick off the voting yourself and see what the interest is from other users. Thanks for bringing this up!

Wow. I've never heard of someone having such high demand that they are booking in minutes. Unfortunately for you, I think this might be a situation that is unique to you and thus not likely to be addressed by OR. Quotes on OR do allow for blocking dates while the quote is open, but right now OR only has the options to hold dates for days. Maybe they could tweak that to allow for hours without a major change? Without knowing their backend its hard to know if that's an easy change or a hard one.

This actually isn't the first time I've heard of clients with this concern, but yes, it's relatively rare.

A larger issue is that OwnerRez fundamentally wasn't designed to work in minutes/hours, but rather days.  This affects all kinds of things, including the fact that properties can only be rented for nights (24-hour overnight periods) rather than hours, which is why you can't add, say, a tennis court that people might rent for a couple hours at a time.

However, there are an increasing number of situations where specific times and shorter delay periods are appropriate, particularly as internationalization increases, and there is ongoing work to add that kind of functionality to the underlying systems.  I can't speak to when or whether that would grow to the point where quote-hold would be available in minutes or hours in addition to whole days, but, it's not totally impossible down the road somewhere, particularly if we see increasing demand for it.