I just would like to know why time zones only work for time enabled categories.
Don’t they work for nightly bookings? If you book an apartment, on which time is a booking for that apartment based? UTC? The local time of the listing? The local time of the visitor?
Thanks for your feedback. Both the date picker and the booking follow the UTC time zone for date-based (daily and nightly) bookings, since the date itself matters. Last-minute bookings should be possible in the current version, previously there was a bug where the date picker JS script followed the customer’s browser time zone.
I published a listing located in a city in timezone UTC-6.
I used a VPN and set it to France, pretending to be a user from there, and tried to book this listing when the UTC time passed midnight (in UTC, it was 7th of aug).
The system did not let me book (The booking can’t be made), even though the listing itself has 6 hours to go until midnight (UTC-6), still on 6th of aug
Like this, the listing owner missed a potential booking. This example is extreme because nobody will have time to fly and arrive from France in 6 hours, but in a country like the USA, it could easily happen that someone is about to fly to Los Angeles, but for him it is already midnight, while in Los Angeles it is still 22:00. Even if the guest arrives after midnight in Los Angeles, the host will want to charge that full night, but the guest could not book it!
Maybe I should have said ‘last hour booking’
This is why I think that timezones should be enabled for daily/nightly bookings as well, where the listing, the datepicker and the bookings follow the time zone from the listing itself
Thanks for the details, we’ll test this again and release a fix in the upcoming Bookings updates. Indeed, the time zone should be taken into account in specific cases, e.g. the listing time zone should be used in the example you provided.
