If you are looking for scheduling appointments on your site, there are a good number of appointments & event booking WordPress plugins are available.
Amelia is one such freemium plugin. It’s one of the popular booking plugins amongst WordPress users.
Let’s dive in, to know more about the Amelia plugin.
Also understand, this plugin is not meant for hotel bookings. You need to have a different plugin for creating a hotel booking website.
Contents
What is Amelia plugin?
Amelia is a freemium WordPress appointment booking plugin, used for accepting general as well as special event bookings.
Once a slot is booked, it is disabled for everyone else. And, you can see the booking details on the backend.
Amelia comes from the stable of a product & services company called TMS.
Free Amelia plugin is also called Amelia Lite.
Who is Amelia plugin meant for?
Time slot booking feature is not required by everybody. It’s a very specific requirement, used by some people or organizations like:
Gyms, Life Coaches, Yoga Instructors, Clinics, Spas & Salons, Repair Centers, Therapists, Counselors, Consultants, etc
You need Ameilia, if you are one of these or like one of these, or are developing a website for someone similar.
What are the Features of Amelia?
First, let me start with how Amelia works.
As a booking website owner, you can do two things
a) Get bookings for an event
b) Get general booking as appointment, on your calendar.
First, what are events?
Events are some planned occasions like a one day or seven-day yoga event.
You can accept bookings for the events through Amelia. By the very nature, these event bookings are different from calendar bookings.
Straight from Amelia demo site, let me share how the Events look on the frontend of your booking website.
A calendar booking is a standard standalone slot booking. Your calendar is available on the website. Anybody can see the slots and can book from the available ones. Amelia makes it easy to book a slot or an event.
Getting Started with Amelia
You’ll find Amelia listed directly in the left-hand sidebar on your WordPress dashboard as Amelia. Taking your mouse over Amelia or clicking it will get you all the options.
The first Amelia screen or section is called Dashboard. Here you get a quick view of Approved Appointments, Pending Appointments, Revenue, Services, Packages, Upcoming appointments, etc.
You can create a new appointment and add a customer from the dashboard itself, by clicking on the (+) symbol on the bottom right corner.
Before we start using Amelia, we need to configure it.
Let’s begin with Amelia Settings.
Settings > General
Time Slot: 30 minutes fixed (for free user)
You can set the default appointment status as either approved or pending. A pending appointment can be approved by you, later.
Amelia lets you choose the number of days, in advance, a booking can be made.
You can show the booking to the clients in their own timezones.
Once booking is done, the client can be show Add to Calendar option, which means client can add reminder to Google or Outlook calendar.
Company settings allows you to add your logo, company name & website to display with the bookings calendar.
Settings > Company
You can manage your company logo & information from this section.
Settings > Notification
You can choose the method to send email notification as native PHP Mail or WP SMTP.
You can set the user name & email id to be used.
By default the customer is notified, but you can disable this setting.
Also, the notification email can be sent to additional email ids.
Settings > Provider Settings
Out of your multiple users, you can choose one Service provider who’ll be assigned all the bookings.
In the paid version, there is no Provider settings because there you have option to add employees.
You add employees & each employee can have own bookings.
In case of Amelia Lite, provider can be a WordPress user or may not exist in WordPress at all.
Settings > Payments
Not available to the free plugin users.
Settings > Integrations
Not available to the free plugin users.
Settings > Appointments
These settings are disabled for the free Amelia users.
To the paid users, these settings allow Amelia to book above maximum capacity & below minimum capacity.
Settings > Labels
You don’t like to use the term “Service” for the service you provide, but you use a different term.
Amelia allows you to set that value here, both singular (service) and plural (services)
Same changes can be done for Employee too – employee & employees. But, as a free user one cannot have multiple users, this settings is of no use in this case.
Settings > Roles Settings
As a free Amelia user, these settings are not for you.
Settings > Activation
This setting allows you to activate paid version of Amelia.
As free user you do get updates automatically, but they are limited to free Amelia.
So,
After you have configured Amelia through settings, you can start using it.
Calendar
You can view all the bookings, including events in calendar form.
As a free user, you can only view weekly calendar. If you get the paid plugin, you have option to choose weekly, monthly or day calendar. Paid users get List & Timeline view of calendar too.
Appointments
This is where you see all the appointments listed in tabular form.
If the appointment is approved, you can cancel it from here & if it’s pending, you can approve it.
You can completely delete an appointment or create a new one. Customer information like email, or special instructions are available here.
Events
This is similar to Calendar view, except this section is for events.
Here you can create, delete or modify an existing event.
As an event can have more than one attendee, you can add, view & modify attendees from here.
I feel there is a slight problem, how it displays an event which is running for multiple days. e.g. consider a 7 day Yoga workshop. It will display the event as 7 separate listings on 7 days. The only way to identify is the event ID in bracket with each event.
Better way could be highlighting an event which spans multiple days with a color or showing some symbol with it. A slight inconvenience, one can easily live with.
Services
This section allows you to create or add/modify services provided by you.
If you want to club those services as package, you need to use paid plan.
You can categorize your services here e.g., Free, Paid or Yoga or Weight Training or Aerobics or Dance, etc.
Locations
This feature is not available to free Amelia users. As a paid feature this feature is perfect for organizations which have multiple locations and want to manage each one separately.
On the front end, your customer can choose services based on location. It makes managing multiple locations, having different employees perfectly easy for you.
Customers
List of customers is available here. You can add, modify or delete the customers from here.
The customer may or may not be a WordPress user.
If the Amelia Customer is not a WordPress user, you can edit the setting in this section and create an associated WordPress account.
For gender, I wish other was there because in today’s world there are people who are non-binary & identify themselves with neither male nor female.
Amelia User Roles
Users > All Users (WordPress Admin Dashboard) will show all the users to you.
Amelia adds extra roles to your dashboard as Amelia Manager, Amelia Employee and Amelia Customer.
Amelia Manager: Similar to an Admin can only hide things, not delete. Also a manager cannot change front end settings, with no access to WordPress settings.
Amelia Employee: By default, this role allows the user access to the list of their appointments on the appointments page or directly on the calendar at the back-end. Amelia allows you to provide even more permissions.
Amelia Customer: This user role allows the user to view, cancel or reschedule own bookings from WordPress backend.
Finance
Another section, not meant for free users.
Notifications
This section allows you to create notification emails to be sent to the Customer for Approved or Pending appointments. Unfortunately, the free plugin does not allow one to send other types of notifications.
Like WordPress classical editor, you get an editor where you can create a message in text as well as html mode. You get to use place holders like %service_name%, %customer_full_name%, etc., which allows you to get the actual value pulled into the email while sending it. A personalized email looks much better than a general one.
For event, you can send only Event booking notification. As a paid user, event cancellation, rescheduling, reminder & follow up mails can be configured here.
It feels, you can have separate email written for Customer & Employee, but editor is the same. You can set only one email, which is sent to both.
Customize
Customization allows you to change the look & feel of the output (event & calendar booking).
This feature is not available to the free users.
How to use Amelia?
It’s interesting, there is no mention of how to use Amelia anywhere on the dashboard.
I explored dashboard but could not find it. Then, explored the Gutenberg editor (WordPress default editor) and there I could find 3 Amelia Blocks – Amelia Events, Amelia Booking & Amelia Catalog view.
All 3 have their respective shortcodes.
Amelia Events View
[ ameliaevents type=list ]
Amelia Calendar View
[ ameliabooking ]
Amelia Catalog View (List of services as categories)
[ ameliacatalog ]
Amelia has integration with Elementor too. You’ll find widgets for these 3 in Elementor too.
Shortcodes make These shortcodes come with a variety of parameters to allow you to make certain changes in the calendar.
e.g. [ ameliabooking category=1 ] to show only the services from a category with ID 1.
[ameliaevents event=1] to show only the event with ID 1 without its recurring events.
What I like about Amelia?
Amelia plugin is a nice plugin. If you don’t need lots of features, and are focused towards what you need, this can be a good plugin.
What I don’t like about Amelia?
Like my other reviews, I do believe anything which comes free should be appreciated and I am happy with Amelia in this aspect.
It’s just I have some suggestions for Amelia, so that it can do even better as a free plugin.
Where Amelia can make things better:
- Allow one to delete events in one go. Currently, one has to delete each manually.
- If you create an event that spans multiple days, it is displayed as a unique event on each day. Only way to tell that an event spans multiple days is the event id (in bracket), which is unique to each event. So, a 5 day event will have same event id for all the 5 days. An identifier as text in bracket is easy to miss. Another identifier that is more clear in telling that this event is not a day-event but rather a session of a five-day event, would make one not to miss this information.
- There is no way of getting ALL the events or bookings in one go. You can only have a view of bookings and events for a duration. This is true if you are looking for your events as customer or as staff or as website admin i.e. both in backend & frontend. So, If you want to see all the events for a period of 1 year, you have to manually select the whole year. And, if I want all the events EVER, there is no way.
You need to upgrade to premium version of Amelia because paid version allows you more features.
- Time slots can be changed from fixed 30 minutes in free to even a short 10 minutes duration.
- Paid Amelia plugin allows you to account for buffer time, i.e. the time required for setting up an event & clean-up/process after an event.
- Free version does not allow you to receive payments, paid version does.
- Paid version allows you to customize frontend, by adding images to events or changing event related colors. And, you can add pictures to gallery related to an event or service. With paid plan, you can even add custom form fields.
- You cannot add a location in Amelia Lite. So, no location based booking.
- You can set a minimum or maximum capacity for a service (if you want to be able to handle more than 1)
- Paid plan allows you add extra with a service
e.g. with a hair cut, one can provide facial as another service - You can add employees. Without paid plan, you need to add employe only through Add Users (WordPress) -> Amelia Employee. But, it makes no sense as free Amelia does not allow you to assign different employees to different services.
- With paid plan, you can add custom form fields
- Paid plan gives you Zoom, Google meet & other integrations
- You can see only weekly calendar in the backend. With paid version, you can see monthly/daily/weekly calendar.
To know more about what the paid plans provide, you can click the button below
Conclusion
Amelia is a good appointments & schedule booking WordPress plugin. Some more features in the free plans could have made Amelia an excellent plugin.
Amelia is perfect for you if your requirement is simple, e.g. you are the only user and are happy with 30 minutes time slot. In that sense, the free version of Amelia works for most of the people.
But, if you work as a team and want a free plugin for bookings for your team members, free version of Amelia might not be for you.
