Car Rental Manager – Online Vehicle Booking System

Launch your car rental business effortlessly with Car Rental Manager, a powerful and free WordPress plugin that lets you create a professional car rental booking system in just a few steps! Whether you're renting cars, scooters, vans, or any other vehicles, Car Rental Manager offers a robust and user-friendly solution to manage your rental business directly from your WordPress website. Perfect for entrepreneurs, small businesses, or web agencies, this plugin empowers you to set up a seamless booking system without coding expertise. Take payments either through WooCommerce or through the plugin's own built-in Custom Payment checkout — WooCommerce is optional, so you can launch with Offline Payment (bank transfer, cash or pay-on-pickup) and add a cart later if you need one. The free version of Car Rental Manager includes a comprehensive set of features to get you started, with the option to upgrade to the Pro version for advanced functionality directly from your WordPress admin panel. Compatible with any WordPress theme, this plugin ensures a polished and professional booking experience that blends seamlessly into your website. Car rental manager is an easy-to-use car rental booking management system that simplifies and streamlines car rental operations. Let's look at the key features that make the plugin more acceptable in its category. Key Features:

• ⚡ Effortless Setup – Launch your rental system in minutes with a simple guided setup—no coding skills required.
• 🛒 WooCommerce Integration (optional) – Seamlessly manage bookings and accept secure payments via popular gateways.
• 💳 Works Without WooCommerce – Switch Booking Mode to Custom Payment and take bookings through the plugin's own checkout, with free Offline Payment built in (PayPal and Stripe in Pro).
• 💵 Flexible Pricing Options
• Tiered Discounts: Automatic discounts by rental duration or booking volume.
• Day-wise Pricing: Set different rates for specific weekdays.
• Seasonal Pricing (Free): Adjust prices for holidays or peak seasons.
• 🔁 Recurring Bookings – Allow customers to schedule repeat rentals for consistent business.
• 📅 Advanced Booking Control – Define how far in advance customers can book.
• ⏰ 24/7 Availability – Support round-the-clock rentals for maximum convenience.
• 🚗 Vehicle Management – Create detailed vehicle profiles with images, features, and descriptions.
• 📆 Availability Calendar – Show real-time availability with an interactive monthly calendar.
• ✅ Streamlined Booking Flow – User-friendly, customizable front-end booking process, powered by WooCommerce or by the plugin's own checkout.
• 📦 Order & Admin Management – Track and manage reservations with an intuitive back-end dashboard.
• 💰 Partial Payment / Deposit Compatibility (Pro) – When used alongside the "Advanced Partial Payment or Deposit for WooCommerce" plugin, a deposit-only booking (order status "Partially Paid") shows the amount already paid and the balance still due — right in the Order List, the Order Details screen, and the booking confirmation PDF/email — instead of just the full price. The balance clears to zero on its own once the customer pays the rest.
• 💬 Request a Better Price – Let checkout customers who feel the price is too high ask for a custom price instead of leaving. The request lands in Quote Requests in wp-admin, where you can reply with a personal one-time discount coupon emailed straight to them.
• 🌍 Multi-Language Ready – Reach global customers with built-in translation and localization support.
• 🔗 Shortcode Support – Embed booking forms, calendars, and listings anywhere on your site.
• 📱 Responsive by Design – Optimized for desktops, tablets, and mobile devices.

Explore The Demo: ✅ Live Demo for Car Rental ✅ Online Documentation Buy Pro Version: ✅ Get Pro Version

Download the car-rental-manager.zip file from the WordPress plugin repository. Log in to your WordPress admin dashboard. Navigate to "Plugins" > "Add New." Click the "Upload Plugin" button at the top of the page. Choose the car-rental-manager.zip file and click "Install Now." Once installed, click "Activate" to enable the Car Rental Manager WordPress plugin.

1.5.7

• New: Added admin booking.
• Improvement: Due issue in pdf.
• Code Optimized

1.5.6 New Features

• New: Add Booking screen (Car Rental → Add Booking) so an administrator can create a booking on a customer's behalf, for example during a phone call. Enter the customer's details, choose the pickup and return date/time (defaults to the next time slot today with a one-day return), and the vehicles that are free for that whole period load automatically — change any date or time and the list empties and reloads, so a vehicle chosen for one period can never be booked for another. Availability is checked across the entire pickup-to-return period and the requested quantity (not just the pickup day), with back-to-back bookings allowed. Then pick the vehicle, locations, quantity and extra services, and the booking is saved like any website booking — it appears in the Booking List (tagged "Admin" in Pro) and counts toward availability, PDFs and emails. The price is calculated live by the very same rules as the checkout (daily/tiered/seasonal pricing, location transfer fees, extra services, early-bird discount, security deposit), and the administrator can override the rental total up or down; an overridden booking records the original system price for reference. Also lets the administrator set the payment method and status (pending / confirmed / on hold / completed), add a note, choose whether the customer is emailed, and knowingly book a vehicle that is already fully booked. Works in both WooCommerce and Custom Payment modes and needs no Pro license.
• New: the Add Booking pickup and return dates now use a calendar date picker (month/year dropdowns, past dates and a return before the pickup are not selectable) instead of the browser's plain date field. Fixes
• Fixed (Pro) the booking confirmation PDF (and the copy attached to the booking email) showing the wrong Paid and Due amounts for an order that took a deposit through Advanced Partial Payment or Deposit for WooCommerce. With an offline method such as Cash on Delivery, that plugin keeps "amount paid" at 0 until the deposit is confirmed, so a $20 booking with a $10 deposit read "Paid $0.00 / Due $20.00" on the PDF while the Booking List correctly showed Paid 10.00 / Due 10.00. The PDF now follows the same rule as the Booking List — once the order reaches an active status the deposit counts as received and only the rest stays due. The same wrong figures in the Order List's View popup (Amount Paid / Balance Due) are fixed too.

1.5.4 Fixes

• Fixed (Pro) the tracked security deposit balance not staying in sync after a regular Full/Partial refund from the Order List — only a refund specifically typed as a "Security Deposit" refund updated it, so a regular refund that paid back the whole order (deposit included) left the deposit balance showing as if it were still fully available. A damage charge logged afterward would then appear to be "covered by the deposit" and show nothing owed, when the deposit money had in fact already been returned to the customer and the cost was being silently absorbed. The tracked balance is now kept from ever exceeding what WooCommerce still has left to refund, regardless of which refund type was used.
• Fixed (Pro) the Analytics Dashboard counting cancelled, refunded and partially-refunded orders at their full original amount. A cancelled or refunded booking's record isn't removed, only marked as such, so Total Bookings kept including it forever; a refund (full or partial) was also never subtracted from Total Revenue, the revenue chart or Average Order Value, even for orders refunded down to nothing. Cancelled/refunded/failed bookings are no longer counted, and every revenue figure now reflects the order's total minus whatever has actually been refunded from it.
• Fixed (Pro) the Early Bird discount never actually being applied to a real booking's price. The class that calculates it was never loaded by the plugin, and the price-calculation filter it relies on was never fired, so a car with Early Bird configured and enabled showed the feature as active but the discount was silently never subtracted at checkout. Also fixed, now that it actually runs: when a booking qualified for more than one discount tier, the tier with the largest days-in-advance requirement was applied regardless of its discount size, instead of the tier worth the most to the customer as advertised ("the system will automatically apply the highest discount value"); and a discount percentage or fixed amount entered larger than the booking itself could produce a negative price, with nothing capping it.
• Fixed (Pro) a vehicle swap (Order List → Replace Vehicle) leaving the booking's tracked security deposit at the old car's amount instead of recalculating it for the new one. Note: a deposit held via SecureHold (a card hold, not a charge) isn't covered and still needs manual review after a swap.
• Fix: Updated the bundled Appneck SDK to the latest version.

1.5.3

• New: Updated the bundled Appneck SDK to the latest version.

1.5.2 Fixes

• Fixed the Add/Edit Car screen's admin layout (fixed sidebar, top bar, and the floating step navigator bar) breaking on RTL admin languages (e.g. Arabic) — the sidebar, top bar and content area kept the same left/right positioning as LTR instead of mirroring, so they overlapped and squeezed the form fields into unreadable, seemingly empty boxes. The shell's fixed chrome now mirrors correctly when the site's admin language is RTL.
• New: added the Appneck SDK for opt-in telemetry and update tracking. It does not collect any data by default; it only starts after you confirm via the admin notice. See External Services in this readme.
• New (Pro): compatibility with the "Advanced Partial Payment or Deposit for WooCommerce" plugin. A deposit-only booking's Amount Paid and Balance Due now appear in the Order List, the Order Details screen, and the booking confirmation PDF/email, instead of just the full price.
• Fixed the pickup "Buffer Time" (the minimum gap enforced between the current time and the earliest selectable pickup time) having no setting on the Global Settings screen, so a site with an existing buffer value had no way to shorten or remove it to allow same-time/immediate bookings. The Buffer Time field is now back on the Settings tab (minutes; 0 or blank allows immediate booking).
• Fixed a duplicate booking record being created every time a customer's browser (re)loaded the order-received "Thank You" page — a refresh, a revisit via the back button, or a second tab all counted as a new load with nothing checking whether that order had already been recorded. Each extra load added another identical booking entry for the same order, which showed up as the same booking printed multiple times over on the PDF booking-confirmation ticket (Pro). An order is now recorded once, on its first load, regardless of how many times the page is revisited afterward.

1.5.1 New Features

• Request a Better Price — a customer who feels the checkout price is too high can now ask for a custom price right on the checkout page, next to the order total, instead of abandoning the booking. Name, email, phone, pickup/return date and time are all taken automatically from the booking already in progress; the customer only has to type the price they'd like. Works on both WooCommerce checkout and the plugin's own Custom Payment checkout.
• Quote Requests admin screen — every request appears here with the customer's details and proposed price. Responding with "Send a Personal Discount" creates a real, email-restricted, single-use WooCommerce coupon (reusing the same coupon system as the existing "Give Discount" customer tool) and emails it to the customer in one step; the admin sees the generated coupon code immediately with a Copy button. An in-page guide explains why the feature exists, how the request-to-coupon flow works, and what each status means. This screen — and the checkout-side button — only appear once the feature is switched on in Settings.
• Join Waitlist — when a customer's chosen car is already booked for their date, they can leave their name, email and phone instead of just seeing a "not available" message. Entries appear under the new Waitlist admin screen; when a booking for that car is later cancelled or refunded, everyone waiting on it is emailed automatically (WooCommerce bookings) or can be notified with one click ("Notify Now", for Custom Payment bookings) — the notification email names the dates the customer originally asked for. Off by default — turn it on under Settings → General → "Join Waitlist". A fully booked day on the car-details calendar is now clickable (instead of just greyed out with no way forward) so it can open this form. Once an entry is "Notified", the admin can record whether the customer actually booked ("Yes, Booked" / "No Response") to keep the list meaningful, since nothing here can detect that automatically. Fixes
• Fixed the checkout-side "Request a Better Price" script matching the wrong order total when a theme's header includes a Mini-Cart, which could inject the request form into the (hidden) Mini-Cart drawer instead of the real order summary. The search is now scoped to the checkout block's own summary.
• Fixed the car-details page's pickup-date field defaulting to today even when the car is already fully booked today — it looked like a normal, selectable date in the calendar with no visual difference from an available one, while a separate notice below contradicted it by saying the day was booked. The default pickup (and return) date now skips forward to the first day that's actually available.
• Fixed that same "already booked" notice staying stuck on even after the date above it correctly advanced to an available day — it was always checking today's availability specifically instead of the date actually shown, so it could contradict a perfectly bookable default date.
• Fixed "Join Waitlist" (see above) marking a booked date BEFORE today as clickable in the calendar, letting a customer request a waitlist notification for a date that has already passed. Only today and future booked dates open the Join Waitlist form now; a past date is disabled with no special treatment, same as before this feature existed. Improvements
• "Make Year" on the Add/Edit Car screen is no longer a mandatory field — vehicles can now be saved/published without selecting a year.

1.5.0 WooCommerce is now optional. The plugin can take bookings either through the WooCommerce cart and checkout, or through its own built-in Custom Payment checkout — chosen with a single Booking Mode setting. New Features

• Booking Mode — one explicit setting decides which checkout owns a booking: WooCommerce (cart, checkout and orders as before) or Custom Payment (the plugin's own standalone checkout, no WooCommerce required). Previously the plugin refused to load at all without WooCommerce active.
• Payments settings tab — Booking Mode selector, a WooCommerce payment-gateway manager that renders each gateway's own native settings inline, and gateway cards for PayPal, Stripe and Offline Payment with their own Configure dialogs.
• Offline Payment (free) — accept bank transfer, cash or pay-on-pickup bookings with no payment processor at all. Includes its own checkout page, a booking confirmation page and a customer confirmation email. PayPal and Stripe remain Pro.
• Currency Settings tab — symbol, position, decimals and separators used to format prices when Booking Mode is Custom Payment. In WooCommerce mode WooCommerce's own currency settings continue to apply.
• Bookings list — free installs can now see their bookings in wp-admin. Shows bookings from both checkouts with a source tag; statistics, filtering, booking details and status management remain Pro.
• Payment Method card on the car add/edit screen — shows the live booking mode and enabled gateway(s), with a popup to change either without leaving the car you are editing.
• Payment setup notices — a notice that names the one action that will actually fix the site's situation (choose a mode, enable a WooCommerce gateway, or enable Offline Payment), and updates itself the moment a gateway is enabled rather than waiting for a page reload. Improvements
• The WooCommerce installer is no longer a blocking popup on every admin page. It appears only on this plugin's own screens, is dismissible, and offers "No thanks — I'll use Custom Payment instead" as a real answer that switches the mode for you.
• Activating WooCommerce later automatically backfills the hidden mirror products for any vehicle added while it was inactive, so those vehicles stay bookable through the cart.
• A site already taking Offline bookings is no longer silently switched to WooCommerce when WooCommerce is activated — the chosen mode is remembered.
• The standalone booking search panel is no longer confined to a block theme's narrow content column.
• Vehicle photos on the checkout and confirmation pages are served at a higher resolution and cropped to a consistent banner instead of being upscaled.
• The booking confirmation page now offers "Book this vehicle again", "Browse vehicles" and "Back to home" instead of being a dead end. Fixes
• Fixed "Book Now" and "Continue" doing nothing at all when WooCommerce was inactive. Both were keyed on the hidden WooCommerce product id, which does not exist in Custom Payment mode, so the request was skipped silently. The vehicle itself is now the booking's identity.
• Fixed a fatal error ("Call to undefined function wc_price()") on the vehicle taxonomies screen, and the same class of error across roughly ninety calls into WooCommerce (wc_price, wc_get_order, wc_get_orders, WC_Tax, wc_clean, currency helpers) that only became reachable once WooCommerce could be absent. All now degrade instead of crashing.
• Fixed vehicle stock never being checked when booking from the search results — the vehicle id was computed but never sent, so a fully booked vehicle could still be added to the cart.
• Fixed a fully booked vehicle producing a silent failure rather than telling the customer why.
• Fixed return times being stored in the booking's raw decimal form (for example "0.5"), which displayed as nonsense on the confirmation page and, because that value is compared as a date, made standalone bookings invisible to availability checks. Security
• Booking confirmation pages are now guarded by a random per-booking token. They previously used a value derived from sequential user, order and post ids, which could be guessed to read another customer's booking.
• Payment credentials entered in the gateway dialogs are preserved when the settings form is saved, so they can never be blanked by an unrelated save.

1.4.0 Major release: a rebuilt admin experience, a single Branch Management workspace, customer-side booking self-service, and a redesigned front end. New Features

• Vehicle replacement with customer approval — when the agency proposes a different vehicle for a confirmed booking, the customer now sees the proposed change (old vehicle, new vehicle and the stated reason) inside My Bookings and can accept or decline it, optionally with a note. Approval is ownership-checked and nonce-protected, and resolving a request clears its pending approval timeout.
• Booking activity timeline — cancellation and refund requests, modification requests and vehicle changes are now shown as activity on the booking card, so customers can follow the status of every request they raised.
• Step-by-step car setup wizard — the Add/Edit Car screen is now driven as an ordered wizard with a floating bottom bar: Back/Next, a progress ring, a "Step N of N" read-out, a clickable numbered rail and a Publish/Update action on the final step. Forward navigation is gated on required fields; a blocked step highlights the offending fields and names the step holding things up. Save Draft stays ungated.
• New [mpcrbm_car_list] shortcode — a standalone vehicle listing with grid/list layouts, paging and an optional left filter sidebar, e.g. [mpcrbm_car_list mpcrbm_left_filter='yes' style='grid' show='6'].
• New [mpcrbm_branch_search] shortcode — lets visitors find and browse rental branches from any page.
• Multi-Location Fee settings — per-location pickup/drop-off fee configuration now has its own settings module, moved out of Price Settings so location pricing is managed in one place.
• Guideline page — an in-admin reference covering setup steps, shortcodes and their attributes, reachable from the plugin's own sidebar. Admin Redesign
• New admin shell — every plugin screen now renders inside a unified layout: plugin sidebar navigation, screen header, publish/update top bar with live post status, and a consistent card-based content area.
• Branch Management workspace — branches, locations and their taxonomies are consolidated into one screen instead of separate menu items, with a modern list view and inline actions. The sidebar item was renamed from "Locations" to Branch Management.
• Branch Managers — creating a branch manager account now happens in a redesigned modal with inline validation, so a user and their branch assignment are created in a single step.
• Extra Services manager — rebuilt with a modern list, search and add/edit flow, and clearer per-service pricing controls.
• Status page — the system status screen was rebuilt with grouped environment cards (WordPress & site, server, PHP limits, uploads, WooCommerce mail configuration) and actionable recommendations instead of a flat table.
• Demo data importer — reworked for reliability and clearer progress feedback while importing sample vehicles, branches and settings.
• Vehicle taxonomies (Car Type, Fuel Type, Seating Capacity, Brand, Make Year, Features) now share the same tabbed management UI as the rest of the plugin. Front-end Redesign
• Car details page rebuilt with a scoped CSS-variable design system and a fully responsive layout — no theme overrides required.
• Car list, branch cards, branch search, registration form and My Bookings restyled to match the new design language. Improvements
• Mobile: the settings tab bar now scrolls horizontally instead of wrapping, the Extra Service Options table scrolls instead of overflowing the page, and a legacy fixed width that broke card panels below 900px was removed.
• The active settings tab is remembered per vehicle across page reloads.
• Toggle switches show a centered loading state and an eased open/close animation while their panel loads.
• The shared FAQ / Terms & Conditions / Related Rental toolbar wraps instead of clipping its actions, and the Related Rental indicator now reflects the real selection count.
• Clearer labels: "Multi-Location Settings" is now "Multi-Location Fee". Fixes
• Fixed a fatal error on add-to-cart when another MagePeople booking plugin was active. The woocommerce_add_cart_item_data callback returned null on its early exits, which every later callback on that filter received in place of the cart-item array — producing a 500 response and a generic booking failure. Both exits now return the cart item data unchanged.
• Fixed publishing a car silently doing nothing when a required field sat in an inactive (hidden) tab: browsers refuse to submit a form containing an invalid control they cannot focus, so the save failed with no message. All steps are now validated up front and the offending step is opened. Security
• Fixed a PHP Object Injection vulnerability (Patchstack) reachable by users with the Editor role. Serialized post meta is now unserialized with allowed_classes => false, so no class is ever instantiated and no __wakeup()/__destruct() magic method can run. Object placeholders are stripped recursively, which also closes the nested-object bypass. The date/time settings sanitizer and the vehicle-duplication meta copier, previously unpatched, are now covered as well.

1.3.9

• Admin: Redesigned the Car Rental status dashboard with grouped environment cards and setup recommendations.
• Admin: UI polish — mobile-friendly settings tabs, persisted active tab, toggle loading state and clearer setting labels.

1.3.8

• Security: Plugin-wide hardening pass (SQLi / XSS / CSRF / access control / file handling audit). Blocked an arbitrary post-meta write in Price Settings by validating the target meta key against an allow-list and requiring manage_options plus a nonce; added the missing capability checks to the feature handler and the FAQ / Terms save and delete handlers; added nonce verification to the cart-empty action to close a CSRF hole; and removed an unauthenticated AJAX registration on the extra-service endpoint.

1.3.7

• Security: Fixed a Broken Access Control vulnerability (Patchstack) in the front-end review handlers. Unauthenticated visitors could edit or delete guest-submitted reviews by supplying a comment ID and the public review nonce. Edit/delete are now restricted to comment moderators and the logged-in review author.