gRDV Booking

Description

gRDV Booking is a focused, self-hosted appointment-booking plugin for businesses, consultants and service providers. Visitors book directly on your WordPress site, and booking records remain in your WordPress database instead of being sent to a separate booking SaaS by default.

The plugin is designed for privacy-conscious operation, particularly for organisations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It combines data-minimising defaults, formal or informal German wording, configurable retention and transparent optional integrations. This does not replace your own legal assessment, but it gives you practical controls for a privacy-minded setup.

Create any number of meeting types, define availability, publish the booking form with a shortcode and send branded confirmations to customers and a freely configurable internal recipient. No WordPress account or administrator role is required for that recipient.

A focused alternative to large booking suites

gRDV Booking deliberately concentrates on a clear appointment workflow instead of trying to be a marketplace, CRM or employee-management platform. It is a good fit when you want dependable scheduling, local data ownership and understandable settings without a mandatory external account.

What you can do

• Create and manage any number of meeting types.
• Display a responsive booking form with the [grdv_booking] shortcode.
• Configure active weekdays, daily time windows and slot intervals.
• Add lead time and buffer time after appointments.
• Collect customer name, email address, optional phone number and notes.
• Review appointments in calendar and list views.
• Create and edit bookings manually in the WordPress administration area.
• Add global blocked times for holidays, absences and other unavailable periods.
• Send branded email confirmations to customers and a configurable internal recipient.
• Send one configurable appointment reminder to customers and the internal recipient.
• Let customers cancel through a personal link with an optional cancellation deadline.
• Include an ICS calendar link in confirmation emails.
• Block unavailable times with an optional externally hosted ICS or Webcal calendar URL.
• Choose formal or informal wording for customer-facing text.
• Set a privacy policy URL and require acknowledgement before booking.
• Automatically anonymize or delete old booking records after a configurable retention period.

gRDV Booking is a complete, independently usable plugin. It has no trial period, usage quota, licence check or feature that expires after a period of time.

Privacy

gRDV Booking stores booking data in your WordPress database. Depending on your form configuration, this can include first name, last name, email address, phone number, notes, selected meeting type, appointment date and appointment time.

The plugin includes a configurable retention setting. Old booking records can be anonymized or deleted automatically after the number of days chosen by the site administrator.

The optional uninstall purge only runs when the last installed gRDV Booking edition is removed. Deleting Free while Pro is still installed, or deleting Pro while Free is still installed, preserves all shared bookings, meeting types, settings and scheduled tasks.

If an administrator enters an external ICS calendar URL, your WordPress site requests that URL to read busy times and block matching slots. The URL is configured by the site administrator and is not enabled by default.

The plugin does not create an account with gR DV, does not use an external booking platform by default and does not send booking records to gR DV.

External services

The optional ICS integration connects to the calendar URL entered by the site administrator. The request transfers the normal technical request data generated by the WordPress server, which can include its IP address and HTTP headers. Calendar event data returned by that provider is temporarily cached in the WordPress database and is used only to determine unavailable dates and times.

The calendar provider, its terms and its privacy policy are selected and controlled by the site administrator. No external calendar is contacted until an administrator saves an ICS URL.

Booking confirmation and notification emails are sent through the WordPress mail configuration chosen by the site operator. Depending on that configuration, the mail provider receives the recipient address, subject and message body needed to deliver the email.

Bundled third-party software

The administration calendar uses FullCalendar 6.1.20, bundled locally under the MIT license. The maintained FullCalendar source code is publicly available.

gRDV Booking Pro

For organisations that need advanced scheduling and administration features, gRDV Booking Pro is available separately. The Pro edition replaces the Free edition while continuing to use the existing booking data and settings.

Learn more about gRDV Booking Pro.