How to offer off-peak discounts for bookings

Write down exactly when the discount should apply. For example, you might choose Monday to Thursday from 11:00 to 15:00, or a fixed date range during a normally quiet season.

Decide whether the reduction is a percentage or a fixed amount, and whether it applies to every service or only selected services. Keep overlapping rules to a minimum so you can tell which price should win.

Open the booking plugin’s service, product or pricing settings and look for options covering weekdays, specific dates, seasons, time slots or special rates. Several booking systems support date-based or weekday-based prices, but the exact controls differ between plugins.

If your plugin supports time-slot pricing, use that rather than a general WooCommerce coupon. A pricing rule can change the amount when the customer selects the qualifying slot; a normal coupon generally depends on a code and does not know which appointment slot is being booked.

Create a lower price for the chosen weekdays, dates or time slots. If the plugin uses seasonal or special-rate pricing, enter the qualifying period first, then set the discounted amount for the relevant service or bookable product. Some systems use one final price per date, so apply broad date ranges before more specific weekday or holiday overrides.

If your booking plugin cannot set these rules, the practical manual workaround is to create a separate off-peak service or bookable product with its own lower price. Make its availability match the quiet hours, and explain clearly which option customers should choose. This works for simple schedules but creates more services to maintain.

Check whether the booking system adds, replaces or prioritises pricing rules. Do not assume that a weekday discount and a date discount will stack. Some systems apply one final date price, while others evaluate rules in an order you control.

Also check extras, deposits, taxes and multi-day bookings. A discount that changes the base service price may not reduce add-ons or the final total in the way you expect.

Preview a qualifying weekday, a qualifying time slot and a qualifying date. Then test the slot immediately before and after the discount window, plus a service that should not receive the offer.

Check the price on the booking form, cart, checkout, confirmation page and customer email. The common Friday-afternoon failure is a discount that appears on the form but disappears at checkout, or a date rule that remains active for the next year when it was meant to end. Confirm the final order total before publishing.

For service-specific discounts across weekdays, dates and time slots, the BookingPress Happy Hours Pricing Addon is the quicker route. Install and activate it alongside BookingPress, then create a happy-hour schedule for each service and define the qualifying days, dates, time period and reduced price.

Use this route when you have several services or changing off-peak periods. It avoids maintaining duplicate booking services, while giving you a central place to review the schedules before checking the customer-facing price.