Description
Formix Charter is a booking and reservation plugin built for boat charters, yacht rentals, and marine tour operators. Create unlimited charter tours, offer flexible pricing (per person, flat group rate, or hourly charter rate), manage your fleet with boat-level availability, and take bookings with Pay on Arrival or PayPal — without needing WooCommerce or any other e-commerce plugin.
Key Features
- Unlimited charter tours with a rich admin editor: gallery, highlights, inclusions, exclusions, and stops
- Flexible package pricing per tour: Per Person, Whole Group (flat rate), or Per Hour (hourly charter with a configurable minimum booking length)
- Fleet management with capacity-aware time slots — assign multiple boats per tour and track availability per boat, per date, per time slot
- Frontend boat filter on the tour listing so customers can browse by which vessel they want
- Reusable, global time-slot catalog shared across tours and packages
- Pickup location management with customer-facing selection at checkout
- Built-in checkout flow with Pay on Arrival and full PayPal Checkout integration (Sandbox and Live modes)
- Automatic double-booking protection with database-level locking
- Bookings management dashboard with status workflow, filtering, and a full calendar view
- Two-way Google Calendar sync to keep manually-created bookings from over-booking your online capacity
- Fully customizable transactional emails with a built-in Email Log to verify delivery
- One-click JSON import/export of tours, packages, boats, time slots, pickup locations, and bookings
- Branding controls: colors, corner radius, fonts, and button text
- Fully responsive frontend and admin screens
Shortcodes
[fmx_charter_tours]— tour listing grid with a boat filter bar[fmx_charter_tours_no_filter]— same grid, filter bar always off (e.g. for a homepage)[fmx_charter_checkout]— the checkout form
External services
This plugin connects to the following third-party services. Both are entirely optional — the plugin is fully functional with neither configured, using its built-in “Pay on Arrival” flow and manual booking calendar instead.
PayPal — used only if you enable PayPal as a payment method under Formix Charter Settings PayPal, and only at the moment a customer completes checkout using PayPal.
- What is sent: the booking amount, currency, and a PayPal order/capture ID exchanged directly between the customer’s browser / this site’s server and PayPal’s API, to process the payment.
- When: only when a site owner has explicitly enabled PayPal and entered their own PayPal API credentials, and only when a customer chooses to pay with PayPal at checkout.
- Terms of Service: https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/ua/useragreement-full
- Privacy Policy: https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/privacy-full
Google Calendar — used only if a site owner explicitly connects a Google account under Formix Charter Settings Google Calendar.
- What is sent: booking date/time, guest count, and customer name are sent to the Google Calendar API to create/update/read calendar events, and calendar event data is read back to detect externally-created bookings (e.g. walk-ins) that should block online availability.
- When: only after a site owner has explicitly authorized this plugin’s access to their own Google account via OAuth, and periodically thereafter (scheduled sync) or when calendar-affecting actions occur.
- Terms of Service: https://developers.google.com/terms
- Privacy Policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy
Screenshots
Installation
- Upload the plugin files to
/wp-content/plugins/formix-charter, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly. - Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress.
- Go to the new “Formix Charter” menu in your admin sidebar to add your first tour, packages, boats, and time slots.
- Create a page containing the
[fmx_charter_checkout]shortcode and select it under Formix Charter Settings Checkout. - Add
[fmx_charter_tours]to any page to display your tour listing.
FAQ
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Do I need WooCommerce?
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No. Formix Charter is fully standalone with its own booking and payment flow and does not require or integrate with WooCommerce.
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Is PayPal required?
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No. Pay on Arrival works out of the box with no configuration. PayPal is optional and only used if you explicitly enable it and enter your own PayPal API credentials.
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Can I use this with a page builder?
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Yes — the shortcodes work inside any shortcode-compatible block or widget in the Block Editor, Elementor, or similar builders.
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Where do I see whether booking emails were actually delivered?
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Formix Charter Email Log shows every attempted transactional email with a Sent/Failed status and, on failure, the exact error from your mail server, plus a “Send Test Email” button.
Reviews
There are no reviews for this plugin.
Contributors & Developers
“Formix Charter — Boat & Yacht Charter Booking” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
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Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
3.1.3
- Fixed a bug where the automatic Google Calendar sync never actually ran: its cron callback was only registered on admin page loads, so the scheduled WP-Cron event fired with nothing attached to it
- Added a configurable Google Calendar sync frequency (Settings Google Calendar), from every 5 minutes up to once a day; previously fixed at 15 minutes
- Existing sites are moved onto the new schedule automatically, defaulting to the previous 15-minute frequency
3.1.2
- Resolved all 22 errors and the actionable warnings from a full WordPress.org Plugin Check scan: missing translator comments, output escaping at point-of-use, date()gmdate(), and wp_redirect()wp_safe_redirect() (with an explicit allowlist entry) for the Google OAuth flow
3.1.1
- Hardened output escaping in the dynamic CSS/email HTML generators to escape at the point of output (addresses WordPress.org Plugin Check findings)
- Removed dead, unused, duplicate CSS/font-loading code from the Settings screen
3.1.0
- Added a boat filter to the tour listing shortcode, and a new
[fmx_charter_tours_no_filter]shortcode for placements that should never show a filter bar - Fixed a data-loss bug where settings (including PayPal credentials) could be lost during certain plugin update flows
- Added Boat, Guests, and Price columns to the admin bookings list; added Boat and PayPal transaction details to the booking detail view
- Added dynamic Reply-To headers to transactional emails
- Fixed centering of incomplete rows in the tour listing grid
- Bundled the FullCalendar library locally instead of loading it from a CDN
3.0.0
- Rebrand and full rework: real admin dashboard, performance fixes, hourly-package pricing model, Email Log