Techniques for handling taxi journeys to unlisted destinations
In some cases you may want to provide a means for visitors to get prices for taxi journeys between locations you do not list using Cab Grid. Or, you may want to encourage customers to contact you concerning journeys where you have not (yet) entered a price. This article discusses techniques you can employ to achieve both goals.
Another Approach for Cab Grid Pro v5
Whilst this approach is still valid, improvements to the Cab Grid Pro plugin have provided some scope for alternative solutions….
Add an ‘-other’ location
If you add an extra location to the AREAS tab on the Cab Grid WordPress admin page labelled ‘-other‘ you can indicate to visitors that they can select this option if their destination is not listed.
You would not enter any prices for journeys to or from this other location. This way, when a customer selects ‘other’ as either their pickup or destination, the ‘no price’ message will be displayed instead of a BOOK button.
You can encourage the customer to call, or you could link to another web-form used to requests custom quotes…
Note: As with all areas, your ‘-other’ destination may be hidden from certain groups. See How to use groups.
Add a custom quote link to the ‘no price‘ message
The message displayed to customers if no price is available can contain HTML. If a price is not available for the selected journey (or they have selected ‘other’ – as detailed above), you can encourage the customer to complete a custom booking request form. This form would be created by a third-party WordPress plugin (such as ContactForm7).
Assuming you have created a page (or section of the same page) containing this custom form you can add a link to the ‘no price‘ message as per the following examples…
With the edit box in TEXT (source) mode, code can be manually added as follows.<a href="link-to-your-quote-form">No price available for this journey, please request a quote...</a>
In VISUAL mode…
- Add the message text
- Select the text to be a link
- Click the LINK tool icon in the editor toolbar
- Enter or paste the URL of the page/post with your quotation form
Note: This needn’t only be for ‘-other’ destinations, if will apply to any journey for which no price is available (or has been entered in the admin).
Demo Form
This is an example quote form created using Contact Form 7. See above article for details on how it might be used on your site…
(mouse over this section to view complete form)
Embed a 3rd-Party Form
Whilst linking the customer to a dedicated quote page within your site allows complete control over the process, it is also possible to embed an externally hosted form directly in the ‘No Price Message‘ field. Typically, this would be form a 3rd-party provider such as Google Forms, WuFoo or JotForm.
General Process
- Choose a provider and register (if necessary)
- Create a form
- Copy the embed HTML – an ‘iFrame’ option is usually most compatible
- In the WordPress Admin for your site, go to the Cab Grid Pro OPTIONS tab. Locate the ‘No Price Message’ field and select TEXT mode.
- Paste the embed code. (It must be above any translation)
- Adjust embed code as necessary (see below).
- Save changes
Adjustments
There may be some adjustments to the embed code required.
In our tests we have observed it is likely required to add a fixed height value to the iFrame style attribute (if using the iFrame embed method). Some providers will provide this value. It generally corresponds to the pixel height space required to display the whole form.
Example
Initial Google Forms embed code:<iframe src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeHlbq2RegYFoQcmIox2BUgP-ReHUQoPqx02dsAMnPTEXcHlg/viewform?embedded=true" width="640" height="1664" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">Loading...</iframe>
We will add proportions to the style attribute and make the iFrame transparent:<iframe style="height: 1664px; width: 100%; border: none; margin: 20px 0; padding: 0;" src="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeHlbq2RegYFoQcmIox2BUgP-ReHUQoPqx02dsAMnPTEXcHlg/viewform?embedded=true" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0">Loading...</iframe>
Note, the techniques discussed here are incompatible if Hide Unsupported Destinations is enabled.
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