Gather Grove Booking

Description

Gather Grove Booking runs the schedule for people who teach — yoga and fitness studios, dance and martial arts schools, music teachers, pottery and craft studios, wellness practitioners, and community programs. Design your booking pages visually with Elementor, take drop-in and appointment bookings, and accept card payments with Stripe.

The free version is fully functional for running a real studio:

• Classes & sessions — recurring schedules, capacity limits, multiple locations and rooms.
• Online booking — Elementor booking-form and schedule widgets your clients use to reserve a spot.
• Appointments — bookable service slots with availability windows and optional deposits.
• Waivers & liability forms — collect a real signature as part of booking, then see your whole roster at a glance: who has signed the current version, who signed an older one, whose signature has expired, and who has never signed at all. Send reminders by hand, record a paper signature, or export the lot to CSV.
• Passwordless sign-in — students can sign in with a link emailed to them instead of a password, so nobody is locked out of a booking by a password they never set. Optional, and you choose whether your site offers passwords, magic links, or both.
• Waitlists — clients can join a waitlist when a class is full, and open spots are automatically offered to the next person in line.
• Flexible schedules — a class can meet on multiple recurring schedule blocks (e.g. Mon/Wed/Fri at different times).
• Bulk attendance marking — mark a whole roster present in one action.
• Payments — accept cards through Stripe for drop-in bookings.
• Client accounts — a self-service dashboard for bookings and profile.
• Attendance — front-desk and instructor check-in.
• Instructors & locations — profiles, assignments, and per-location schedules.

Who it’s for

• Yoga, pilates and fitness studios — recurring drop-in classes, capacity limits, waitlists, and a signed waiver on file before anyone steps on a mat.
• Dance and martial arts schools — several weekly schedule blocks on one class, per-location rooms, and front-desk check-in.
• Music teachers and schools — appointment-style lessons with availability windows and optional deposits, alongside recurring group classes.
• Pottery, craft and maker studios — small capacities, multiple rooms, and a roster you can mark present in one action.
• Wellness practitioners — one-to-one appointments shown in the visitor’s own timezone, with a self-service client dashboard.
• Breathwork, meditation and sound-healing facilitators — circles, workshops and sound baths with capacity limits, a waitlist when they fill, and a waiver signed before anyone arrives.
• Coaches, mentors and private sessions — bookable one-to-one slots with availability windows and optional deposits, so clients pick a time without the back-and-forth.
• Online facilitators — virtual classes and appointments, with the Zoom meeting created for you and the join link in every confirmation and reminder.
• Community programs and co-ops — free and comp bookings with no payment gateway required, and waiver compliance across a whole roster.

Built for Elementor

The client-facing pages (booking form, class schedule, appointment booking, client dashboard) are Elementor widgets, so you design them visually alongside the rest of your site. The free Elementor plugin (3.5 or newer) is required to display these on your site. Elementor Pro is optional — it unlocks dynamic tags and one-click Theme Builder starter pages, but is not required for booking to work.

Part of the Gather Grove suite

Gather Grove Booking works entirely on its own. It is also one part of Gather Grove, a family of plugins for running and growing a creative business on your own WordPress site. The plugins share one admin, one list of people, and one look, so a studio can add what it needs as it grows:

• Gather Grove Pulse — email broadcasts, automated sequences and a contact list that knows who booked, joined or enrolled.
• Gather Grove Communities — private member spaces with rooms, an activity feed and direct messages.
• Gather Grove Courses — self-paced and cohort-based online courses.
• Gather Grove Forms — applications, intake forms and RSVPs that feed the rest of the suite.
• Gather Grove Companion — an AI assistant for your admin, and a chat helper for your visitors.
• Gather Grove Notion Sync — free; sends bookings and form entries to your Notion workspace.

Together they serve creators, mentors, facilitators and anyone running a private community or an online program, as well as studios. Learn more at gathergrove.io.

Free and Professional

Everything listed above is free, and stays free. The free plugin has no locked features, never expires, and is not a trial.

Gather Grove Booking Professional is a separate plugin, available from gathergrove.io, for studios that sell more than drop-ins. It adds:

• Memberships and class packs
• Gift cards
• Family and household accounts
• Multi-instructor scheduling
• Enrollment-style courses
• Custom email branding
• Advanced reporting drill-downs

Compare every feature, line by line, at gathergrove.io/docs/pricing.

External services

This plugin connects to the following third-party services.

Stripe — used to process card payments after you connect a Stripe account and a client pays for a booking or appointment. The booking and payment details required to create the charge (amount, currency, and related metadata) are sent to Stripe at payment time. Stripe.js is loaded from Stripe’s servers on pages that display a payment form, as required for PCI compliance.
Terms of service: https://stripe.com/legal — Privacy policy: https://stripe.com/privacy

Google Maps — used by the optional Location “Map Embed” and “Directions Link” Elementor dynamic tags. If you place the Map Embed tag on a page, the visitor’s browser loads an embedded map from google.com for the location’s address (Google receives the visitor’s IP address and the studio address, as with any embedded map). The Directions Link tag only builds a link to google.com/maps containing the studio address; nothing is sent unless the visitor clicks it. No data is sent from your server, and neither tag is active unless you add it to a page.
Terms of service: https://policies.google.com/terms — Privacy policy: https://policies.google.com/privacy

Zoom — used to automatically create, update, and delete Zoom meetings for virtual class and appointment sessions, only after you connect your own Zoom Server-to-Server OAuth app under Settings → Integrations. When a virtual booking is confirmed (and on reschedule or cancellation), your server sends the session’s topic, start time, duration, timezone, and the host’s email address to api.zoom.us / zoom.us using your own credentials. Nothing is sent unless you enable the integration, and visitors’ browsers never contact Zoom through this plugin.
Terms of service: https://explore.zoom.us/en/terms/ — Privacy policy: https://explore.zoom.us/en/privacy/

Postmark — used to send your site’s email through your own Postmark account, only after you connect one under Gather Grove → Settings → Email delivery. When connected, your server sends Postmark your key, your sending domain (to register it and check its DNS records), and each email it is asked to send: sender, recipients, subject, body and any attachments. If you also switch on “Send all your site’s email through Postmark”, every email your site sends goes this way. Postmark then posts delivery, bounce, open, click, spam-complaint and unsubscribe reports back to a secret address on your site. Nothing is sent unless you connect an account.
Terms of service: https://postmarkapp.com/terms-of-service — Privacy policy: https://postmarkapp.com/privacy-policy

Technical details