Booking Revisited
I started to look at this in January 2020 when I was given the task of maintaining the Village Hall website (see old page - in old format).
As I soon found out booking forms and a calendar of events was not a trivial task. Attempts had been made to integrate a plugin for the Wordress.com website.
Ideally the solution will be free, but, like most things that are worth anything they will cost or there will be another reason why they are not suitable. The first thought was to try and use Google Calendar. While this is free and accessible to anyone who has a Google Account (and most do as it is free!), the problem still revolves around getting people to use it.
Google Calendar
An experiment was performed and it does work but it is not as straight forward as it projects itself. To get a calendar to be shared between two Google users is bad enough, to get a group to use it is more than we can expect our group to do!
Update June/July 20124 The Village Hall website has a Google Calendar embedded in the Wordpress site but it remains to see if anyone visits. I must admit that I am impressed that the person who is now running the site managed to get the calendar to work in Wordpress but I suspect that it was just a "block" item.
There was also a very basic enquiry form for those that were interested in a karaoke/pub night but there was no attempt to implement a booking system. To get a booking system to work there has to be a payment system as well.
Hall Booking Online
This (said that it) starts at £10 per month. (Boxford Village Hall said that they were going to use it - Box River News, sometime in 2023). Actually they are using HallMaster, which is from £145 per month.
Programming Effort
Due to the complexity of this venture it in not pracatical for a website owner od webmaster to embark on their own design. It is definitely requires that a fully developed solution is incorporated in the single webmasters websites. The devlopment of such software not only requires mutiple developers to work on it the testing a debugging put it beyond the single programmer.
This, of course, is unless you want to develop your own solution and then market it yourself. Again, you will need a team!
HallMaster Review
I suggest that you look at both the Boxford Village Hall website and the HallMaster website and see how the booking system works.