The booking form that the guest sees, and the form that a property manager sees, are largely similar, with a few exceptions. Non-managers will not see the Override Total and Deposit options, or the Guest name dropdown. Only managers who're allowed to administer this property will see those.
If you're booking on behalf of a guest who hasn't been a resident before then you can add their details on this page. Once those details have been used once that guest will be stored in the system and you will be able to reuse them in this form in the future by selecting their name in the Guest Dropdown which is adjacent to the address details section. Note, for security reasons this guest's information is not available to any other property.
Here you'll see two slightly different pages depending on your property configuration. If it's an MRP (see the Is this an apartment/cottage/villa? option) you'll see the booking form with the available rooms presented as either a list or rooms (don't worry if you have lots of rooms and don't want to list them all, there's a feature called "Available rooms/tariff limit" you can use to modify that output), or as a set of dropdowns where the guest/manager can choose the number of rooms of a certain type that they'd like to add. If the property is configured as an SRP then you don't see the option to choose an individual room or rooms.
Alternatively, if when creating the property you set the "Business management process " option to Tours (you will need to have installed the Jintour plugin to do this) and have added Tours then you will not see a rooms list, instead you'll see a list of optional extras that can be chosen, rooms will not be offered.
The form has several different areas. It is designed so that when making a booking the guest doesn't need to change pages to work out how much his booking is going to be, it's all worked out on the same page for him/her.
Arguably the most important part of the page is the Booking Particulars area. This is where the guest enters the parameters of the booking they want to make. Particulars generally are composed of the arrival and departure dates, guest numbers (if configured, they are optional depending on if you charge per person per night, to create guest types you must install the guest types plugin and create guest types) and possibly a smoking option. With this information the booking engine can work out if you have any rooms free.
In the case of an MRP, if the booking rooms option Resource List style is set to Classic the user is offered a list of rooms, and they can choose which ones they want to book. If it's set to Resouce/Room type, then they can choose how many of a given Resource/Room type, they'd like to book. If they change their booking particulars then the selected rooms list is reset, this is because the booking form will constantly re-check that rooms are available for the currently chosen parameters.
If Room Features have been created the (if the rooms list syle is set to "Classic") then the guest can choose to filter the available rooms based on room features.
Note that the rooms list is actually a combination of rooms and tariffs, which means that you can offer several different tariffs for the same rooms, so for example you can offer both "Bed and Breakfast" and "Bed and Breakfast and Evening meal" options which can be priced differently, if you have enabled either the Advanced or Micromanage tariff editing modes.
In the case of SRPs they only have one room, so if the engine finds that the one room can be booked within the scope of the booking particulars (eg. that the property is free on those dates) then the room/tariff combination is selected transparently.
Once the booking form has been filled to the guest's satisifaction, when they click the Review booking button they're taken to the Review Booking page where they're given one last chance to modify the booking before it is added.
Note that if you've configured a gateway (eg paypal), on the review booking page you will not be given the option to use it, only non-property manager/receptionist type guests are given the gateway.
New in 5.5.2 is the ability for a property manager to override the prices set in the booking form. They will enter new figures in the Override Accommodation and Override Deposite fields then click the Save override button. Once that's been done then the room prices are adjusted. Note that optional extras are not affected by this change, their prices will remain as before, so this option is not available to Jintour based properties.