Setting up real time availability

You can prevent guests from making booking requests for times that you don't have availability by enabling 'real-time availability checking'. This can avoid the need to decline lots of booking requests, and spread out your bookings so you can accommodate more covers overall.

To enable real-time availability, go into your back office > setup > bookings.

On the Booking Widget page, scroll down to 'Enable real-time availability checking' and switch this to 'on'.

With real-time availability checking enabled, customers using your booking form will only be able to make booking requests for times that you have a table available that could accommodate the booking.

Note: You need to have max covers set on your tables in order for the availability check to be able to determine your correct availability.

Include joining tables

If you would like to show availability when multiple tables could be joined together to accommodate a booking request, switch 'include joining tables' to 'On'.

By default any time slots where multiple tables would be needed for the booking will show as 'Available', but as these slots depend on you being able to join free tables together, you can choose to show these as 'Limited Availability' or 'Please Enquire' so the guest is aware that their request may not be able to be accommodated.

Limiting guests arriving at one time

You can also limit the total number of covers that can request to arrive at one time. This can help stagger booking start times and avoid overloading your kitchen.

To set a maximum number of covers that can arrive at a certain time, type this number in the 'Arrival max covers' field.

If a new booking request would take the total number of covers at a particular time over this number, that timeslot will show as unavailable, even if you have free tables that could accommodate the booking.

Once you have set the options you need, press 'Save' to confirm your changes.