Reservation rules and availability
What this is for
Everything on this page decides what a guest is offered when they try to book. Get it right once and the online booking form stops promising things your kitchen can't do.
Settings live under Settings › Reservations.
Who's allowed to book
Two switches, and they're independent:
| Setting | Effect |
|---|---|
| Enable Admin Reservations | Your staff can create bookings from the back office. |
| Enable Customer Reservations | Guests can book themselves from your customer site. |
Common combinations:
- Both on — the usual setup. Guests self-serve, staff handle phone calls.
- Admin only — you take bookings but keep control of the book. Good while you're finding your feet, or for a small room where every booking is a conversation.
- Both off — walk-ins only. The Reservations screen tells you it's switched off rather than quietly showing an empty book.
Minimum party size
Minimum Party Size sets the smallest booking you'll accept online.
Set it to 1 if you'll hold a table for a single diner. Set it to 2 or more if small tables are for walk-ins and you'd rather not tie them up. It applies to online bookings — your own staff can still enter anything.
Time slots
Guests book a slot, not an arbitrary minute. You define the slots, and it's the single most important part of this page.
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Slot Type | The sitting a set of slots belongs to — Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner. |
| Start Time / End Time | The window that sitting covers. |
| Time Slot Difference | How far apart slots are, in minutes. |
| Maximum Guests | How many covers you'll accept in that slot. |
| Available / Unavailable | Whether the slot is offered at all. |
Choosing a slot interval
The interval decides how bunched your arrivals are.
- 15 minutes — smooth arrivals, lots of choice, a long list for the guest to scroll.
- 30 minutes — the usual compromise, and the right default for most restaurants.
- 60 minutes — everyone arrives at once. Fine for set sittings, hard on a small kitchen.
If your pass gets slammed on the hour, a shorter interval will do more for you than another chef.
Choosing a maximum
Maximum Guests is a cap on covers per slot. It's the setting that stops a Saturday from being sold three times over.
Set it to what the kitchen can send in that window, not to how many chairs you own. Chairs aren't the constraint — the pass is.
Marking slots unavailable
Turn a slot Unavailable to close it without deleting it — a private function, a day you're short-staffed, a sitting you don't run in winter. Turn it back on when it returns.
Last-minute bookings
Disable Slot Minutes sets how many minutes before a slot online booking closes for it.
At 60, a 7:00 pm slot stops accepting online bookings at 6:00 pm. This applies to today only — future days aren't affected.
Set it to how much warning your kitchen genuinely needs. Too short and you get a party of eight appearing with ten minutes' notice; too long and you turn away business you could have taken. Most restaurants land between 30 and 120 minutes.
Your own staff can still enter a booking inside that window. This limits the guest, not you.
Seating areas guests can request
If you've set up areas, guests see them when booking and can pick a preferred seating area — with the area photo, table count and seat range shown.
They can also choose No preference, which means any available table and the best one assigned on arrival.
It's a preference, not a promise. You still assign the actual table.
A worked example
The Copper Fork runs dinner only, Tuesday to Sunday:
- Slot Type Dinner, 17:30 to 21:30, 30-minute intervals — nine slots a night.
- Maximum Guests 20 per slot, against 10 tables.
- Minimum Party Size 2.
- Disable Slot Minutes 90 — the kitchen wants an hour and a half.
- Both admin and customer reservations on.
The 17:30 and 18:00 slots are marked unavailable on Sundays, when they open later.
Good to know
- These settings are per branch. A second location sets its own.
- Changing slots doesn't disturb bookings already taken. Existing reservations keep their times.
- If guests report that no times are available, work down this list: reservations enabled, slot marked available, maximum not already reached, and the last-minute cutoff.
Next
Your room is set up. Next is what happens on it — the order journey.