# Capacity, slots and party sizes > The five settings that decide what a guest is offered on your booking page — and which of them to leave alone. _Canonical: https://seatsat.com/help/capacity-slots-and-party-sizes_ --- Your booking page doesn't guess. Every time it offers is the result of a handful of numbers you control, and the defaults are chosen to work for an ordinary restaurant. This is what each one moves, so you change the one you meant to. ## How many people fit > **Total covers**: 48 > > _How many guests fit at the same time across the whole location._ This is the ceiling for the whole location at any one moment — not the number of chairs you own, and not covers per evening. A room that seats 48 and turns twice serves 96 people on this setting. Count what you can genuinely serve at once, including the kitchen. A dining room that fits 60 but plates 40 should say 40 here; the booking page has no other way to know. ## How far ahead the diary opens > **Booking window**: 60 > > _How far in advance guests can book a table from the public booking page. Default is 60 days._ Sixty days is the default. Shortening it keeps the book close and current, at the cost of turning away the Christmas party that plans in September. Lengthening it collects bookings you will still be honouring after a menu change and a staff change. ## How the times are spaced > **Default slot duration**: 30 min > > _How far apart bookable slots sit on the public time-slot grid. Shorter cadences fit more dinners; longer cadences feel calmer to guests. Save applies the choice to every service period._ This is the spacing of the grid a guest chooses from, not how long they stay. At 30 minutes a guest picks 19:00, 19:30, 20:00. At 15 minutes they can pick 19:15 — more bookings fit, and the pass gets a new table four times an hour. Note what the hint says about scope: saving applies your choice to **every service period**. It is not a per-service setting. ## How long a table is held > **Turn time per service**: 105 > > _How long a table is held after a reservation start. Lunch turn-time applies to periods labeled Pranzo / Lunch; everything else uses the dinner value._ Turn time is the one people confuse with slot length, and it is the one that actually decides whether you get double-seated. Slot length spaces the offers; turn time is how long each booking occupies its covers before those covers come back. Lunch and dinner are set separately, and the rule for which is which is mechanical rather than clever: periods labelled **Pranzo** or **Lunch** take the lunch value, and everything else takes the dinner value. If you named your midday service something else, it is being turned at dinner pace. ## Capping a single service > **Max covers per service**: default > > _Cap the bookable covers within each service. Leave at default to inherit the location total (\{\{max}})._ Left at default, each service inherits the location total. Set it when one service can't carry what the room can — a Sunday lunch with half a kitchen, an aperitivo sitting you keep small on purpose. ## Which parties you take > **Party sizes**: 2–8 guests · 1 rule > > _Smallest and largest party guests can book, plus optional rules limiting how many large parties can sit at the same time._ Two numbers and a list. The smallest and largest party a guest may book, plus optional **concurrency rules** — the part worth knowing about, because it solves a problem the covers number cannot. A rule reads as a sentence: _at most 2 parties of 8 and up_. Your room may hold 48 covers, but six tables of eight on the same Saturday is a different evening from twelve tables of four — same arithmetic, different kitchen. With no rules, parties of any size fit right up to your covers capacity. > These bounds govern the **public page**. You are not bound by them: a booking taken by your team can exceed the party maximum, and the capacity override on an individual booking will seat a table the room says is full. The settings shape what strangers can do unsupervised, not what you can do. ## Exceptions, not new rules For one date or one season, don't move these numbers — use **Day & season overrides**. Mark a date closed, cut its covers, cap its party size, or swap its menu, and leave your ordinary week alone. The hints there are the giveaway that this is the right tool: a blank field on an override _inherits_ the weekly setting rather than zeroing it. A day override wins over any season containing it, and an override's note surfaces on the public booking page — which is where "closed for Ferragosto" belongs, rather than in a week of manually cancelled bookings. ## The order to change things in When the booking page is offering something you don't want, work down this list rather than across the settings page: 1. **Wrong times offered at all** — opening hours and service periods, not these settings. 2. **Right times, too many of them** — slot length. 3. **Right times, too many people arriving in them** — turn time first, then total covers. 4. **Right volume, wrong shape of party** — party sizes and a concurrency rule. 5. **Only on one date** — an override. Changing total covers to fix a turn-time problem is the common mistake, and it costs you every service instead of the one that was wrong.