Event prices are display-only

The price you put on a private event is displayed, not charged. seatsat has no card form, takes no deposit, and moves no money. What a guest pays, when they pay it, and how, stays entirely between you and them.

What the price actually does

It tells the guest what the evening costs. That's the whole job. It behaves exactly like a price printed next to a dish on your menu: it sets an expectation, and settlement happens the way it always has at your restaurant.

When a guest requests four seats at €120, their booking records €480 so you both have the same number written down. No payment is attached to it.

There is no card entry anywhere in the event flow — not on the event page, not on the request form, not in the confirmation email. Your guest is told as much directly: both the request form and the page they land on afterwards read "No payment now — everything is settled directly with the restaurant." If a guest tells you they were asked for card details on a seatsat page, that page is not ours. Please report it.

Then what protects the seats?

The request timer, not a payment.

Requested seats are held the moment a guest asks for them, so they can't be sold twice while you decide. A guest who cancels releases their seats immediately.

Unanswered requests are handled by Request expiry in your settings — it auto-declines after 12, 24, 48 or 72 hours and puts the seats back on sale. The default is 24 hours.

Request expiry can also be set to Hold indefinitely, and then nothing releases an unanswered request — those seats stay held until you approve or decline them yourself. If you run events, check this setting: it is the only thing between a request you forgot about and a night that looks sold out.

This is deliberate. Requiring prepayment to hold a table would change how you run a buyout; holding the seats on a timer doesn't.

Deposits, refunds and no-shows

None of these exist inside seatsat, because none of them can — we never held the money.

Deposits — take one however you take one today: a bank transfer, a card over the phone, a note in your own book.
Refunds — there is nothing for us to refund. Whatever you agreed with the guest is yours to honour.
No-shows — we record that the booking existed and that it wasn't cancelled. Any charge is yours to pursue.

Where to write your terms

Use the cancellation note on the event. It's free text, and it follows the guest through all three places they look: the event page before they book, the confirmation page right after they request, and the manage page they come back to later. That makes it the right place for "48 hours' notice or the deposit is retained" or "full payment on the night, cash or card".

It does not go out in the emails, though. Those stay short and carry a "View or cancel your request" link instead, so the note is one tap away rather than restated in the message — worth knowing if you expected your terms to land in the guest's inbox.

Two things worth knowing about it:

It's yours, not ours. seatsat enforces nothing in it — it's a statement of your terms to your guest.
The version a guest saw is frozen onto their booking when they request. Editing it later doesn't rewrite terms someone already accepted.

Will this change?

Possibly, for a different feature. Online payment is planned for ordering, and if it ships it could extend to events later. It would arrive as something you opt into, with its own settings and its own announcement — not as a silent change to how an existing event behaves.

Until then: the price is a number on a page, and the money is yours to collect.