Setting up private events
Create a chef's table, tasting night or buyout, hold seats while you decide, and keep your dining room from being double-booked.
A private event is a fixed date, a fixed number of seats and a price you set — a chef's table, a tasting night, a group dinner, a full buyout. Guests ask for seats; you decide who gets them. Nothing is charged through seatsat.
Create the event
Open Events in your admin and choose New event. You'll be asked for:
- Name and description — what the guest sees on the event page.
- Date, start and end time — the window the event occupies.
- Seats — how many covers you're selling.
- Price per cover — displayed only. See Event prices are display-only.
- Host — the person from your team who owns the evening.
- Menu — optional; pick one of the menus you've already built.
- Cancellation note — optional free text stating your own terms.
Only owners and admins can create or publish events.
Link a menu instead of retyping one
The menu picker lists the menus already on your account, so an event reuses the real thing rather than a copy. That matters for two reasons: allergen tags and translations come along automatically, and editing the menu later updates the event page too.
Pick No menu if the evening's food isn't fixed yet. You can add one before you publish.
The menu a guest saw is frozen onto their booking when they request seats. If you change the menu afterwards, existing bookings keep the version those guests actually agreed to.
Check the dining-room impact
This is the setting worth slowing down for. Dining-room seats consumed controls how many covers the event takes out of your normal booking page while it runs.
- Leave it empty when the event happens in your dining room. Empty means the event consumes its own seats: eight at the chef's table, eight fewer covers bookable that evening.
- Set it to 0 when the event is somewhere else — a private room, a terrace, a separate floor. The main floor stays fully bookable.
Set 0 for an event that is actually in your dining room and you'll seat the same tables twice. Note too that an event running past midnight blocks both days, not only the day it starts.
The event detail page states the result in one line — "Reserves 8 seats of the main dining room during 20:00–22:30" — so you can check before publishing.
Preview, then publish
Preview opens the guest page exactly as a guest will see it, including while the event is still a draft. Nothing is public until you publish.
If publishing would oversubscribe the room, seatsat warns you first: how many existing bookings overlap the window, and how far negative it goes. You can publish anyway — existing bookings stay valid and new online availability shows zero — or cancel, adjust the number, and try again.
Requests, and how seats are held
Guests don't book instantly — they request seats, and you approve or decline.
A request holds its seats from the moment it's made. Nobody else can take them while you decide, and you're never in the position of two parties having claimed the same table. Requests you don't answer expire on their own after your location's request window, and the seats go straight back on sale.
Declining, expiring, or a guest cancelling all release seats the same way.
What the guest gets
On requesting, the guest receives a confirmation email with a private link to their booking, plus a calendar attachment. They can cancel from that link. You'll see every request — pending, approved, declined — on the event's booking list.
Cancelling an event
Cancelling notifies everyone who booked and releases the room. Your cancellation note is what guests were shown when they booked, so make it say what you'd want to point at later.
Calendar
Once an event has its first approved booking, it appears on the venue's connected Google Calendar and stays in step as bookings change. Connect a calendar under Settings if you haven't.