Taking reservations
How a booking reaches you, what each status means, and the one setting that decides whether guests confirm themselves or wait for you.
A guest picks a date, a time and a party size on your booking page. What happens next is your choice: the table is confirmed on the spot, or the guest asks and you answer. One setting decides which, and it changes how your whole service day feels.
Instant, or request
This is the first decision to make, and the one most worth understanding before you change it.
New venues start on Instant confirm. A guest who books at 19:00 on Friday has a table at 19:00 on Friday; nobody has to be at a computer for that to be true. It is the right default for most restaurants, and it is why your booking page works while you're on the pass.
Request to book is the other posture, and it is not simply "safer". It moves the work to you: every booking becomes a request that sits until someone answers it. That is genuinely what you want for a room where the right answer depends on who else is in that night — but a request nobody answers is a table nobody sits at, and a guest who waited for an answer they never got.
Pick request when you would otherwise be phoning guests back to rearrange the room. Stay on instant when you wouldn't.
What holds a requested table
Seats are held from the moment the request is made, so a request can't be sold twice while you think. What releases them is a timer:
The list also contains Hold indefinitely, and it behaves exactly as it reads: nothing auto-declines, and a request you forget about holds its table until you answer it by hand. If you run on request-to-book, this is the setting that decides whether a quiet week ends with a full-looking book and an empty room.
Reading the book
Bookings arrive in Bookings, filtered by what needs you rather than by date: Pending, Needs reply, Auto-confirmed, Archived, or All.
A booking carries a status through the evening, and the words mean what they say:
- Requested — the guest has asked, the seats are held, you haven't answered.
- Confirmed — the table is theirs.
- Seated — they're in the room.
- Completed — service finished.
- No-show — they didn't arrive and didn't cancel.
- Cancelled — released, by either of you.
Each booking also records where it came from — Web, WhatsApp, Staff, Walk-in, or Reserve with Google — so "we're fully booked" is always answerable with by whom.
Answering a request
Approve confirms the table. Decline releases the seats and emails the guest that the answer was no.
Both are worth doing deliberately, because both reach the guest immediately and neither can be taken back. The confirmation dialog states the consequence rather than asking whether you're sure: declining tells you "the held seats go back on sale", cancelling a confirmed booking tells you "the guest is emailed a cancellation straight away — this cannot be taken back."
One error is worth recognising on sight:
That time just filled up — the request no longer fits. Decline it or free capacity first.
That is not a bug. Seats are held per request, but capacity is checked again at the moment you approve — so two requests for the last two covers can both be waiting, and only one can be approved. The room stays honest even when the inbox is behind.
Changing a booking for a guest
Open the booking and edit it. Date, time, party size, name, phone, email and the note all change in place, and the save button says what it will do — Save & notify guest — because a change the guest isn't told about is a change that goes wrong at the door.
The note is the field the dining room actually reads:
And when the room says no but you know better:
Use it for the two extra chairs you can genuinely find. It overrides the arithmetic, not the room.
What the guest can do without you
Guests get a manage link on their confirmation, and two windows decide what it lets them do:
These are minimum-notice rules, not permissions: a four-hour modification window means a guest can move a Saturday booking on Thursday and can't at six o'clock on Saturday. Set a window to zero and guests can act right up to the booking.
Widening these is usually the cheaper trade. A guest who can cancel at 18:00 gives you a table you can re-sell; a guest who can't cancel gives you a no-show.
What you must ask for
At least one has to stay on — a booking you cannot reach is a booking you cannot confirm, move, or chase. Email is what carries the confirmation and the manage link, so turning email off means the guest has no self-service link to use, whatever the windows above say.
Closing a day
Reservations follow your opening hours, and the exceptions live under Day & season overrides — mark a date closed, cut its covers, cap party size, or swap the menu for a week. A day override wins over the season it sits inside.
If a date already has confirmed bookings, the override tells you how many before you save. It does not cancel them for you, and it shouldn't: those guests need a message from you, not a silent disappearance from your book.