The waitlist
Taking a name when the room is full, what the estimated wait is and is not, and why nobody gets called automatically.
A waitlist entry is a note that someone is waiting. It holds no table, it takes no seat out of your availability, and it will not contact anybody on its own. Everything below follows from those three facts, and the product says the first one out loud every time you add someone.
Adding a party
The quick-add bar at the top of Bookings has three modes. The third is the waitlist.
The bar tells you where the entry will land before you save it — the hint reads "→ will land as" followed by the status. For the waitlist that status is:
WAITLIST · NO TABLE HELD
That is the sentence to read back to the guest standing in front of you. A walk-in lands as SEATED · WALK-IN, a phone booking as CONFIRMED. The waitlist lands as neither, and the difference is not cosmetic: nothing is reserved.
Fill the name, party size and a time, then Add to list ↵.
A name is required here, where a walk-in can go in without one. The error says why: "A waiting party needs a name to call back." An anonymous walk-in is already sitting down and can be pointed at. A waiting party is a name you are going to say across a full dining room in forty minutes.
A phone number is not required, but take one. You cannot call a list back that has no numbers on it.
What it does not do to your night
A waiting party does not consume capacity. Put eight parties on the list for a room that seats twenty and your booking page still offers exactly the slots it offered before — because a waitlist exists precisely when the room is full, and an entry that took a seat would make the room look fuller than it is to the next real booking.
For the same reason a waiting party is not counted in your covers. Your numbers for the night are people you are feeding, not people who asked.
The order of the list
Parties are ordered by when they joined, per date. Saturday's queue and Sunday's queue are different queues; being third on the list only means anything inside one service.
Promoting or cancelling one party does not reorder the others relative to each other. The party behind the one you seated does not become "second" — it keeps the place it had. Positions are an ordering, not a countdown, which is why guests are never shown one.
The estimated wait
Each waiting party on the board can carry a range — "30–60 min wait", or "under 90 min wait" for the party at the front. Hovering it says where the number comes from:
"Estimated from the parties ahead and your table sizes. Not a promise."
The model is deliberately crude, because you should be able to argue with it: it counts the parties ahead that need a table this party could also use, divides by how many of your tables seat them, and multiplies by your turn time. Four tables that fit six, you are second, turns are ninety minutes.
Where it cannot be honest, it shows nothing at all. No dash, no "unknown", no zero. Two cases do this:
- You have no floor plan. Without tables and their seat counts there is nothing to divide by. If you want quoted waits, that is the thing to go and build — see Sections and tables.
- No table you have seats that party. A party of ten at a venue whose largest table is six is not waiting for a table; they are waiting for a different restaurant, and a number would be a lie with decimal places.
It is a range on purpose. A single number reads as a commitment, and it will be wrong.
The estimate is yours, not the guest's. It appears on your board and never on the guest's screen. You can pass it on with the context that makes it a judgement — "probably half an hour, we'll call you" — where the same range printed on a form would read as a promise from the software.
When a booking cancels
Cancel a booking and, if anyone is waiting near that time, a banner offers them to you:
"Freed up a slot — promote 2 waiting parties?"
The list is "Picked from the waitlist within ±60 min of the cancelled slot. Promote re-checks capacity."
An hour either side, because a party who asked for eight will usually take half past seven. And the re-check matters: between the cancellation and your click, another guest may have booked that slot from your public page. If that happens, promote tells you rather than overbooking you — "another booking has taken that slot. Skip and try a different match."
If the party is no longer on the list at all — you already seated them, or they cancelled — you get "is no longer on the waitlist" with the status they now have. Both are the same message: the board moved under you, and nothing was written.
Promoting turns the entry into a confirmed booking. It gets a table's worth of capacity, a confirmation, and everything a booking normally has.
Nobody is called automatically
This is the part worth being blunt about. The waitlist does not message anyone. Not when you add them, not when a slot frees, not at any point. The banner exists so that you can decide who gets the table; there is no queue that empties itself while you are on the pass.
That is a deliberate choice, not an unfinished one. Deciding who gets the last table on a Saturday is a judgement about the room — a party of two you can turn before nine, a regular, someone already standing at the bar — and it is not a decision to hand to a rule.
Letting guests add themselves
By default only your team can put someone on the list. You can also let guests do it: when a date has nothing available, the booking page offers to take their details instead of ending there.
The switch is in Settings, under guest details and changes.
Read that hint before you turn it on. It is a commitment to work the list, and the previous section is why: nothing calls anyone. A guest who joins and hears nothing will phone you, and they will be right to.
The guest is told the same thing you are. Their form says "This is not a booking — no table is held for you", and so does the acknowledgement afterwards. It says it twice on purpose — a guest who thinks they have a table and arrives to find they do not costs you more than the dead end it replaced.
Turning it back off hides the form and keeps the parties already on your list. They were told you would be in touch, and switching a setting is not a reason to break that.