Availability and turn times

When guests are being offered slots you cannot seat, when tables are being double-booked, or when late slots leave no time to serve.

For any date and party size, the diary works out which start times can be seated. A slot is offered only when there is a table, or a combination, free for the whole booking duration, inside business hours, respecting the turn-time buffer between seatings.

Business hours can have multiple windows per day where you split lunch and dinner. Intervals are the slot granularity guests pick from. Duration is how long the table is held and can vary by party size, with a separate override for large parties. Turn time is the buffer added after a booking so the table is not rebooked before it is cleared. Cover limits cap how many guests you take per slot and per day, and time-slot capacity rules can cap by party size.

Individual tables can be set to ignore turn-time buffers where they never need one.

Where sister venues are linked, availability can extend across the group, so a fully booked service can still offer the guest a table nearby.

Smart Seating re-plans the room continuously rather than fixing a table at the moment of booking. When a guest asks for a time that shows as unavailable, the optimiser checks whether one or two bookings that have not yet arrived could be moved to seat them. If so, the time becomes bookable and the moves happen automatically when the guest books. It never makes more than two moves, never touches a locked booking, a seated guest, a table with an order running or a joined-up group table, and guests are never shown a table number online, so nothing changes for them. Every move is written into the booking history and availability is re-checked at the moment of booking, so it never promises a table it does not have.

Shorter sittings put a gap to use that a full-length booking cannot fill. A table free at 8:45pm is useless to a booking that needs two clear hours but suits a couple, so it can be offered as a shorter sitting, with the duration shown to the guest before they book.

Both can be tested before they change anything. Replay runs the optimiser read-only over any past date range and lists every booking your availability turned away that the room could have seated, ranked by party size, with the exact table moves and what the night was worth. Shadow mode then scores every live guest search against the optimiser without changing what guests see, so after a fortnight you have a demand-weighted figure rather than an estimate.

• Cover limits and per-party-size capacity rules protect pacing without switching availability off.

• The actual slot calculation runs on the platform; you set the rules and guests see only what can be seated.

• Smart Seating changes which times are offered, not what a guest is told; table numbers are never shown online.

• A fortnight in shadow mode gives you the real, demand-weighted uplift before you turn the optimiser on.

See also:

• Floor plan, tables and the diary

• Booking types and events

• Deposits, pre-orders and charges

• Bookings and covers