Updating an item’s online booking settings
Last updated: July 15, 2025
In your Dashboard, bookability refers to the online booking status of a particular item or availability. There are several different item settings relating to online bookability. To access these settings:
- Go to the Items section of your Dashboard and select an item.
- Select Bookability from the options on the left-hand side.
Read more about each option by clicking into the sections below.
Archived, Private, Unlisted settings
These three options are located at the top of the Online Bookability page:
Heads up! Archived and private items cannot be added to booking flows, however unlisted items will be shown to online customers when viewing the flow on your website. Additionally, archived and private items previously added to your booking flows will not be visible to your online customers.
Archived item
When an item is archived, it will be hidden from your Dashboard and no longer bookable. However, it will still be visible in reports, allowing you to accurately track any previous bookings or sales. Learn more about archiving items.
Private item
This checkbox determines whether or not the item can be viewed and booked online. When an item is private, it is not visible to online customers. However, users logged into your company’s FareHarbor Dashboard can still view and book the item.
Unlisted
When an item is marked as unlisted, it will not be displayed publicly on your website, but can still be viewed and booked by people who have a direct link. This is helpful, for instance, for private tours where you only want a specific group of people to have access to the item.
You can also make individual availabilities unlisted. Learn more here.
Booking Restrictions
Booking restrictions are a set of rules determining how an item can be booked online. These settings include minimum and maximum party sizes, auto-close times, and custom “call to book” messaging.
If you have booking restrictions set up in your main Dashboard settings, you will see a dropdown menu allowing you to choose an already-existing set of restrictions. Or, if you prefer, you can customize booking restrictions for an individual item by selecting Custom settings and adjusting the settings as needed.
Learn more about booking restrictions.
Online Calendars
These settings apply to the availability calendars your customers can see on your website.
Number of seats left
By default, your online calendars will display a message alerting online customers when there are only 3 spots left for a particular time. Here, you can adjust when this countdown should start.
Group same-day availabilities on calendars
If you have more than one availability for an item per day, you can choose to group these availabilities together so they don’t take up as much space on your calendar of availability. This is especially helpful if you’re displaying several different items on one calendar.
Grouped availabilities will have a 
icon next to the item name.
When a user selects the item, they’ll be taken to a page where they can select their desired time. From there, they’ll proceed with the standard booking process.
Note: By default, this setting also groups availabilities inside your Dashboard. You can customize which items are grouped on your Dashboard calendars by using the custom item grouping option. Learn more about calendar display options.
Online Payments
If desired, you can require credit card information from online customers when the booking total is $0 for an item.
This is often used when offering a Groupon deal or an item that is included on a tourist pass. If a customer enters a promo code or selects a ticket type that makes their booking total $0, you may want to have their credit card on file in the rare event you need to charge them for damages or no-shows.
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FH Admin-only options
Allow completely free bookings
For Dashboards where PayPal is the default payment processor, the checkbox Allow completely free bookings must always be enabled for every item. This has to do with the restrictions set by PayPal about what we’re allowed to charge. Disabling this will result in a dead end for customers, leaving them with no means of completing the booking.
Overview
Payments cannot be completed using the PayPal payment processor when the gross equals $0.00, and there is a booking_fee or processing_fee on the order being passed to PayPal as well. This is a limitation set in place by PayPal and enforced through their API. The concept can be seen when we look at PayPal and fee-only payments, however, can also happen when customer types are set to $0.00, and isFreeAllowed is set to False. In this scenario, the price is set to free, however we are still attempting to collect a booking_fee and/or there is a processing_fee being imposed since we have set isFreeAllowed to False.
For Dashboards with Stripe as the default payment processor and PayPal as the enabled payment processor, this doesn’t pose an issue since PayPal shouldn’t display for the option with our back end validation in place. The customer is able to complete the booking per usual with Stripe. For Dashboards with PayPal as the default payment processor however, we must never set isFreeAllowed = False. We will address this issue with internal documentation.
Example of the error message:
Email restriction
This option should only be used in very specific cases, as outlined in the company’s Onboarding doc. When an item has an email restriction in place and a user tries to book that item with an unauthorized email address, they will see an error message alerting them they are not authorized to complete the booking and to use their approved email address.
To set up an email restriction, you must enter a string of text called a regular expression, or regex, which will be used to limit online booking to people with matching email addresses.
Examples:
^(.*@fareharbor.com)$will limit online booking to customers with a fareharbor.com email address.^(.*@fareharbor.com)|(.*@gmail.com)$will limit online booking to customers with a fareharbor.com OR a gmail.com email address.
Allow auto-opening online bookings
To learn more about allowing auto-open for online bookings, and for instructions on how to enable this feature, read this help page.
Additional notes for online booking settings
Booking restrictions
When Dashboard-level booking restrictions have been created, they will be available at the item level, but can’t be edited from an item’s settings. You can click the blue arrow to jump to the Dashboard settings and update them there, or select Custom settings to override at the item level.
By default, all items will have “custom settings” to prevent current setups from being overridden during the rollout. Note: The dropdown will not appear if the company has not set up any Dashboard-level booking restrictions.
If needed, you can enter negative numbers for online booking cutoffs, to allow customers to create bookings even after the availability start time. This will be the case if working with “General Admission” activities or events, or gift cards.
To automatically close an availability after 1 booking is made (without resources), set the cutoff for 1+ bookings to 9999 hours before the availability start time. This may be used, for example, when a company wants the correct number of guests for private parties to be reflected on the availability capacity and reports, rather than “1 private party.”
Triggering “Call to book” or “Sold out” message on empty availabilities
Sometimes companies want to display a “Call to book” or “Sold out” message on availabilities even if they’re not operating on that day. To do this, change the availability’s total capacity to 0. Because the total capacity of 0 is now considered “full,” the availability will close and the “full or overbooked” message will be automatically shown to online customers.
Number of seats countdown
The countdown shown to online users will take resources and affiliate blocks into account to ensure the customer sees the right number. More about resources and capacity.
Online Payments
The “Hide taxes line when there is no taxable amount” setting was previously located here, but has been moved to Item > Info & Policies > Advanced (where item tax rate is set).