Blocking and unblocking seats

When using the manual seating assignment tool in the manifest, you can “block off” seats to make them unavailable for that particular time range. This can come in handy if you need to reserve seats for a party, close off the remaining seats at a table, reflect seats that are broken, etc.

Blocked seats will be reflected to online customers as unavailable, and cannot be booked. For logged-in Dashboard users managing seat assignments, blocked off seats will be marked with a diagonal slash and have a status of “blocked”:

How to block or unblock seats

To block off one or more seats, open the manual seat assignment tool from the manifest and select Block seats. Select the seats you want to make unavailable. Any seats you select will be marked with a diagonal slash on the seat map, and will immediately become unavailable for booking.

To unblock a seat, click on the blocked seat on the seat map. The seat will be highlighted in the list to the right. Click the X next to the seat to remove the block. The seat will immediately become available for booking.

FAQs

Why can’t I block or unblock seats?

Certain actions, like blocking seats, may not be available based on your user permissions. If you would like to update your permissions, contact your administrator or FareHarbor Support.

If you need to block off seats for an availability that doesn’t have any bookings yet, you can use the “Show empty availabilities” setting (located in the Display options menu near the top of the manifest) to block off seats for that availability. You can save this setting to a custom calendar so that it’s remembered the next time you view the manifest.

Why am I seeing blocked seats for a different time or activity?

If you have any activities requiring seating during an overlapping time range, blocked seats for those activities will be displayed as well. If needed, you can unblock seats for an overlapping time range directly from the list.

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Seat blocks and resource capacity

• In order to keep capacity as accurate as possible in calendars (while minimizing clients’ interaction with resource overrides), seat blocks act like resource overrides.

  • For example, if the resource max uses are 50, and 5 seats have been blocked, the new max uses for that time range will be 45.

  • Seat blocks are shown in the resource use calendar to give an accurate picture of capacity, but can only be managed from the seating tool:

    

• As a best practice, manual resource overrides should not be created in addition to seat blocks. This is because we don’t currently have a way to define which seats a manual override should be applied to, resulting in a mismatch between seat capacity and resource capacity.

  • If, for whatever reason, a resource override has been created in addition to seat blocks, whichever change is most restrictive will be used. For example, if resource max uses is 50, 5 seats have been blocked, and a resource override has been created to reduce max uses to 25, then the total number of resources that can be used is 25, because that is the most restrictive change.

• If, for any reason, resource max uses is not set, then seat blocks will not affect resource capacity (resource max will remain unlimited).

• If multiple resources are tied to the same seat map, blocking a seat will affect capacity for both resources. Unblocking, in turn, will affect capacity for both resources.

Changes to seat maps

• If a user is editing the layout of a seat map and removes a seat that has been blocked, all seat blocks associated with that seat will be deleted and removed from the resource use calendar.

• If a user is editing a resource’s settings and removes or changes the seat map attached to that resource, all seat blocks associated with that resource will be deleted and removed from the resource use calendar.

  • If the seat map is attached to a different resource, existing seat blocks will remain on that resource use calendar.