Using exclusive seating groups
Last updated: February 24, 2021
The information on this page relates to FareHarbor’s Seating Assignment feature. If you’re not currently using this feature and are interested in trying it out, contact FareHarbor Support.
Exclusive seating groups allow you to manage private sections or maintain distancing within your bookable space.
How does it work?
When building a seat map, you can organize your seats into groups. For example, you might use groups to represent each table or row in a venue. By default, all seats in a group will remain bookable until they’ve been filled, meaning there can be more than one party sitting in a group.
When a group of seats is exclusive, it can only be booked by one party at a time. Once a group has at least one person assigned to it, all other seats in the group will be automatically closed and no longer available for online booking.
In the Dashboard, logged-in users will see these seats marked with a dotted border, indicating that they are not available for online booking.
Organizing groups in the seat map builder
Before you can start using exclusive groups, you’ll need to organize the seats on your map into groups, if you haven’t already. Learn more about creating groups.
Any seats that are left ungrouped will still be bookable as usual. This means that they will remain available until every individual seat has been filled.
Updating exclusive group settings
Exclusive groups are managed using resource requirements, one of FareHarbor’s power features. We encourage you to get to know how they work so you can make edits for yourself, but if you need a hand, we’re always here to help.
To update exclusive group settings:
Locate the resource requirements you want to update. Learn more about accessing resource requirements.
Find the requirement(s) you want to make exclusive. For example, if you want to make tables in your VIP section exclusive, you’d look for a requirement like this:
Click the pencil
icon next to the requirement summary. In this example, it’s the summary starting with “Use 1 of Royal Ohana Luau Seats”.Go to the Advanced tab
Under Seating auto-assignment options, select Make seat groups exclusive.
Save your changes.
Viewing and using exclusive groups in the Dashboard
When viewing your seat map in the Dashboard, seats in exclusive groups that have been closed are marked with a dotted border. Their status will be marked as “Closed” to indicate that they are not available for online booking.
Logged-in users can still override this restriction and move customers into these seats, but will be asked to confirm before doing so. Learn more about changing seats for customers in exclusive groups.
Seats in exclusive groups that have not yet been closed will still be considered “Available” until at least one seat in that group has been filled.
Changing seats for customers in exclusive groups
When a party has been booked into an exclusive group, you can move individuals within that party to any other open seats within the same group. All seats in the currently booked group will appear available, indicating that people within the party can be moved freely within the group they’ve been assigned.
If needed, you can also override the exclusive group restriction and move customers from other bookings into an already-booked exclusive group, but will be asked to confirm before doing so.
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When multiple bookings are in the same exclusive group (either because a logged-in user manually assigned them, or groups were made exclusive after they were originally booked), logged-in users will always be warned when trying to move customers within that group.
If only some groups in a seat map need to be made exclusive, you can determine which specific zones to make exclusive in the resource requirement group.
- For example, in the requirement group below, you can make groups exclusive for only the Adult VIP/Child VIP requirement (following the steps here). This means that the exclusivity rule will only be enforced for groups in the VIP seating zone, and not the General seating zone.
