Booking restrictions

Booking restrictions determine when and how customers can book your items online. These settings can be managed in three different places:

• Main Dashboard settings (located under Settings > Booking Restrictions)
• Individual item settings (located in an item’s Bookability settings)
• Availability settings (located in an availability’s online booking status menu)

Booking restrictions created in your main Dashboard settings can be applied to multiple items or availabilities. This is useful if you want to use the same online booking rules for most items, but need to override them in a few specific cases.

Creating Dashboard booking restrictions

1. Go to the Settings section of your Dashboard
2. Select Booking Restrictions
3. Click “New booking restriction” and enter a name
4. Click Edit next to the name of your new restrictions
5. Adjust the default settings as needed (learn more about these options below)
6. Save your changes

Options

Booking restrictions come with default settings based on the most common online booking scenarios. However, you can adjust these settings however you’d like.

Booking party sizes

This option controls how many individuals or customer type options can be assigned to a booking. You can create different rules for when there are no bookings versus one or more bookings.

Example: If you’re setting up a guided tour, you can set the minimum booking party to 2 people when there are no bookings. That way, you won’t be left leading a tour for only one person.

Auto close online bookings

In this column, you can specify online booking cutoffs, which determine when availabilities should be automatically closed to customers. Learn more about this setting.

Example: If an availability has no bookings, you can set your booking restrictions to automatically close the availability 3 hours before midnight the day before the activity takes place. But if the availability has 1 or more bookings, you can choose to accept online bookings all the way up until the activity starts.

Note: These rules apply to online bookings only; logged-in Dashboard users can still make bookings on closed availabilities.

Include a message in online calendars when closed

By default, when an availability is within the auto-close window, it will be shown in your online calendar with a Call to book message:

In the Bookability settings, you may specify whether or not you would like to turn this setting on and for which scenarios you would like the message to appear.

This setting can be enabled so that restrictions take effect when there are:

• No bookings
• 1+ bookings
• Full or overbooked availabilities

You may enable this setting for availabilities that are:

• Auto-closed
• Full or overbooked
• Both auto-closed and full or overbooked

When disabled, these availabilities will be hidden from online customers instead of displaying a message.

To include auto-closed availabilities in online calendars with a “Call to book” message, select the first two checkboxes in the column. To include full or overbooked availabilities in online calendars with a “Call to book” message, select the third checkbox in the column.

In some circumstances, you may want to communicate more specific information beyond the default “Call to book” message. You can customize the note that appears for any of these booking restriction scenarios by typing in a custom message in the optional field below the checkbox, as shown in the following example:

If all of the boxes in this column are unchecked, auto-closed and full or overbooked availabilities will be hidden from online calendars.

Add customers to a waitlist

The Waitlist feature allows customers to sign up to be notified when a seat for a fully-booked activity becomes available. This helps provide greater booking flexibility and reduce customer dissatisfaction when availability is limited. Learn more about this feature here.

Notes

• When assigned to an item, booking restrictions will apply to all past and future availabilities. If you want to assign restrictions to specific availabilities only, see Changing an availability’s booking restrictions.

• Booking restrictions can be deleted from your Dashboard by clicking Edit > Delete. Make sure that the booking restriction is not currently in use by any items or availabilities, otherwise you will not be able to delete it.

• Reordering booking restrictions determines the order in which they are listed in an item or availability’s settings.

  

Internal-only content. Don't copy and paste to anyone.

Training video:

Additional notes for FH Admins

• The “Can manage booking restrictions” permission (located in a permission group’s Setup section) must be enabled in order to view Dashboard-level 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.

  

Auto open online bookings

This option was introduced for a few specific companies, so in general we are not including it in client-facing documentation. A company must have the “Allow auto-opening online bookings” setting enabled under advanced company settings in order for this option to be visible in the booking restrictions table.

This option allows you to automatically open availabilities for online booking a certain number of hours in advance. The availability will not be bookable until that time (customers will see a “call to book” message instead). For example, use this setting to restrict online booking until 30 days (720 hours) before an event or activity starts.

If a client wants to use auto-open, please defer to the client’s AM before enabling it on their Dashboard.

To enable this setting:

1. Go to Advanced company settings > Bookings
2. Check “Allow auto-opening online bookings” & click Save
3. A new column will now appear within all items’ bookability section called “Auto-open online bookings”
4. Go to the item and modify as needed