By using our software for your restaurant processes, you’ll get a seamless and flexible booking experience, both for your staff and for your customers. Setting up customized booking durations can help with a better scheduling strategy and an increase in revenue. This support article explains what a booking duration is, how to set it up, and other important aspects of it.
Default booking duration
The booking duration is the time your guests spend at your restaurant, no matter if the reservation is made online or it is manually added by the staff. On your resOS profile, the booking duration includes the turnaround time too, and it can be further customized depending on your needs. In order to set up the default booking duration (the default duration applied to all your opening hours and special opening hours), you’ll have to go to Menu–> Settings & add-ons–> Bookings –>Seatings–>Default duration.
Availability for guests
You also have the option to display the booking duration so your guests can see it on the email notifications, as well as the status page (the page they see after the online booking flow or the page they receive via email notifications for manually added bookings). You can do that by clicking on “Show booking duration to guests” in the same section where you set the default booking duration. If you would like not to display the booking duration (via any means), then you simply need to make sure that the option is disabled.
Set duration based on the number of people
If you’d like to offer different booking durations based on how many people book a table at your establishment, we’ve got you covered! You can set up custom duration rules based on the minimum and maximum number of guests on one booking. Many restaurants use this function to allow bookings with bigger parties for a longer booking duration and increase their revenue with the extra orders placed.
Customized booking duration
For a more personalized approach, you can have the same settings from above ⬆️ set up in a different way for each opening hour and special opening hour. If you’d like to override the settings for the default booking duration, you’ll have to follow these instructions:
- Access your resOS profile.
- Go to Menu–> Settings & add-ons–> General–> Opening hours–> Pen icon (edit)–> Seatings.
- Enable “Overwrite default seating settings” and choose the new booking duration OR enable “Set duration based on number of people” and add the custom rules for the specific opening hour/special opening hour.
❗NB: The rest of the opening hours will still have the default booking duration unless changed otherwise.
Guests’ view of booking durations
Perhaps you’re wondering where your guests can see the booking duration that you set up in the system (if you’ve enabled this option previously). If the booking duration is not enabled for your guests to see, then everything will look the same except for the section where it’s specified. There are two places in which your guests can check and verify the booking duration of their reservation:
- Booking status page: the page that the guest has access either after completing the online booking flow or that it is received via email if their booking is added manually by the restaurant staff.
- Email notifications: when a guest receives email notifications about their reservation, if enabled by the restaurant, they receive details regarding their booking duration too, amongst others.
Modifying booking durations as a guest
Unfortunately, it is not yet possible for the guests to modify the booking duration themselves (it is something that we’re planning to implement soon). However, if they reach out to the restaurant (either through the status page, email, DM, etc.), then a member of the staff could edit the duration manually in the system.
Read more about the different seatings settings for our resOS profile 👉 here 👈.