Block tables, areas and times from online booking

Some seats are not meant for the internet. A chef’s table you only sell by phone, a terrace you close when it rains, two tables held back for walk-ins, a private function on Saturday. Resos lets you take capacity out of the online booking flow while your team can still seat guests there, and this guide shows which method fits which situation.

Pick the right method first

The methods are not interchangeable, so decide what you are blocking before you change anything.

What you want to block	Use this
One table, permanently	The table’s Available online switch
A whole area, permanently	The area’s Available online switch
One table for a few hours or one evening	Close Table
A whole day or one time window on one date	Close bookings today or Close time interval today
A date or a period you are closed	Special opening hours
An area on certain weekdays only	Opening hours per area
The number of guests, not the tables	Limits within an opening hour

Stop one table being booked online

Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → General → Tables, open the Areas & tables tab, and click the pencil icon on the table you want to hold back. Each table has two separate switches:

• Bookable: restaurant staff can book this table. Turning this off removes the table from the Schedule view entirely, so nobody can seat anyone there.
• Available online: guests can book this table online. Turning this off is what you want. The table stays fully visible to your team and can still be used for walk-ins, phone bookings and manual bookings.

Turn off Available online, then click Save. Repeat for each table you want to hold back.

Two things to know before you do it:

• Available online depends on Bookable. If you switch Bookable off, Available online switches off with it, and it does not turn back on by itself: when you switch Bookable back on, you have to switch Available online back on yourself too, since the off state was saved.
• If you turn off Available online on the last online table in an area, Resos turns the whole area off for online booking too and tells you it has done so. When you reopen that table later, check the area’s switch as well, otherwise the table looks blocked even though its own switch is on.

Close a whole area to online booking

Editing every table one at a time gets tedious, so areas have the same two switches. Click the pencil icon on the area itself and turn off Available online.

An area set to staff only behaves exactly as you would expect when you accept bookings based on table availability: guests are told you are fully booked for those seats, while your team keeps the area on the Schedule and can seat walk-ins there. Turning the area’s Bookable switch off instead is the stronger option, and it also hides the area and all its tables from the Schedule view. If tables you created have disappeared from the Schedule, this is almost always why.

Do not forget your table combinations

This is the setting that surprises people most. A table combination is its own bookable unit with its own Bookable and Available online switches, and those switches are independent of the tables inside it.

That means a combination of tables 5 and 6 can still be sold online after you have taken tables 5 and 6 off the internet individually. The booking then shows up as “5, 6” and looks exactly as though the two tables were booked separately.

So whenever you take a table off online booking, open the Combinations tab in the same Tables screen and turn off Available online on every combination that contains it. Working the other way around is just as useful: leaving the singles online but the combination staff only means guests can book the small tables, while large parties have to go through you.

Block one table for a few hours

For a private function, a repair or a table you are holding for a regular, you do not need a fake booking. Resos has a dedicated closed-table entry.

There are two ways to create one:

1. In the Schedule view, hold Shift and drag along the row of the table you want to block. Drag from the start of the block to the end and release. How far you drag sets the duration, rounded to the nearest 15 minutes.
2. Click the button to add a new booking and choose Close Table, then fill in the date, time, duration and table yourself.

Either way you get an entry that occupies the table exactly like a booking does, so nothing can be booked onto it online, and staff can see at a glance why the table is unavailable. Open it again later to change it (Edit Closed Table) or to remove it, and the table goes back to normal.

Closed tables work on future dates too, so you can block next month’s private party today.

Close a service, a time window, or a whole date

To take everything off the market rather than a single table, use the shortcuts in the three dots menu in the Schedule, List and Floor plan views, or add a special opening hour. Both are covered in close online bookings for the rest of the day.

Two details worth knowing when you plan a gap:

• A closed time interval applies to a single date. There is no weekly repeat for a closed special, so a gap you want every Tuesday has to be added per date, or built into your regular opening hours.
• Building a gap into your opening hours costs you more than the gap itself. The last slot in an opening hour is its closing time minus your booking duration, so splitting the day in two also removes every slot within one booking length before the gap. With a two hour duration, an opening hour that ends at 15:00 stops offering slots at 13:00, so a second opening hour starting at 17:00 leaves no bookable start time between 13:00 and 17:00, not just the two hour break you wanted. Check the Last booking slot line on both opening hours before you rely on it, and set the first Guests leave by to the time you actually want the room empty. For a one-off window rather than a recurring one, a closed special opening hour or Close time interval today is the better tool, because it removes only the times you name.

If you close a whole date and you also run Experiences, the closed special asks What should this close?. The default closes regular bookings only and leaves your experiences bookable, so choose Both regular opening hours and experiences if the restaurant is genuinely unavailable.

Open an area only on certain days

If your terrace should be bookable at weekends and closed on weekdays, tie your opening hours to areas instead of switching the area on and off by hand.

Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Managing bookings and turn on Define opening hours per area. Every opening hour then gets an Areas section where you select the areas it applies to. Because normal opening hours are set per weekday, this gives you the weekday control you are after: put the terrace on the Saturday and Sunday opening hours only, and it simply is not offered the rest of the week.

Cap guests instead of blocking tables

Sometimes the real goal is not “block this table” but “stop taking more than 30 covers at 19:00”. That is what limits are for, and they are explained in how to set up limits within opening hours.

One thing to be aware of: a limit of 0 means no limit, not “block everything”. If you want to close a slot, close it with one of the methods above rather than setting a limit to zero.

Why guests can still book something you closed

If a guest slipped through, it is almost always one of these:

• A combination is still online. The single tables are off, the combination that contains them is not. This is by far the most common cause.
• You accept bookings as requests. With Accepting new online bookings set to Manually accept or decline each booking, Resos does not check table availability at all when it builds the time slots, so times keep showing as available and you decide case by case. If you want the system to hide times when nothing is free, choose Accept booking if a table is available or Manually if a table is available under Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Managing bookings.
• You use Reserve with Google. Bookings themselves move between Resos and Google in real time, but the availability Google shows comes from a feed we upload once a day, so a table or an area you close may keep showing there until the next upload. Bookings made on Facebook and Instagram sync instantly with Resos through our integration partner. If Facebook is still offering a time you closed, that is worth reporting to us.

What Resos cannot do yet

Being straight with you so you do not go hunting for a switch that does not exist:

• There is no one-click “mark this service fully booked”. Use Close bookings today or a closed time interval instead.
• There is no rule that blocks one party size in one time window, for example “no tables of 4 before 11:00 on weekdays”. The nearest workarounds are limits on the opening hour covering that period, or keeping the tables and combinations for that party size offline and adding those bookings yourself.
• There is no minimum gap between consecutive bookings on the same table. Combinations are set up manually, so they do not take adjacency or booth rules into account.

If you are not sure which of these fits your restaurant, write to us at hi@resos.com and describe what you want to hold back. We will tell you the shortest way to set it up.