How to set how far in advance guests can book
In this article
Some restaurants need a few hours of notice before a table can be booked online, so the kitchen is not caught out by a reservation made by someone standing in the queue at the door. Others want the calendar open months ahead, so guests can plan a birthday or an anniversary. Resos covers both with two settings that sit next to each other on the same page.
Where the two settings live
Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Limits, and look under the New online bookings heading. You will find two dropdowns:
- Minimum time in advance: the shortest notice you accept for an online booking.
- Max time in advance: how far ahead your online booking calendar opens.
Both apply to the whole restaurant. Click Save at the bottom of the page when you are done.
Minimum time in advance
This is your lead time. Pick the amount of notice you need, and Resos stops offering any time slot that falls inside it.
The dropdown starts at No restrictions, which is the default and means guests can book right up to the next available slot. From there you can choose half hour steps up to 3 hours, then whole hours up to 24 hours, and finally 48 hours.
The cutoff is measured from the moment the guest is looking at your booking page, not from the start of the day. If you set 3 hours and it is 13:00, the earliest slot a guest can pick is 16:00. At 14:00 the earliest slot becomes 17:00, and so on through the day.
When no time is left today and you have set a notice, the guest sees “Bookings must be made at least 1 hour in advance.” on the time step, with your own number (for example “at least 2 hours” or “at least 90 minutes”). It takes the place of the fully booked message for today, so it also shows when today is full for another reason. If guests choose a seating area, they see that area’s fully booked message instead.
This is not the same as the confirmation deadline, which is about how long a guest has to confirm a booking they already made. See the booking confirmation feature.
The minimum applies to the list of times your booking page, your website widget, the Resos API and the channels we feed, such as Reserve with Google and Reserve with Facebook and Instagram, all offer. It is not a rule about when a booking may exist, so you can still take a last minute table over the phone and add it yourself.
Max time in advance
This is your booking horizon. Choose how far ahead the calendar should open, from 1 day up to 12 months. Anything beyond it is simply not shown to guests.
If you never touch this setting, Resos uses 6 months.
The window rolls forward
The window is counted from today, every time a guest loads your booking page. It is not a fixed end date that you have to move.
So if you set 3 months, your calendar is always open about three months out. Tomorrow it will be open three months from tomorrow. You do not need to come back and extend it at the start of each season.
Why the very last day may look missing
The month settings are counted in whole months, and the last day is not itself offered. With a 3 month window, guests can book up to the day before the same date three months from now.
The day and week settings behave differently, because they include today on top of the number in the label. A 1 week window gives today plus the following 7 days, and a 1 day window gives today and tomorrow.
This is worth knowing if you are testing the setting yourself, because a date that falls exactly on a month horizon looks unavailable even though the setting is correct.
Different minimum notice per service, day or experience
The minimum notice is one value for the whole restaurant. Opening hours, special opening hours and experiences have no notice setting of their own, so you cannot, for example, require a day’s notice for lunch while dinner stays bookable until the last minute. The maximum window is restaurant wide as well.
The closest you can get is closing that service by hand on the day. Use Close time interval today in the three dots menu of the Schedule, List or Floor plan view, or add a closed special opening hour with a time interval. Neither repeats, so you do it again each day. The steps are in close a time interval and close one service. To cap how many bookings or guests a service takes, use limits within opening hours.
If a guest cannot book when you expect them to
Before assuming a setting is wrong, check these in order:
- Are you open that day? A special opening hour marked as closed removes the day from the calendar no matter what your window says. If you run opening hours per area, closing one area still leaves the day on the calendar; the day only disappears when every bookable area is closed. See default and special opening hours.
- Has someone closed bookings for today? The Close bookings today shortcut in the Schedule, List, and Floor plan views takes the rest of the day off the calendar in one click, and it is easy to forget it was used. It can be used on a future date too, and then that whole day disappears. See closing online bookings for the rest of the day.
- Is the day simply full? A full day is not removed from the calendar. The guest can still pick the date and is then told there is nothing available on the time step, so a report of “I cannot book” can mean full rather than out of window. Booking and guest limits, or all your tables being taken, do this even inside your window.
- Is the guest looking at an old page? The calendar is built when the booking page loads, so a tab that has been open for a while, or a cached copy of your website, can still be showing yesterday’s window. Ask the guest to reload.
We hope you found this guide useful. If you have any questions about your booking window or any general questions about Resos, do not hesitate to contact us at hi@resos.com. Our support representatives are excited to offer their help!
