How to set how far in advance guests can book

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 are set for 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.

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.

These settings are restaurant wide

Unlike booking and guest caps, which you can set per opening hour, the minimum notice and the maximum window apply to your whole restaurant. There is no way to give one service a different lead time from another.

If you need tighter control over a specific service, use limits within opening hours to cap bookings or guests for that opening hour instead.

If a guest cannot book when you expect them to

Before assuming a setting is wrong, check these in order:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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!