Why your booking page shows fully booked

Few things are as alarming as a guest telling you your booking page says you are full on a night you are half empty. The good news is that Resos does not hide availability at random. Something in your setup is saying no, and this checklist walks through every reason it can, in the order that finds the cause fastest.

The message guests see is “Sorry, we are fully booked on {date} - please try another date.”, or “We are fully booked in this area on {date} - please try another area or date.” if you let guests choose an area. If you have written your own Custom fully booked message it appears instead, but the causes are the same.

Accounts set to Don’t use table management are not table-based, so checks 1-4 do not apply.

Start by reproducing it

Open your own booking page and try to book. This takes a minute and saves an hour.

Note down the exact date, time and party size you tried, then change one thing at a time:

• Try a smaller party. If 2 people works and 6 people does not, the problem is table size, a table already taken, a missing combination or your allowed party-size range, so go to checks 1, 2, 3 and 10. Add check 5 if you set duration based on number of people.
• Try another date. If only one date is blocked, go to checks 2, 7, 8 and 11.
• Try another time of day. If lunch works and dinner does not, you are looking at a single opening hour, so go to checks 5, 6, 7 and 8.
• If nothing at all is bookable on any date for any party size, go to checks 3, 4, 5 and 9.

One more thing to know before you start: the calendar step is built from your opening hours alone. A date can look open in the calendar and still have no times on the next step, because times are only calculated once the guest has picked a date and a party size.

1. No table is big enough, or the minimum is too high

The most common cause by far. Resos only offers a time if it can find one table, or one table combination, that fits the party.

Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → General → Tables and look at two things:

• Maximum seats. If your biggest online table seats 6, parties of 7 are told you are fully booked, no matter how empty the room is. The fix is to add a bigger table or a combination.
• Minimum seats. A table with a minimum of 4 is never offered to a party of 2. If small parties are blocked while large ones work, this is why.

2. The tables that fit are already booked

Often nothing is misconfigured and the room is simply spoken for. Resos takes a table out of the offer for as long as a booking sits on it, so a few bookings on your only large tables are enough to report a party of 6 as fully booked while smaller parties still get times.

Open the Schedule view for the date that is failing and read the rows of the tables that fit the party. Three things to look for:

• Bookings that overlap without starting at the same time. Each booking holds its tables for its whole duration, so a booking at 18:30 with a two hour duration still blocks 19:30. The gap you see in the time column is not the gap in the table’s day.
• Bookings your own team added. Phone bookings, walk-ins and imported bookings occupy tables exactly like online ones do.
• Combinations. A booking on one small table also takes every combination containing that table out of the offer, which is why large parties are usually the first to disappear.

Bookings you have not answered yet do not hold tables, and canceled, declined, no-show and finished bookings release them again. If the tables really are free at that time, carry on down the list.

3. Combinations are missing or staff only

If your room is all two-seaters, everything above two people depends on combinations. Open the Combinations tab in the same Tables screen and check that combinations exist for the party sizes you want to accept, and that each one has Available online switched on.

A combination has its own Bookable and Available online switches, separate from the tables inside it, so a complete set of combinations can still be invisible to guests if those switches are off.

4. Your tables or areas are not available online

Still in Tables, check the Available online switch on each area and each table. An area set to staff only is deliberately reported to guests as fully booked, and everything inside it goes with it, so a single area switch can take your whole restaurant off the market.

An area with no tables in it contributes no availability of its own, so if it is the only area guests can pick they will see times that cannot actually be seated. Make sure every area you offer online contains tables.

5. Your booking duration does not fit the opening hour

Resos never offers a slot that would run past the time your guests are supposed to leave. The last slot in an opening hour is its closing time minus the booking duration, so a two hour duration inside a two hour opening hour leaves exactly one slot, and a duration longer than the opening hour leaves none at all.

Check your default at Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Seatings → Default duration, and remember that this duration includes turnaround time. If you use Set duration based on number of people, check the rule that applies to the party size that is failing, since a longer duration for big groups can quietly close the end of the service to them.

Then open the opening hour at Menu → Settings & add-ons → General → Opening hours. The form shows a Last booking slot line that tells you the answer directly. If it is earlier than you expect, either shorten the duration or move Guests leave by later.

6. Lead time and booking horizon

Two settings at Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Limits decide how close to now and how far ahead guests can book:

• Minimum time in advance removes every slot that starts sooner than that from the current moment. It cuts the front of the day, not the whole of it: with 3 hours set, a guest looking at 16:00 no longer sees 18:30, but the slots after 19:00 are still on offer. Late in the day it can empty everything that is left of a service, which is the classic cause of “today is fully booked but tomorrow is fine”.
• Max time in advance decides how far ahead the calendar goes. Dates beyond it are simply not offered.

7. A limit has been reached

Limits sit on each opening hour, at Opening hours → open the opening hour → Limits: max bookings and max guests, either across the whole opening hour or per time interval. When a limit is reached the slot is full even though tables are free, which is exactly what limits are for. See how to set up limits within opening hours.

Four things catch people out here:

• If you run several opening hours at the same time, each has its own limit. Check every opening hour that covers the time you are testing.
• Bookings that are still waiting for you to accept them, and bookings waiting on the guest’s own confirmation, both count towards limits. A pile of unanswered requests can fill a slot on paper while the tables sit empty.
• A limit of 0 means no limit. Setting a limit to zero does not close a slot.
• If Activate waitlist is on for the opening hour, times past the limit still show, but as waitlist sign-ups rather than confirmed times, and the waitlist has its own per-interval cap.

8. The day or a time window is closed

If a single date or a single part of a service is blocked, look for a close:

• Close bookings today may still be active on that date. Open the date in the Schedule, List or Floor plan view and check the three dots menu, where the entry reads Open bookings today when the day is closed.
• Closed time intervals and special opening hours live at Menu → Settings & add-ons → General → Opening hours → the Special tab. A closed special can cover a single date or a whole period, and it wins over your normal hours. Restaurants often have several stacked up from months ago.
• Closed tables block individual tables for part of a day. They show in the Schedule on the table’s own row.

Blocking on purpose is covered in block tables, areas and times from online booking and close online bookings for the rest of the day.

9. Online booking is switched off

If guests see “Online booking is currently disabled, please get in touch” rather than a fully booked message, the booking page itself is off. Go to Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Managing bookings → New online bookings and turn off Disable booking page & widget.

While you are on that screen, check Accepting new online bookings too. It does not cause a fully booked message, but it explains the opposite complaint: with Manually accept or decline each booking, table availability is not checked at all, so every time inside your opening hours stays on offer and arrives as a request for you to answer.

10. Party size is outside your allowed range

Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Limits also holds Min people on an online booking and Max people on an online booking. Above the maximum, guests see your Above max notice instead of times, which is the message telling them to call you. If you have not written one, the “more” option is hidden entirely.

11. The date belongs to an Experience

If you use Experiences, the days and times that belong to an experience are deliberately kept out of the regular booking flow. Guests reach them by picking the experience at the start of the booking page, or through the link you shared. A date that only carries an experience therefore shows no regular times, which is working as intended, not a fault. If it is an Experience rather than the regular booking flow that shows fully booked, see why does my experience show fully booked?.

12. Tables held by an unfinished payment

If you require a prepayment or no-show fee, the tables on a booking stay blocked while the guest finishes paying or authorizing their card. That window is set by Payment completion time at Menu → Settings & add-ons → Payment → Online payment. A handful of abandoned checkouts can hold real capacity for the length of that window before the bookings are removed automatically.

13. Google can lag behind

Bookings themselves move between Resos and Google in real time. What can lag is availability: Google shows it 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. The detail is in block tables, areas and times from online booking.

Still stuck? Send us this

If none of the above explains it, we can look at your account. To get an answer in one reply instead of five, send us:

• The exact link your guests use.
• The date, the time and the party size you tried, exactly as you tried them.
• A screenshot of what you see on the booking page.
• Whether it fails for every party size or only above a certain number.

Write to hi@resos.com with those four things and we will trace it in your setup.