Why does my experience show fully booked?

This assumes you already know how to create an experience, see how to set up and share Experiences first. This guide covers what to check when an experience is active and public but guests still cannot book it: no times offered at all, no times for the party size they want, or guests ending up in plain booking instead of the experience.

Guests see “Sorry, we are fully booked on {$date} - please try another date.” whenever Resos finds no bookable time on that date for that experience. You can replace that text with your own at Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Managing bookings → Booking page & widget → Custom fully booked message. It is one field for the whole restaurant, not a per-experience one, so your wording shows on every fully booked date, experiences and regular booking alike. Tables actually being taken is only one of the reasons, and usually not the one. Regular booking can look perfectly healthy on the same day, because the experience runs on its own schedule with its own settings.

Work through these in order

The first four cover almost every case.

1. Is the date further out than guests can book?

Your account has a booking horizon: Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Limits → Max time in advance. Dates beyond it are never loaded into the booking calendar, so a Christmas or New Year event created in the autumn shows This event has no upcoming dates rather than any times at all. This is different from the fully-booked message, and it is the usual reason next week’s regular bookings look fine while the event looks dead.

Set Max time in advance far enough out to cover your event dates, then reload the booking page.

2. Is the event’s own time window long enough for one booking?

Resos will only offer a time if the booking still finishes before the event ends. The last time it can offer is the Guests leave by time minus the booking duration.

So an event that opens at 17:00 and has guests leave by 19:00 is a two hour window. If the booking duration is 2 hours 30 minutes, no start time fits and the event is never bookable, on any date.

The duration in play is your account’s Default duration unless you turned on Overwrite default seating settings in the experience’s Advanced → Seatings section, in which case it is the duration set there. Either widen the window on the Dates step, or shorten the duration for this experience.

3. Does the date actually match the schedule?

Reopen the Dates step and check it against the exact date the guest is trying.

• A single experience runs on its Date, or across Date to End date if you set one. If you also restricted it to certain weekdays, only those weekdays inside the range are bookable.
• A recurring experience runs on the weekdays you picked, every week or every other week. On an every other week schedule, half the matching weekdays are deliberately skipped.
• Dates in the past are dropped, and the experience is labeled as expired in the list.

4. Do the areas the experience uses still have tables guests can book?

This one only applies if you have Define opening hours per area switched on.

An experience with areas selected uses those areas instead of the areas your regular opening hours use, which is what lets you run an event in a private room that is closed the rest of the week. The flip side is that if those areas cannot take an online booking, the experience has nowhere to seat anyone.

Check in Menu → Settings & add-ons → General → Tables that each area on the experience is marked Available online, and that it still contains tables that are themselves marked Available online. An area stops being bookable online automatically once it has no online-bookable tables left, for example after the last one was switched off or deleted.

You cannot leave this empty: with Define opening hours per area on, the wizard pre-selects every online-bookable area and refuses to save an experience with none. If the setting is off, areas do not apply at all and the experience simply uses your normal setup. Older advice paired Define opening hours per area with Allow guests to choose area; only the first one is needed for experience areas to work.

5. Have the limits already been reached?

Open Advanced → Limits on the experience. Max bookings or Max guests for the whole event, or Max bookings per interval or Max guests per interval, will each close the event down once they are hit.

One thing to know here: these limits only count bookings that were made on this experience. Bookings taken earlier under a regular opening hour on the same day are not counted, and they are not moved onto the experience when you create it. If you want a date to run as the event only, take those existing bookings across yourself, and send guests to the experience from the start.

6. Is the start time too close to now?

Minimum time in advance, in Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Limits, removes times that are too soon. On an event with a short window, that can empty the whole day rather than just trim the first slot.

Guests cannot book for more than a few people

If your experience refuses parties above a certain size, the limit is almost always your table setup rather than the experience.

Resos can only offer a party a table it knows will seat them: a single table with enough seats, or a combination of tables you have configured yourself. It never invents a combination. So if your largest online-bookable table seats 4 and you have not set up any combinations that seat more, 4 is the maximum party size a guest can book, on experiences and on regular bookings alike. This also applies to a fixed-capacity sitting that is not tied to your usual table plan, such as a 30-cover event: availability still resolves through tables and combinations, so create a table or combination that seats the sitting size and mark it Available online.

Add the combinations you want to accept on the Combinations tab per area, in Menu → Settings & add-ons → General → Tables, using Add combination, and mark them Available online. Cover every group size you are willing to take, and remember that a combination is only available while all of its tables are free.

Also check Max people on an online booking in Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Limits, which caps the party size selector no matter what your tables allow.

Keeping guests inside the experience

If you use the Multiple locations add-on, the booking flow can show a dropdown of your other locations at the top of every step. A guest who came in on an experience link and switches location there lands on the other location’s ordinary booking flow, without the experience, and may not notice they have left it.

If that matters for an event, you can turn the dropdown off for the connection in Menu → Settings & add-ons → Bookings → Multiple locations, using Show links to restaurants in booking flow. Otherwise, say plainly in the experience Description or Note, and in the message you send with the link, which location the event is at.

How experiences relate to your opening hours

An experience is a special kind of opening hour. It carries its own dates and times, its own limits, its own payment settings, and optionally its own areas, and it does not follow your regular opening hours for that day. What it does not carry by default is the seating interval and booking duration: those come from your account settings until you turn on Overwrite default seating settings.

That is also why a day can look bookable for regular bookings and unbookable for an experience at the same time. They are two separate schedules.

If you have worked through every check above and the experience still will not book, contact us at hi@resos.com with the experience name and the date, time and party size you tried, and we will take a look.