Availability

Availability controls when guests can book your venue and what they can book at any given moment. You’ll find it under each venue’s Settings → Availability tab, which is split into four panels: General, Shifts, Access Rules and Staffing.

Think of it as a set of layers. Your venue defaults (default duration, party sizes and so on, set under Tables) apply everywhere unless a shift or an access rule narrows or overrides them for a particular part of the week.

General

The General panel sets venue-wide availability rules.

Late reservations

Mark late after sets how many minutes past a reservation’s start time the platform waits before flagging an un-checked-in reservation as Late. The default is 15 minutes. Enter a number of minutes and Save.

This setting only governs the Late flag. Marking a reservation a no-show (and charging any held deposit) is a separate action, controlled by the Late / No-Show toggle on the access profile that applies to the booking, not here. Turn that toggle on and set its threshold to have un-arrived reservations auto-marked as no-shows once their booking window has fully elapsed.

Time periods

Time periods are named parts of the day - for example Lunch, Dinner or Late - that you can reuse elsewhere. Rather than typing start and end times into every shift or access rule, you define a time period once here and then pick it by name. This keeps your service windows consistent across the venue.

Blackout dates

Blackout dates close your venue for a date or range regardless of your normal availability - bank holidays, private hire, refurbishments and the like.

For each blackout you set:

From and To dates
A short description (so your team knows why)
Which flows it blocks - you can independently switch off Guest list, Events and Reservations

Because the three flows are independent, you can, for example, close table reservations for a private event while still letting the guest list run.

Live availability

Live availability shows guests a “how busy are we” indicator - a traffic-light chip that reflects how full your venue is for the day they’re looking at:

Chip	Meaning
🟢 Quiet	Plenty of room - lots of availability left.
🟠 Busy	Filling up - still space, but going fast.
🔴 Full	Very little or no space left for that day.

The light is worked out automatically from the day’s booked covers against your venue’s table capacity, so it moves on its own as bookings come in - there’s nothing to update by hand. Venues that run on guest lists only (no tables) use a fixed reference so the chip still reflects how busy the night is.

To turn it on, open Settings → Availability → General, find the Live availability section and switch on Show live availability. The change saves automatically.

When it’s on, guests see the chip in:

the booking wizard,
your embeddable booking widget (on the first step), and
your venue’s tile on the guest search page.

Live availability is off by default, so existing venues don’t change until you opt in. Switch it off again at any time and the chip disappears for guests.

Shifts

Shifts are your recurring service windows - the repeating pattern of when the venue trades across a normal week. A shift says “on these days, between these times, this is how we serve”.

Create a shift with the shift editor:

Field	What it does
Name	A label for the shift, for example Weeknight Dinner or Weekend Late.
Schedule	A start and end date bounding when the shift is active (leave open-ended for an ongoing shift).
Days	Day tiles - pick the days of the week the shift runs.
Times	Either enter custom start/end times, or select a time period you defined under General.

A shift sets the recurring open-hours window - the days and times the venue trades - and, optionally, shift-wide service limits (below). Party size, duration and payment settings stay on the access profile attached to each access rule (see How the layers fit together below).

Service limits

Each shift has an optional Service limits section with five independent toggles. Turn on only the ones you need - each counts every booking arriving in the shift, across all access rules, staff bookings and walk-ins, so they work alongside each access profile’s own limits: a booking must fit both.

Lever	What it does
Pacing	Caps the covers arriving in any 15-minute window (:00, :15, :30, :45) across the whole shift. An empty window always takes one booking. For example, cap the kitchen at 30 arrivals every 15 minutes even though two access rules are each paced at 20 on their own.
Max covers	Caps the total covers for the shift on a date, across every access rule - for example, 120 covers for Lunch however they’re split between rules.
Open areas	Only these seating areas are offered during the shift. An access rule offers tables in areas that are both on the rule and open here - handy for closing the Terrace for Dinner.
Last online booking time	Online bookings stop this many minutes before the shift ends; staff can still book. The editor previews the cutoff, for example “Last online arrival 22:00” for a shift ending at 23:00 with a 60-minute cutoff.
Largest online party	Parties larger than this must call the venue to book in this shift; staff can still book.

If a booking time falls in two shifts, both shifts’ limits apply. A guest who hits a shift limit sees a message to pick another time, day, or to call the venue; a staff booking that would break a shift limit shows a warning naming the shift, with the option to proceed anyway.

The access profile editor’s Pacing, Max covers and Areas sections flag when a shift covering the same hours also limits that rule, and name the shift if its limit is tighter.

Access Rules

Access Rules are the most granular layer. Each rule is a per-slot definition of what a guest can book at a specific time, and it’s what appears to guests as a bookable option.

Every access rule has a type:

Type	Used for
Table Reservation	A bookable table slot - drives your reservations floor.
Guest List	A guest-list slot - a name-on-the-list entry rather than a table.
Private Hire	An enquiry-only option for private hire - not a bookable slot. Guests see it on the venue page and can send a private-hire enquiry.

For each rule you configure:

Setting	What it does
Name	Internal name for the rule.
Schedule / days / times	When the rule is active (as with shifts, days of the week and a time window).
Guest-Facing Display	The title, description and image guests see for this option in the booking wizard and widgets.
Hide from app	Keep the rule live but hidden from the guest app - handy for private or link-only availability.
Access Profile	A reference to a reusable Table or Guest List access profile that supplies the detailed rules - party sizes, deposits, pricing, policies, capacity, admission rules and so on.

A rule’s time window can run past midnight (for example 19:00-00:30) to cover a late shift - a booking placed any time within that window still matches the rule, including after midnight itself.

Changing a rule for specific dates

Saving an edit to an existing rule asks what the change applies to:

Apply to	What happens
This day only	The change applies to the calendar day you opened the rule from. The rule goes back to normal after that day.
A date range	Pick a from and to date. The rule goes back to normal once the range ends.
Entire series	The change applies to the rule itself, on every date it runs.

This day only and A date range create a dated change: a copy of the rule with your edits that runs in its place for those dates, leaving every other rule untouched - changing Main Bar for 1 to 14 Nov, for example, leaves Treehouse exactly as it was.

Tick Not running on these dates instead of editing the settings to switch the rule off for the day or range, rather than changing it.

A dated change shows on the calendar as its rule’s name and date range, for example “Main Bar · 1 to 14 Nov”, and can be opened and edited on its own. Revert to normal on a dated change removes it, returning those dates to the rule’s usual settings. Deleting a rule deletes its dated changes along with it. A rule can’t have two dated changes with overlapping dates.

Editing a rule’s Entire series doesn’t change any dated change already sitting on top of it for its dates - the save dialog warns you when this applies.

Bookings already made keep their table, time and deposit even if the rule changes afterwards. For capacity (max covers) and reporting, a rule and its dated change count as one: max covers adds them together, and reports show a single row for the rule.

Pricing and deposits

For a Table Reservation rule, linking a price list to the rule is what drives deposit card holds at booking time. See Pricing and Deposits & card holds.

How the layers fit together

Venue defaults apply everywhere as a baseline.
Shifts define your recurring service windows - the days and times the venue trades - and can set shift-wide service limits that apply across every rule running in them.
Access rules define the specific bookable options within those windows, each backed by an access profile, and control exactly what guests see and can book slot by slot.

Set your defaults first, shape the week with shifts, then expose bookable options with access rules.

Staffing

The Staffing panel sets how the Analytics staffing & prep plan sizes suggested headcounts for this venue. That plan turns your predicted demand into a per-service front-of-house and kitchen headcount, and these three ratios are what it uses to do the sums. They don’t affect bookings or what guests see - they only shape the staffing suggestion. Leave them untouched to use the platform defaults.

Setting	What it does	Default
Covers per front-of-house	One front-of-house staff member is suggested per this many covers in a service.	16
Covers per kitchen (BOH)	One kitchen (back-of-house) hand is suggested per this many covers in a service.	25
Minimum staff per open service	Any open service with covers never suggests fewer than this many front-of-house and kitchen staff.	1

The suggestions are sized to the busy case (the upper end of the forecast range), so a service is staffed for a high night rather than an average one. A venue left on the defaults behaves exactly as it did before this setting existed.

If a plan or export spans several venues with different ratios, its subtitle reads “per each venue’s Staffing settings”, so it’s clear each venue is sized to its own numbers.