What are time slots?

Time slots are used to manage the booking availability you want to create for each schedule and comprise of the following element:

• Time slot: the actual time i.e. 12:00 - these are defined with a start time & end time;
• Frequency i.e. 15 minutes - you can have the following intervals between time slots: 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes. The interval does not have to be the same throughout a schedule.
• Duration i.e 90 minutes - this is the number of minutes you wish to allocate to a booking so that the system can calculate your capacity accordingly throughout the session. Please note that the Duration can be overridden when taking a telephone booking. The duration is also automatically overridden if you set up different rules in Booking Length (time allocation based on number of guests in a booking).

For each time slot, you can specify:

• The number of guests or bookings you wish to take for that time slot;
• That number can be broken into number of guests or bookings available for web bookings only and number of guests or bookings available in total for that time slot.

Example:

You may want to take a maximum of 20 guests in total for a time slot, but only up to a maximum of 12 on the web. If you take bookings for 8 guests on the web, then you can take up to 12 guests for telephone bookings. The system will stop taking web bookings for that time slot once the threshold has been reached (in this example, 12 guests).

Time slots override

There is an override setting that allows you to accept more telephone bookings if you need to: 

• Show all timeslots by default on add/edit tel booking - if set to YES, then you will be able to take telephone bookings over and above the time slot allocated Max. No (Total) as all time slots will be shown.
• Visible all timeslots check box on add/edit tel booking - if set to YES, then you will be able to take telephone bookings over and above the time slot allocated Max. No (Total) but only by ticking the Show all time slots option.

Note: if you use table management, the override will only allow you to add a telephone booking if a table is available to accommodate the booking (and you are allowed to under / over book a table in terms of number of guests that table can accommodate.

Editing / deleting time slots

• You can modify any element of a time slot when editing a schedule;
• You can delete any time slot when editing a schedule.