Availability Planning Helpful Tips

Below are some helpful tips when working in Availability Planning.

Existing Reservations

If you had existing reservations that fall within the dates of your new schedule, these reservations will still exist when creating your new schedule. When publishing your new schedule, these reservations will be automatically reassigned to a table that fits them. If a table does not exist that can accommodate that reservation, you will see the reservation under 'unassigned reservations'.

Publishing

Publish a schedule when you are ready to make that reservation availability live. You can always move a schedule back to drafts if you want to remove it from public view. Below are a few things to keep in mind when publishing schedules.

1. Publishing a schedule alone does not release reservations to the public. Visit the Availability page to configure your availability window and make reservations visible to guests.
2. Ensure that you publish a schedule in advance of the first service start date and time
3. When changing the dates of a published schedule, please note the following scenarios:
   • Any overlapping dates that stayed the same, won’t change
   • Any original dates that fall outside the new date range will be cleared
   • Any new dates that fall outside the old date range will apply as normal
   • For example, your original published schedule was 6/1-6/30. You change the dates of that schedule to be 6/15-7/15
     • 6/1-6/14 will get cleared
     • 6/15-6/30 will stay the same
     • 7/1-7/15 will get applied
   • If you want to extend the end date of an existing published schedule, we recommend only moving the end date and leaving the start date as is, to avoid any confusion of the scenarios mentioned above
   • The only time we recommend changing the start date of a published schedule is if you want to clear the availability on all dates prior to that start date 

Table Blocks

You have the ability to block tables for an entire service or for certain periods of time. You can block tables within Availability Planning in advance of your first service of the day. Once your first service starts, any day-of table blocks should be made in Timeline.