How do booking perks work?

Perks are treats attached to table bookings — deposits are never discounted. How customers apply them, how staff redeem them, and what cancellations do.

Table bookings take perks — a treat like a free dessert or a welcome drink — rather than money-off discounts. That's deliberate: booking deposits are never discounted, so a promotion aimed at bookings describes what the customer gets at the table, and your team honours it during the visit.

What the customer sees

When you have a live booking promotion with a code, a Have a promo code? box appears on the details step of your booking page (and in the embedded widget). After booking, the confirmation screen shows a perk card — "Your perk: …" — with the code if there was one and the instruction to show the confirmation at the table. The perk also appears as a voucher box in the booking confirmation and reminder emails (the email editor exposes it as the {{offerPerkText}} and {{offerCode}} placeholders on those two templates).

Perks can also apply automatically — a birthday, first-visit, day-of-week or off-peak trigger attaches the perk with nothing to type. One offer per booking: a booking carries at most one perk.

Staff can add a code too

Taking a booking over the phone or at the front desk? The new-booking form has a collapsed Add promo code row — click it and type the customer's code into the Enter the customer's promo code box. The code is checked when you confirm the booking: an invalid code stops the booking so you can correct it before anything is saved. The row appears only when your plan includes promotions and you have a live booking promotion with a typed code — automatic perks attach with nothing to type, so an automatic-only setup shows no box. The walk-in form has the same Add promo code row, with the same rules — an invalid code stops the walk-in before anything is saved.

Redeeming at the table

Staff have two interchangeable ways to mark a perk done, and either one updates the other:

• One tap on the booking — the booking's detail panel (dashboard or staff portal) shows a Perk section with the perk text and a Redeem button. Once tapped it shows who redeemed it and when.
• Scan in the Scanner — a member's card scan surfaces their waiting perks for one-tap redemption.

Redeeming is exactly-once — a second tap or scan shows it's already been redeemed. Every role, including Hosts, can redeem perks by default (the permission is revocable per role).

Cancellations, changes and no-shows

• Customer cancels within your cancellation window — a one-time code goes back to the customer's allowance (the use is returned).
• Customer cancels late (past your deadline) — the code is voided, matching industry practice.
• You cancel the booking — the use is returned.
• No-show — the perk is voided.
• Customer changes the booking so the offer no longer qualifies (for example moving off the trigger's day) — they see a clear warning and must confirm before the change goes through without the perk.

Every one of those transitions is recorded on the Promotions page's History tab, per code and per booking.

Related: What can Promotions do? · How do I create a promotion? · How does the Scanner work at the venue? · How do I cancel a booking (and what happens to the deposit)?