How do booking treats work?

Treats are what a promotion gives a table booking — a free dessert, a welcome drink — because deposits are never discounted. How customers apply them, how staff redeem them, and what cancellations do.

Table bookings take treats — a free dessert, a welcome drink, a glass of fizz — 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 treat card — "Your treat: …" — with the code if there was one and the instruction to show the confirmation at the table. The treat also appears as an "Included with this booking" box in the booking confirmation and reminder emails (the email editor exposes it as the {{offerPerkText}} and {{offerCode}} placeholders on those two templates).

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

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 treats 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 treat done, and either one updates the other:

• One tap on the booking — the booking's detail panel (dashboard or staff portal) shows a Treat section with the treat 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 treats 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 treats 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 treat 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 treat.

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)?