How do I control booking times and durations?

Set your time slots, default booking length, customer-choosable durations, duration by party size, and turnaround time.

You control booking times and lengths in Settings → Bookings → Booking rules, mainly in the Booking channels and Time & duration cards. Owners, Admins and Managers can open this page.

Turn booking channels on or off

In the Booking channels card:

• Enable staff bookings (on by default) — lets staff manually create scheduled bookings from the dashboard.
• Accept online table bookings (on by default) — lets customers book a table through your public booking page and widget. Switch this off to pause online bookings entirely.

Time slots and the default duration

In the Time & duration card:

• Set Time slot increments for online bookings — the minute intervals customers can pick from (5, 10, 15, 30, 45 or 60 minutes; the default is 15).
• Set Default online booking duration — how long an online booking lasts when no other rule applies. The default is 90 minutes; you can set anything from 15 to 600.

Food & drinks-only bookings

Available on Plus plan and above. The Food & drinks-only bookings card (on the same page) lets customers book a drinks-only visit separately from a food booking. When it's on:

• Customers pick Food & drinks or your drinks option on the booking page (you can rename the drinks label — the box is on this card; customers see "Drinks only" unless you change it). Their choice shows as a "Booking type" line on the confirmation screen, in the confirmation email, on their manage-booking page and on their My account booking cards, whichever they picked.
• Your team gets the same choice when adding or editing bookings, and existing bookings count as food. While the card is on, every booking row on your dashboard shows its type chip — Food or Drinks — your new-booking alert email includes a "Booking type" row for both types, and staff TV screens badge each card's type too.
• Drinks booking length sets an optional shorter default duration for drinks-only bookings (0 = use your standard booking length). Every other rule — deposits, party caps, customer duration choices, duration by party size — is shared by both types.
• Drinks-only bookings never receive pre-order invitations.
• Drinks-only online hours are set in Settings → Hours → "Drinks-only online booking hours", and the per-type covers caps live on this card too (see How do I cap party sizes and covers?).

Switching the card off hides everything again — nothing is deleted, and old drinks bookings keep their type quietly.

Let customers choose their own duration

Available on Plus plan and above.

• Switch on Customisable booking duration. The first time you enable it, a starter list of options is created for you: 1h, 1h 30m, 2h, 2h 30m, 3h and 4h.
• Add or remove options with the Add button and each chip's ×. Choices run from 30 minutes to 6 hours.

When this is on, it overrides the default duration above — the customer's choice wins over your default length.

If you also switch on Duration by party size, your rules win for every party size a rule covers, and those guests don't see the duration picker at all. A party-size rule exists to get the table back on time, so it isn't something a customer can opt out of by picking the longest option. Customers are only ever offered a length you'll actually honour.

A customer whose party size no rule covers does still see the picker, because there's no rule to enforce for them — see the gap note under Duration by party size below. Cleanest setup: use one or the other — the picker to let customers choose, or a complete set of party-size rules to decide for them.

Lengths that wouldn't finish before you close are greyed out in the picker rather than hidden, so customers can see the option exists and simply won't fit today.

Duration by party size

Available on Plus plan and above.

• Switch on Duration by party size. A starter rule set is created: 1–2 guests → 90 mins, 3–4 → 120, 5–8 → 150, 9–99 → 180.
• Edit each rule's Min, Max and Duration, remove rules with the bin button, or click Add rule.

This automatically sizes online bookings by party size, and overrides both the default duration and the customer duration picker above. It can also apply to walk-ins — there's a separate switch for that in Walk-In settings.

A few things worth knowing:

• Rules are checked in order and the first match wins, so keep the ranges tidy and don't let two rules cover the same party size. The page warns you if they overlap.
• A party bigger than your largest rule gets that largest rule's length. With rules ending at 8 guests, a party of 9 or 12 is treated like the 5–8 band — a big table is never given less time than a smaller one.
• A party size no rule covers gets your default booking duration — or, if you also let customers choose their own duration, that customer sees the picker and their choice is used. Either way the screen shows them what they'll actually get. The page warns you about gaps like that so you can add a rule if you meant to.
• If your team has set a custom length on a booking by hand, that length stays put when the customer changes their party size on the manage-booking page. It isn't quietly reset to the rule.

Turnaround time

Available on Plus plan and above. Set Turnaround time to the number of minutes a table needs between one party leaving and the next sitting down — time to clean and reset. The default is 0, which means no gap anywhere. The gap is applied everywhere a table is offered: the booking times customers see online, table checks when staff add or move a booking, walk-in placement, how soon a cleared table goes to the next waitlist customer, and when their "table ready" text is sent. One deliberate exception: tables freed by a cancellation or no-show go to the next waitlist customer straight away (nobody sat there, so there's nothing to clean) unless you switch on Apply turnaround time after cancellations & no-shows in Settings → Waitlist.

Click Save changes when you're done.

Related: How far ahead (and how late) can customers book? · How are tables assigned to online bookings? · How do I set up and seat walk-ins?