Booking as a guest
The three-part booking funnel, the confirmation and its QR, and how a guest changes or cancels a booking afterwards.
Your booking page is your own address, one per outlet, which you set and can print as a QR code. See Booking policies and setup. A venue with more than one bookable outlet can share a single link, and the guest is asked “Which one are you visiting?” first.
The funnel
One card asks three questions in turn, with a step indicator and a trail of tappable pills carrying the answers already given, so a guest can go back and change one without starting again.
1. How many, and which day. A row of discs for the party size, up to ten, plus an 11+ chip when your outlet allows a larger party online. The header states your online ceiling, read from your settings rather than guessed. Over it, the guest is told that larger groups should call, and the number is a tap-to-call link rather than printed text.
Under it, a five-day strip with a Full calendar disclosure, running from today to the end of your booking window. Days you have closed are drawn as closed. The page re-reads the date each minute, so a phone left open overnight rolls forward on its own.
2. Where and what time. Zones first, if you have more than one bookable room. Every zone is shown and the unavailable ones are disabled with the reason attached: Sold out when you have closed the room, Full when it has filled, Too big when the party is over that room’s limit. A venue with one room skips the question entirely.
Then the slot grid, split into service bands. Slots starting within the next two hours are not offered, and they disappear as the cutoff advances.
3. Your details. Name and phone are required, and the phone is a bare ten digits behind a fixed +91. Email is optional. When WhatsApp is live, the form says so: “Your confirmation arrives on WhatsApp, so the number has to be one you use there.”
Under that, an optional block the floor team sees before the party arrives: Occasion chips, Allergens chips with an + Other free-text escape, and a Special note. The allergen selection is echoed back as “The kitchen will be told: …”.
Last, your House rules, in the order you set. Two of them are always there and always carry live numbers: how long the table is held past the booking time, and how late a free cancellation can be made.
There is no agreement checkbox. The button reads Confirm booking, carrying the chosen date and time, and one line under it says “By reserving you agree to the house rules.”
What the guest gets back
Which of the three outcomes appears depends on your auto-confirm setting and the size of the party.
Confirmed. A card with a tear-off stub carrying a QR code, the label Booking ID and the reference. The line under it reads “Show this at the door. No signal? The booking ID works too.” The guest also gets Add to calendar and Get directions.
Awaiting reply. The same card, but deliberately without the stub, the QR or the calendar link, because a booking that has only been requested is not a table yet. The reference is shown separately, and the message says the venue is reviewing the request.
Enquiry. A party too large to book online, or one arriving when your pending requests are already at their ceiling, gets the enquiry path rather than a dead end: a short form, and the answer that nothing is booked yet and the team will reply.
If a guest already has an active booking, the page says “One thing first” and offers to book another table as well, rather than quietly making a second one.
Changing or cancelling
The only way back into a booking is the secure link in the guest’s own confirmation. There is no lookup form: a reference on its own opens nothing, so a guest who has lost the link has to call you.
From that page a guest sees the live status (Awaiting reply, Confirmed, Arrived or Seated) and can:
- Request a change. The form asks the same four questions again: day, party size, room and time. Sending it does not change the booking. It goes to your team as a change request, and the guest is told the venue will reply either way. A second request replaces the first rather than queueing behind it.
- Cancel. Confirmed with “Cancel this booking? The table goes back to the floor and this link stops working.”
- Show the QR at the door, once the booking is confirmed. This is the fallback when the confirmation message has cropped or stripped the image.
Both the change window and the cancellation window are the same setting: your free-cancellation window. Past it, the button is replaced by a line telling the guest to call you.