Requests, changes and holds
The incoming bell, accepting and declining a booking, answering a change request, and how long a pending request is held.
When your outlet reviews each booking rather than confirming it instantly, every guest submission arrives as a request. Requests are answered from the bell, from the booking’s own sheet, or from the ops console’s Reservations room.
The bell
A bell sits in the app bar on the host stand and in the console’s chrome row, so the count is visible wherever you are standing. The badge counts requests still waiting on you, and it stops at 9 rather than growing.
Open it and you get Incoming requests with three kinds of row:
| Kind | What it is |
|---|---|
| New booking | A guest asking for a table. |
| Change request | A guest asking to move a booking they already have. |
| Large-party enquiry | A party too big to book online, or one past the pending ceiling. |
A new booking reads as its service band, time and party size, with the date shown only when it is not today. An enquiry carries no accept or decline: turning one into a booking is done on the console.
When a request is answered, it does not vanish out from under you mid-glance. The row stays a moment with what happened to it: Accepted on another device, Declined on another device, Expired: the pending hold ran out, Cancelled by the guest, or Handled.
On the ops console the badge counts the whole week while the popover lists tonight, and a Review all button takes you to Reservations for the rest. Empty, either bell reads “All caught up, no new requests.”
Accepting and declining
There is no confirmation dialog. You press, the state changes, and a message tells you what happened.
Accepting a new booking moves it to confirmed. On the ops console it also assigns the smallest free table that fits, or composes a join. If nothing fits, the accept refuses rather than overbooking, and says so: no free table fits a party that size, so nothing was confirmed.
The same Accept and Decline pair is on the booking’s own sheet, so you can answer a request after reading its detail rather than having to go back to the bell. On the ops console the equivalent buttons are Approve and Decline.
The console’s Reservations room also has Accept all that fit, which works down the day’s pending rows one at a time, skips what will not fit, and tells you at the end how many were confirmed and how many need bigger tables. It never stops halfway.
When you are offline, both buttons disable and say so rather than failing silently.
Change requests
A change request shows what the guest is asking for as a from → to summary, built from the same five facts in the same reading order everywhere:
Sat 12 Sep → Sun 13 Sep · Dinner → Lunch · 7:00 PM → 8:30 PM · 2 → 4 covers · Indoor → CourtyardOnly the facts that actually change appear. A request that only changes the note shows the quoted note instead of a summary.
All three surfaces can answer one:
| Surface | Where it appears | Buttons |
|---|---|---|
| Host stand | In the bell, on one line. | Accept / Decline |
| Floor manager | A Change requests group pinned above everything, on every tab. | Accept / Decline |
| Ops console | A Requested change block at the top of the booking’s own drawer. | Approve / Decline |
Approving re-checks that the new service actually fits, rewrites the booking, and releases the tables it was holding if they no longer suit. Because that is a change to the live floor, it is the one action the host stand will not let you take while you are peeking at another service: it disables the buttons and says “Step back to now to answer a change request.”
Declining leaves the booking exactly as it stands.
Two different holds
The word “hold” means two things in Reserve, and they are worth keeping apart.
The pending hold is how long an unanswered request stays answerable. It runs until that booking’s own slot has ended. It is not a countdown from when the guest submitted, and there is no timer the guest can see. Once the slot has passed, the request expires on its own and its capacity is released. In the bell it reads “Expired: the pending hold ran out”, and on the console it lands under Declined.
Hold table for is a different setting entirely: how long a confirmed table waits for a late guest before it goes back to the floor. That is the one the guest reads about in your house rules as “Held for 15 minutes”.
There is also a ceiling on how many requests can be pending at once for one service date, so an outlet reviewing by hand cannot have its whole floor promised away to unanswered requests. Past it, a new submission becomes an enquiry, and nothing is held for it.