Having full control over your online bookings is easy with Dineplan. You can access your availability settings on your account at any time and manually close off any time, date, shift and/or area for online bookings.
There are a few factors that affect your online availability. This article is a quick use guide to getting going.
For an in depth look at each of these, see our Online Availability section in our Knowledge Base by clicking here.
To access your availability settings, log into your Dineplan account and click on the Availability tab on the left (or click here once logged in)
Seating Areas
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You can see which areas you have created and which are available for online bookings. Make sure that you are happy with which areas are available or not. To change an area's online availability, please contact Dineplan Support Team.
Deleting a seating area will remove all reservations and availability for this area. Unless you are 100% sure of what you are doing, Do Not Do This. You can contact our support team to help you with this at any time.
Shifts
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Your shifts set which days and times each area is available for bookings.
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Edit each shift to adjust this accordingly and make sure that you have the correct areas open on the right days and time.
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Here you can also adjust further online availability settings such as Table Turn Time, Pacing, Limit Last Minute Bookings and Close Shift Prior To Start.
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Click HERE for Shifts in depth.
Table Turn Time
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Adjusting this sets how much time after the start time of a reservation it is "marked as left" and the availability of that reservation is made available again for another booking.
Pacing
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Sets a cap on when online bookings stop for each time step. Time steps default to every 30 minutes, but can be set differently. If you are unsure of your time step, check with our Support Team.
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Online bookings at each time step will close when the number of covers set is reach at each time.
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You can override the pacing when manually adding reservations.
Limit Last Minute Bookings
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Prevents a guest from making an online booking that is within "x" minutes from the time that the booking is being made.
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This is a rolling setting, so if set to 60 minutes, guests can make an online booking at any time, but the reservation time cannot be within 60 minutes from the time that the booking is being made.
Close Shift Prior To Start
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Closes online bookings for the whole shift for the day, from "x" minutes before the shift starts.
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If set to 120 minutes for a Dinner shift that is set up to take the first booking time at 17h00, then from 15h00 on the day, online bookings will be closed for that whole shift.
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If you are worried about online bookings being made during your shift when your staff are busy on the floor and not checking Dineplan, use the Close Shift Prior to Start setting and then you can print your reservations at the start of your shift to work off of this knowing that no more reservations can be made online through Dineplan for that shift.
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Pacing is a great way to manage your kitchen's capacity by spreading out your online bookings and making sure that you don't have too many bookings all arriving at the same time.