Blacklisting a guest — Help

What this covers

Flagging a guest you do not want to take bookings from, what it actually prevents, and — just as importantly — what it does not. Needs permission to update guests (Owner, Manager or Host).

How to do it

Open the guest and choose Blacklist Guest. You are asked to confirm, and you can record a reason. Fill the reason in — a flag with no explanation is useless to the colleague who meets it in three months.

To reverse it, use Remove from Blacklist.

What it blocks

New bookings are refused across every normal route:

Your staff creating or changing a booking — refused with "This guest is not allowed to make reservations."
Your public booking page — the guest is told the booking cannot be made.
Event bookings, taken by staff or by the guest on your events page.
Bookings through the API, if you use it.
The AI chatbot — it declines the booking without telling the guest why, the same neutral wording the public booking page uses.

They are also labelled — This guest is blacklisted appears on the profile with the reason, and the flag shows in the guest list and on the caller screen-pop — and you can filter the guest list by it.

The waitlist refuses them too, at the same point as every other route: a blacklisted guest cannot be added to the queue in the first place, and — as a backstop, in case a guest is blacklisted after already being queued — converting an existing entry into a seated reservation is also refused.

Also:

Existing bookings are untouched. Blacklisting does not cancel anything already in the diary — cancel those yourself if that is what you want.
Nothing is sent to the guest. They are not told, and there is no visible change for them.

When to use it — and when not to

Reasonable: repeated no-shows, walking out without paying, abuse of staff, a genuine safety concern.

Not reasonable: a guest who complained, tipped badly, or is simply hard work. The flag is visible to your whole team and outlives the shift on which somebody was annoyed.

A sensible house rule is that only a manager or owner blacklists, even though hosts technically can, and that the reason names a date and a fact.

Writing the reason

Good: "Left without paying a €180 bill, 14 March. Police report filed."
Good: "Four no-shows in six weeks — 2, 9, 16, 23 Feb."
Bad: "Difficult", or anything insulting.

Write it as though it might one day be read out. It is your restaurant's record, it can be exported in a spreadsheet, and the guest could in principle request a copy of what you hold about them. See Your guest data and privacy.

Reviewing it

Filter the guest list by blacklisted once or twice a year. Flags added in the heat of a bad Saturday have a way of quietly outliving their usefulness.