Rolling slots vs fixed seatings
What this covers
The two ways a day can be bookable, how to choose, and the one rule that will stop you saving.
Requires the manage-settings permission and the Fixed Seatings feature.
The two modes
| Rolling slots | Fixed seatings | |
|---|---|---|
| A guest picks | Any time on your interval — 19:00, 19:15, 19:30 | A named service window — "First seating 19:00–21:00" |
| Duration comes from | Your default duration | The seating itself |
| Pacing window | One booking interval | The whole seating |
| Staff pick | A time | A seating, with an escape hatch for another time |
| Suits | Most restaurants | Set menus, tasting menus, fixed turns, high-demand rooms |
It is set per weekday, in the same table as your operating hours. So a restaurant can run rolling slots Monday to Thursday and two seatings on Friday and Saturday, which is a very common shape.
Which suits you
Rolling slots, if
- Guests arrive across the evening and you want to spread them
- Party sizes and durations vary
- You are not usually turning tables twice
- You would rather manage the flow yourself
Fixed seatings, if
- You genuinely need two turns out of a table and cannot leave that to chance
- You serve a set or tasting menu with a known length
- Demand exceeds supply, so certainty is worth more than flexibility
- Your kitchen would rather cook for one room at a time than a rolling stream
The honest summary: seatings trade guest flexibility for your certainty. A guest who wanted 19:45 has to take 19:00 or 21:15. In exchange you know exactly how your evening runs, and you get the second turn.
What changes in seatings mode
For guests
The booking page offers named windows instead of a list of times. Clearer, in fact — "First seating, 19:00" tells a guest more about what to expect than "19:00" does.
For your staff
The booking form offers seatings rather than free times, and the chosen seating supplies the duration, which locks to the window. There is an other time escape for the genuine exception, and a booking made that way is flagged as being outside your seatings — so it is possible, visible, and not the default.
On the Timeline
Seatings appear as bands across the day, so you can see at a glance which sitting a booking belongs to (link The Timeline).
Pacing
The pacing window becomes the whole seating rather than a single interval, and a seating's own max covers takes precedence over your restaurant-wide cap. That is the more natural way to think about it: "this sitting seats 40", not "eight covers per half hour" (link Pacing).
The rule that will stop you saving
A weekday set to seatings must have at least one active seating covering it. Otherwise the save is refused, naming the day:
Friday is set to seatings but no active seating covers it.
The reason is simple: a seatings day with no seatings would be a day with no bookable times at all, and silently unbookable is the worst possible outcome.
So the order of operations is: create the seating first, then switch the day over. The same guard works in the other direction — you cannot deactivate or delete a seating if doing so would leave a seatings weekday uncovered (link Managing seatings).
The safety net if the feature leaves your plan
If Fixed Seatings is no longer on your plan — you downgraded, or a trial ended — every day quietly falls back to rolling slots. Nothing breaks and no day becomes unbookable.
Your configuration is untouched, not deleted: your seatings and your per-day choices are still there, and restoring the feature restores the behaviour exactly. Worth knowing so a downgrade is not frightening, and so you are not surprised when guests suddenly see times instead of sittings.
Good to know
Existing bookings are not rewritten. Switching a day to seatings leaves bookings already in the diary exactly as they are, including ones that do not line up with any sitting.
You can mix freely by weekday, and change your mind as often as you like.
Walk-ins are unaffected. A walk-in is seated now, not booked into a window.