Receiving and managing booking requests

If you have added a booking widget to your website you will receive bookings and booking requests directly into your system. 

This article shows how to manage booking requests on the back office. You can also manage booking requests directly on your EPOS.

Note: You won't need to follow the steps in this article for any auto-confirmed bookings. Though if you have configured your availability checking settings so that bookings come through as requests within a certain notice period, you may still receive some bookings that you will need to manually accept or decline. You will also still receive bookings as requests if they require more than one table to accommodate them.

When you receive a new booking request, you will receive an email to the address you have set up for booking notifications in the Email notifications of the Back Office set up module.

The email you receive will include a link to the booking request on the back office, so you can go straight to it to check availability and accept or decline the request.

The check availability button will take you to the bookings grid view to easily see your current bookings and available tables. 

You can also check for available tables by clicking on the Available tables dropdown and allocating a free table from there.

Note: If you have set up booking types linked to specific tables or areas, you will only able to allocate a booking to a table that is valid for the particular booking type.

You can view all your booking requests by going to the main bookings page on the back office. You will see the booking requests have a blue status label with a tick and cross at the right of the page, where you can directly accept or reject them.

You can use the bookings grid view to see if you can accommodate any requests and allocate them a free table.

Clicking on a booking request from the grid view will show you the details and give you the option to confirm or decline it.

When you confirm or decline a request, an email will be sent to the customer who made the request to inform them. 

The email will use the templates you have configured for the booking confirmation/declined emails. You will also be given the opportunity to edit it for this specific booking here.

Before or after accepting a booking request, you may wish to add a deposit for the booking.