Time Slot Restrictions

Time slot restrictions allow you to control how soon or far in advance your customers can book online.

When to Use Slot Restrictions

Time slot restrictions are helpful in various situations to ensure smoother scheduling and better resource management. Here are two key use cases:

1. Prevent Booking Too Far in Advance: If you want to limit how far ahead customers can book, you can set a time slot restriction to allow only bookings within a specific window, such as 14 days. This ensures that customers can't book indefinitely into the future and helps you maintain control over your schedule.
2. Create a Booking "Buffer": Another useful application is creating a buffer between now and the next available time slot. For example, you can set a restriction that prevents customers from booking a session within 24 hours of the session's start time. This gives you or your instructors ample time to prepare or travel to the facility before the session begins.

Create a Slot Restriction

Time slot restrictions are created at the service level, so you will need to set this up for each service, should you wish to do so. The time slot restriction is found in the Advanced Settings area of each individual service,

Start Period & Start Unit

To set limits on how far from now someone can begin booking, you can set Start Period to either minutes, hours, or days, and Start Unit to the number of your choice.

For example, if your instructor needs at least 5 hours to get to the facility, you can set the Start Period to hours and the Start Unit to 5. This will prevent customers from booking any time slots within the 5 hours leading up to a scheduled session, ensuring enough time for travel and preparation.

These settings help manage last-minute bookings and provide a buffer for your instructors and resources.

End Period & End Unit

To limit how far in advance someone can book, you can use the End Period and End Unit settings. These allow you to control the maximum booking window, ensuring customers cannot book beyond a certain time frame.

For example, you don't want customers booking beyond 30 days out, so you would set the End Period to days and the End Unit to 30. This will prevent customers from booking any time slots more than 30 days ahead of the current date.

Note: You can choose to set either a Start Limit or End Limit, or both. Setting both is not required to create the restriction, giving you flexibility in how you manage your booking window.

Different Restrictions for Members

Similar to how pricing is setup in Swift, you can create different time slot restrictions for the public (non-members) vs. members, allowing you to give members a different window to book than non-members.

To do this, you'd create a restriction and set "Applies to Membership Group(s)" to Public (Non Members). And then you can create another restriction, assigned to a membership group or groups.