Session Availability and Booking Closing Times
In this article, we’ll explain how booking closing times affect session availability and how to prevent confusion related to past and future bookings.
What is Booking Closing Time?
Booking closing time refers to the cutoff time before a session starts when bookings are no longer allowed. Setting an appropriate closing time prevents customers from booking into sessions that have already started or ended.
By default, if no closing time is set, bookings remain open until midnight of the session day. This is to allow users book into a session they attend on the day, who may have forgotten to book or joined as a trial on site.
How Ticket Availability Works
When setting up a class or activity, you can define several types of tickets, including:
- Single Session Tickets: These allow users to book a spot for just one session at a time.
- All Session Tickets or Subscription Tickets: These allow users to book all remaining sessions in a term or block at once.
For all session or subscription tickets, availability is based on the total number of spaces left in all future sessions. However, if a session has already occurred earlier in the day, but no booking closing time is set for the activity, that session will still be counted in the availability check. If you would like to prevent this from happening, you can set the booking closing time for this activity to be 1 minute before the session starts.
FAQs
Question: How can I stop users from booking a class that has already taken place?
Answer:
To prevent bookings for past sessions, you can set a booking closing time. This can be done by navigating to the ‘Settings’ tab on the Create/Edit Activity form and adjusting the time to disallow bookings a few minutes before the session starts.
For example, setting the closing time to 1 minute before the session begins ensures that once the session starts, no further bookings will be allowed for that specific session. If no closing time is set, users can still book a session up until midnight on the day it takes place.
Question: Why does the system show “sold out” for all session tickets when there are still spaces available for future sessions?
Answer:
This happens because the system includes today’s session in its availability check if the booking closing time isn’t set. To resolve this issue, set the booking closing time to 1 minute before the session starts. This ensures that once today's session begins, it will no longer be counted in future availability checks. As a result, customers will be able to book future sessions without the past session affecting availability.