Table management software. Tables that combine.

How table combining works for group bookings

You decide which tables can go together. On the floor plan, tables join a "Pushes together with" group and you connect the ones that touch, so the booking page only ever joins tables your staff could push together in the room.

When a guest asks for more seats than any single free table has, the booking page looks for a combination of up to four connected tables, the fewest tables first and then the fewest empty seats. It books the combination as one reservation, in the same flow every other guest uses, and the guest gets one confirmation.

• A party that needs two tables books them together as one reservation.
• The combination is offered on your normal public booking page.
• It also steps in when your one big table is already taken, seating the group across smaller tables instead.

Table combining comes with Venue Growth, Venue Pro and Venue Custom.

Large group bookings without the phone call

A party too big for one table has usually meant a phone call, so someone can check the floor and piece two tables together by hand. That puts your front of house in the loop for every big group, on a quiet Tuesday lunch and a full Saturday night alike.

With combining on, the guest enters their party size like anyone else, and the booking page works out the tables and confirms the booking without a call or a hold-for-review step.

Some groups you'd still rather talk to first. Set a maximum online party size, anything up to 30, and bigger groups get an option to enquire and send you a group enquiry instead of booking. Setting that limit needs Venue Growth or above.

Service periods: separate hours and turn times for lunch and dinner

Lunch and dinner aren't the same shift. A lunch crowd usually turns over faster and the sitting runs a shorter window. Split your hours into named services and each one gets its own settings:

• Hours, which can differ by day of the week.
• Last seating, the latest a party can be booked in.
• Turn time, how long a table is held for one booking, with optional different turns by party size.
• Booking interval, how often start times are offered.
• Max covers, an optional cap on how many guests online bookings can seat at once.

Because turn time is set per sitting, every slot is checked against the turn time of the service it falls in, combined tables included, so a booking is only confirmed when a table is free for its whole turn. A table seated at 6:45pm on a two-hour dinner turn isn't offered again at 8:30pm, even though a faster lunch turn would have freed it by then.

A late service that runs past midnight stays one sitting

A late dinner, or a bar that trades from 6pm to 2am, is one sitting in Gaplessly. Give a service a closing time earlier than its opening time and it runs into the next morning, belonging to the day it opened. Reservations and availability aren't split at the calendar date, so the sitting's hours and turn time apply straight through midnight.

A sitting is tables filled and staff on for one continuous stretch, and a hard cut at midnight would either end it mid-service or restart it as a new one. The live floor follows the same rule: at 12:30am, last night's service is still the one running.