A booking that lands ten minutes before the guests walk in can catch your kitchen or front of house out. No bookings within stops guests booking any time that starts too soon: pick a window, and your booking page won’t offer a time that starts within it. It covers your whole venue, every meal and every day.
Set it up
1. Open your online booking settings. In NomNom Web, click Settings at the bottom of the left-hand bar and choose Online Booking & Discover.
2. Click No bookings within. It’s under BOOKING OPTIONS, and says No minimum until you set it.
3. Pick a window. Choose from 15 minutes to 2 hours in quarter-hour steps, then whole hours up to 24 hours. It saves as soon as you pick.
In NomNom Web: Settings → Online Booking & Discover → No bookings within. In the phone app: Settings → Online Booking & Discover → No bookings within.
What guests see
The window rolls forward from the moment the guest looks. With 2 hours set, a guest looking at 5:10pm isn’t offered anything before 7:10pm today: 7:00pm is hidden and 7:15pm shows as normal. A long window reaches into tomorrow, too: set 24 hours, and at 8pm nothing before 8pm tomorrow is offered.
Hidden times simply aren’t shown, and the guest isn’t told why. If nothing is left that day, they see Sorry, we have no availability on this date, please try a different date.
No bookings within, cut-off or minimum notice?
Three settings stop late online bookings. They work together, and the strictest one wins.
- No bookings within (this one) covers the whole venue. It’s a rolling window of up to 24 hours, and times inside it just disappear.
- A meal’s Online booking cut-off is a time of day. Once it passes, that meal takes no more online bookings for the rest of the day, and guests are told online bookings are closed for today. See Closing online bookings for the day: the online booking cut-off.
- A meal’s Minimum notice is a rolling window like this one, but for one meal, and it can be much longer — handy for afternoon tea or a set menu. When every time that day falls inside it, guests are asked for more notice. See Requiring more notice for certain meals.
A meal’s Minimum notice and No bookings within don’t add together: the longer one applies. So a meal with 1 hour of notice, at a venue set to 2 hours, still needs 2 hours.
Good to know
- Your team can still book. Bookings you make in NomNom Web or the phone app ignore it, so you can still seat a walk-in or take a last-minute call. See Taking a booking over the phone.
- Your venue’s clock. The window is measured from the time where your venue is, not where the guest is.
- Events too. It applies to events as well as your regular meals.
- Guests changing their booking. If you let guests change their own booking online, the times they’re offered follow the same window.
- Turning it off. Pick No minimum, and guests can book right up to the start of a time.
- Check it. Test Online Booking, further down the same page, opens your booking page so you can see which times are offered today.