When a customer starts a booking on your public page, their spot in the event is temporarily held until they finish the booking or the reservation period expires. This prevents double-booking of the space before the original customer completes the transaction.
This article covers:
How to set the reservation period
By default, Bookwhen sets the checkout reservation period to 15 minutes.
To change this, select Settings from the left-hand menu, then Booking preferences. From here, select Edit next to Booking:
Add your preferred time into the field (the number represents minutes):
Select Save to save your changes.
If, for example, you set your checkout reservation period to '15 minutes,' the customer has 15 minutes to select the Book now button (highlighted below):
If they don't complete the booking, the space will become available for others to book again after 15 minutes.
💡 Important note
If you've set a ticket to close at a specific time, but a customer adds it to their basket before that time, they can still complete the booking within the checkout reservation period. For instance, if the ticket closes at 2 pm, and a customer adds it at 1:58 pm with a 15-minute reservation period, they have until 2:13 pm to complete the booking.
Events appearing as fully booked
There may be occasions when your event appears as fully booked. When a booking starts, a 'checkout' reservation is created, temporarily occupying a space on the event.
If there's only one space left for your event and a customer adds the ticket to their basket, the event may appear 'sold out' on your schedule page, despite one spot being available.
This will be resolved either when:
The customer completes the booking or
The checkout reservation period passes, and the space gets rereleased.
If you have the Waiting list feature enabled, you may encounter a similar scenario where the system reserves available space until everyone on the list is contacted.
You can check out your Bookings tab and use the Checkout filter to review the booking in progress:
💡 To note: You cannot 'force complete' a checkout booking. The customer must start a new booking if it isn't completed in time.
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