How to Set Up Your Venue's Booking System

To get started with setting up your bookings, you'll want to head over to your Bookings Setup, from your overview page this can be found in a couple of spots. Here in the top menu.

Bookings Setup has a number of sections you'll need to populate. Use the left menu to navigate each section. Items with an (*) are required.

First up, your General Settings. These are your default settings some of which can be overridden by certain experiences we'll cover more lately. We've added defaults here but we recommend going through these and adjusting to your needs. It's likely you will have had a setup with the Usefull team to help you configure these correctly.

If you're wanting to use the Booking Guarantee Feature or take Upfront payments for any of your booking experiences. You'll need to setup a Stripe account. Check out this guide for more.

Be sure to add your booking policies and terms, like cancellation policies etc. These are send along with booking confirmation emails.

Operating hours define when your venue is open to accept bookings. These are your default hours but can be adjusted for specific experiences.

Experiences are the items your customers can book on Usefull. We call them experiences because they can be anything — a Wine Tasting Experience, a Degustation Lunch, or even regular items like Dinner. These experiences are what your customers actually book, and each has its own detailed configuration, which we’ll cover in a separate guide. You must have at least one active experience to enable bookings.

Sections & Tables are essential for managing seating in your venue. You must have at least one section with seating options added. If your venue has multiple sections, customers can choose where they’d like to sit—provided the experience they select is available in that section. Sections and tables are automatically assigned when customers book online, based on the rules you set and each table’s capacity.

Table Parings is an optional feature where you can define how your preferred table pairing rules. If this section is left blank. Usefull will try to find an exact table match and then look for tables that can be paired to make up the capacity needed. This just gives you more control.

It's likely from time to time that your venue will be closed for a private function, taking a break, or if a specific section is not available for booking. You'll need to add a Blockout. We'll cover this in more detail in another guide.

Special Dates allow you to flag dates in your booking calendar and setup special booking rules for that day. For example if you require a booking guarantee that is different from your usual booking flow on a special date you can set that up here.

Finally, you can create a booking QR Code and have access to your booking link that you can share to social and on your web site.