You can quickly and easily create waitlists for your classes and events with Smoothbook. Please note that waitlists are disabled by default, if you would like to quickly enable waitlists for your organisation select ‘settings’ from the main menu and click on the ‘calendar settings’ icon. Close to the top, on the left hand side, you will see a checkbox to enable waitlists:
If this setting is checked, all of your services will offer waitlists. If you would like to switch waitlists off for certain services you can do that by selecting ‘settings’ from the main menu and clicking on the ‘resources and services’ icon. If you select ‘edit’ against your service you will see a setting to enable / disable waitlists for that particular service.
The number of available appointments (or openings) for your timeslot is configured on the scheduling page when you create your shift:
So if the above example was a class, at most 10 people will be able to book the class through the booking calendar (if you add people to a class yourself through the ‘manage appointments’ interface, you can overbook as much as you like).
Smoothbook supports waitlists meaning that if a timeslot is fully booked people can add themselves to the waitlist. If someone cancels and a place in the timeslot becomes available, the people on the waitlist will receive an email with a link to book the timeslot.
The system will not automatically book your customers in from a waitlist; your customers must complete the booking process: payments, terms and conditions, etc. themselves. Booking for the newly available timeslot is first come, first serve: whoever books first will take the appointment – there is no priority in the waitlist.
If people have been added to a waitlist you will be able to see the waitlist in the ‘manage appointments’ interface. (You can see this by selecting ‘appointments’ -> ‘manage appointments’ from the main menu. The waitlist is denoted with the hourglass icon and shows the number of people on the waitlist.
You can view the waitlist and remove people from it by clicking on the icon.
- Any time that the number of appointments drops below the number of openings, the people on the waitlist will be emailed with an invitation to book
- This includes if you delete appointments / reserved slots through the ‘manage appointments’ interface