Customers say they can't book a table
Why no times are showing on your booking page, and how to open them back up.
When a customer tells you there is nothing available on your booking page, one of the following is nearly always the reason. They are listed roughly in the order worth checking them.
1. Are reservations switched on?
Settings → your location → General → Reservations has to be switched on before anybody can book online at all. If it is off, the booking page simply has nothing to offer.
2. Are your reservation hours set?
Reservation hours are separate from your business hours. If somebody set your business hours when the restaurant was first set up and never touched the reservation hours, there may be no bookable window at all, even though you are clearly open.
Check under Settings → your location → Opening Hours, switching to Reservation Hours at the top of the page.
3. Is it too soon, or too far ahead?
Two settings in Reservation settings quietly rule dates out without saying anything on the customer’s screen:
- Same-Day Notice is the least notice you accept. If it is set to four hours, nobody can book for tonight after about four o’clock in the afternoon.
- Advance Booking is how far ahead your diary opens. If it is 30 days, a customer trying to book for a date next month is shown nothing at all.
4. Is the party too big or too small?
Minimum and Maximum Party Size decide who gets offered anything in the first place. A party of ten looking at a maximum party size of eight sees no availability whatsoever, rather than a message inviting them to ring you, so the booking is lost unless they happen to call anyway.
5. Have you hit your own capacity limits?
Max Reservations Per Slot and Max Covers cap how much you accept at each time, and once a slot reaches its limit it stops being offered. That is the setting working exactly as intended, but it is worth checking when your dining room is visibly half empty, because the limit may have been set lower than the kitchen can genuinely handle.
6. Did someone block the times?
Open Reservations → Manage Availability and look at the date in question. Individual times may have been set to Unavailable, quite possibly for a function that was later cancelled without anybody reopening the slots.
It is worth checking the Holidays page for that date as well.
7. Are there tables to give?
If you use a floor plan, a booking needs a table with enough seats on it. A party of six cannot be seated anywhere if every table you have seats four and no table combinations have been set up, because Dinerly will not assume two tables can be pushed together unless you have told it so.
The quickest test
Open your own booking page and try to book the table the customer wanted, for the same number of people on the same date. Then change one setting at a time and try again after each change. Doing it one at a time is what tells you which rule is actually responsible, and it usually takes about a minute.
Last updated 20 September 2026