Your first booking

How a customer books a spot on one of your events, from the widget to confirmation.

1. Open the booking widget

Customers reach the widget in two ways:

• Embedded on the company's site via the generated snippet, or
• Directly at /widget/calendar (the URL the snippet's iframe loads).

The widget lists the company's upcoming published events that are inside their booking window. (Inside the staff app, the Bookings nav link opens the bookings manager — not the widget.)

2. Pick an event

Each event shows its date and availability. The exact remaining-places count appears only once availability drops to the event's show_bookable_threshold or below. Sold-out events offer the waitlist when the event has waitlist_enabled.

3. Choose seats / time

Depends on the event's booking_mode:

• Fixed slots — pick a seat in an area, then a time slot (seat_time capacity).
• Flexible window — pick a people count and a time window. If the event has seats, the customer also picks a seat (no fixed time slot); without seats the window is booked on the event itself.

When the bookable exposes several price rows (e.g. adult, child), the customer sets a quantity per price; the people total must equal the sum of the per-price quantities.

4. Confirm and pay

• Free bookings (total 0) skip payment and confirm immediately — state Free.
• Promo codes — the "I have a promo code" field parks the booking in PromoPending for staff review instead of charging the card. Approved codes confirm the booking (fully covered) or email the booker a link to pay the remainder; rejected ones fall back to cancellation or full payment, per the staff's choice.
• Paid bookings redirect to Stripe Checkout on the company's connected account. A capacity hold (booking.hold_minutes, default 30 min) reserves the spot while paying; booking.max_hold_lifetime_minutes (default 90 min) is the hard cap on the whole flow.
• The bookings:expire-holds sweeper (every 5 min) expires lapsed holds — and settles Checkout sessions Stripe already captured, so a slow payment still confirms instead of being lost.

5. Done

The finish page (/booking/{booking}/{outcome}/finish) shows the booking code and an .ics calendar download. Reminder emails go out 24 h and 1 h before the event start (bookings:send-reminders, hourly).

Event full? With waitlist_enabled on, customers join the queue and receive an offer link when a spot frees up.