How to take table bookings

Set up a booking page, your floor plan, availability and deposits in DineKit, then manage reservations from the diary — free, with no per-cover fees.

DineKit’s Bookings module turns your site into a proper reservations system: a public booking form for diners, a floor plan of your real tables, and a diary where your team takes, moves and confirms reservations. There’s no per-cover fee and nothing to subscribe to — it runs entirely on your own WordPress site.

Before you start

DineKit bookings list for a single day — The day’s diary in list form, grouped by service. Scroll the image sideways to see the full screen.

DineKit is installed and active on your site (see Getting started).
Your Opening Hours are set up — Bookings uses these to work out your lunch/dinner service periods automatically.
If you want to take deposits to cut no-shows, you’ll need your own Stripe account connected first — see Take card payments.
A few tables and a zone or two already sketched out helps, but you can also build your floor plan as you go.

Step by step

In wp-admin, open DineKit > Bookings. If you ran the setup wizard and switched on reservations, your booking page and floor plan starter tables already exist — you can skip straight to Booking Settings.
If you don’t have a booking page yet, either use the dashboard’s “getting started” checklist to auto-create one, or add a new WordPress page and insert the DineKit Booking block (or paste the Book a table Date Time Guests Name Email Phone Anything we should know? (allergies, occasion…) Leave this field empty shortcode) anywhere in the content. Publish the page and that’s your live booking form — link to it from your main menu.
Back in Bookings, click the gear icon to open Booking Settings. This is a full-page settings view with a live preview of the public widget; “Back to diary” returns you to the day-to-day view.
Set your maximum party size (the largest table a diner can request online) and minimum party size (so, say, tables of 8+ aren’t clogged up with solo diners booking through the widget).
Set the slot interval — how often booking times are offered (e.g. every 15 or 30 minutes; DineKit allows as tight as 5 minutes).
Set the turn time (how long you expect a table to be occupied) and a buffer either side for clearing/resetting. These two numbers directly control what DineKit will offer as available — get them close to reality or you’ll under- or over-book yourself.
Check your service periods. These aren’t set separately — they’re pulled straight from your Opening Hours (lunch, dinner, closed days, holiday overrides), so the booking widget only ever offers times you’re actually open. If Opening Hours aren’t set for a day, Booking Settings’ own open/close time is used as a fallback.
Set a covers-per-hour cap if you want a hard ceiling on how many diners can be seated in any given hour, independent of table count — useful if your kitchen, not your seating, is the bottleneck. Once a slot hits the cap the public widget waitlists new requests, though staff can still override the warning from the diary.
Set your deposit rules if you’re taking deposits (see below), and decide whether new bookings should auto-confirm or arrive as pending for a member of staff to approve first.
Finish with widget branding — accent colour, corner radius, and a light or dark style so the public form matches your site rather than looking bolted on.

Building your floor plan

Your floor plan is what makes availability real — DineKit checks actual tables, not just a headcount.

Open DineKit > Floor Plan and add a zone/area for each distinct part of your venue (Restaurant, Bar, Terrace, Private Room…).
Within a zone, add tables: give each a seat count and a shape (round, square, rectangular), then drag it into position and rotate it to match your actual room.
For big parties, join tables into a combo so two or more tables can be offered together as one larger booking unit. DineKit’s best-fit assignment reserves joined tables for parties that actually need them, rather than burning a big combo on a table for two.
If a table is broken, being repaired, or otherwise unusable, mark it out of service — it greys out with a wrench badge and drops out of availability and combos until you switch it back on.
Prefer a list to a map? Toggle to the list view to see every table by zone with its seats, party fit, and any joined/out-of-service badges — handy for a quick audit.

Taking and managing bookings

The diary is your day-to-day view of reservations, with each booking showing a status (pending, confirmed, seated, completed, cancelled, and so on) so front-of-house always knows where things stand.

For a running-the-floor view, switch from the diary list to the full-width timeline — tables run down the left by zone, the day’s clock runs across the top, and each booking appears as a coloured block sized to its turn time. Collapse the sidebar to a slim icon rail for maximum screen during service.
Click an empty slot on the timeline to open a new booking pre-filled with that time and table.
Use Walk-in to seat someone on the spot without going through the online form.
If a requested time is fully booked, DineKit offers “next free” suggestion chips — the nearest available times within a configurable window — both on the public widget and in the admin New Booking form, so a “we’re full” doesn’t have to be a lost booking.
Click any booking to open its detail view: guest, party size, deposit/payment status, notes and a full history of what happened to it.

The waitlist

When every table for a requested time is taken (or the covers-per-hour cap is hit), the public booking widget offers to add the diner to the waitlist instead of a hard no. Waitlisted requests sit alongside confirmed bookings in your diary as penciled-in, so staff can see the extra demand and manually confirm one if a table frees up or a cancellation comes in.

Deposits, to cut no-shows

DineKit can require a deposit for a booking — a straightforward way to cut no-shows on your busiest slots or biggest tables. Deposits are taken through your own Stripe account (never DineKit’s), on-site with no redirect to another page, so set up Take card payments first if you haven’t already: see Take card payments. Once Stripe is connected, set your deposit threshold and amount in Booking Settings; a paid deposit is what promotes a booking from pending to confirmed. If a deposit-paid booking is later cancelled, DineKit handles the refund and flags it in the booking’s history rather than leaving it unresolved.

Automatic emails

DineKit sends the diner a confirmation email as soon as their booking is made (and confirmed, if it needed approval), plus a cancellation email if the reservation is cancelled or voided. Your team can also see a send log per booking so a failed email doesn’t go unnoticed. If you’re not seeing emails arrive, check your host’s outgoing mail (SMTP) setup first — that’s the most common cause, not DineKit itself.

Tips

Set Opening Hours before Booking Settings — service periods come from Hours, so an out-of-date lunch/dinner window there will quietly limit what the widget offers.
Get turn time and buffer right early — they’re the single biggest lever on how many bookings a busy evening can actually hold.
Use the covers-per-hour cap if your kitchen (not your seats) is the real constraint, and let staff override it from the diary when they know better than the public widget does.
Mark a table out of service rather than deleting it — deleting or moving a joined table cleans up its combos automatically, which isn’t what you want for a table you’ll bring back next week.
Turn on auto-confirm once you trust your capacity settings; keep it off (pending-review) while you’re still tuning party sizes and turn times.