Opening hours and open dates

If nothing is bookable, this is almost always the page you are looking for. Opening hours belong to a location — not to a product, not to your account — so every location needs its own, and a location with no valid period accepts no bookings at all.

Where it is

1. Open Locations in the menu.
2. Click the location.
3. Open the Open dates tab.

It sits after Location settings, Book button, Customer flow and Booking experience. If the tab has a warning icon next to it, hover it — "No active or upcoming open dates" means this location is currently closed to bookings.

If the location has no periods yet you will see a blue notice: "To accept bookings, create at least one time period below. Time periods define when your location is available for rentals."

Everything on this tab is saved with the single Save button at the top of the page. There is one save for the whole tab — you do not have to save each period separately.

The two halves of the page

Booking Rules, Booking Length Limits and Custom dates apply to the whole location, all year.

Time Periods are your seasons. Each period covers a date range and holds one weekly opening schedule, one seasonal price choice and one lead-time setting.

Open a new season

1. Press Create new time period.
2. Give it a Period Name — for example "Summer 2027". The name only helps you find it later.
3. Set Period start and Period end.
4. Set the weekly hours (below).
5. Choose Price table for time period: High season or Low season.
6. Set Time before start that you can book.
7. Press Save.

A new period starts out open 00:00–23:59 every day, with every hour ticked, so you only need to narrow it down.

Periods must not overlap. If two share a date you get "Time periods can't overlap. Change the start or end dates so this period doesn't share any dates with another." followed by Overlaps with: and the offending periods. The Next available date button under Period start jumps the start to the day after the last overlapping period ends.

Each period shows its own state in the list: Active, Scheduled, Ended or Dates not set.

Copying instead of retyping

• The copy icon on a period (Copy timeperiod) duplicates it with empty dates, so you can give it a new range.
• Match all days to Monday copies Monday's hours to the rest of the week, "including pickup and return times".
• If you run several locations, the Import card copies Time Periods, Booking Rules, Booking Length Limits or Custom dates from another location. Imported settings are staged — "Settings imported. Click Save to apply the changes."

The weekly hours, and what the times actually mean

Each weekday has Open, Close, a To end of day checkbox, a Closed checkbox, and two dropdowns: Pickup hours and Return hours.

This is the part that behaves in ways people do not expect, so read it once carefully:

• Start and return times are whole hours. From Open and Close, the system builds one slot per hour, from the opening hour up to and including the closing hour. 08:00–17:00 gives 08:00, 09:00 … 17:00.
• Minutes on the closing time do nothing. 17:30 and 17:59 both produce a last slot of 17:00. If you want an 18:00 start to be possible, the closing time must be 18:00 or later.
• Always set the opening time on the full hour. This one matters. Minutes are harmless on Close but not on Open: an opening time such as 09:30 is accepted when you save, and that weekday then produces no bookable times at all. There is no warning and nothing looks wrong on this screen — the damage only shows up as an empty booking page. If a single weekday is dead while its neighbours are fine, check its Open value first.
• 00:00 is the beginning of the day, not the end of it. Setting Close to 00:00 does not mean "open until midnight" — it means the day ends where it started. To stay open through the evening, tick To end of day: the Close field then shows 24:00 and cannot be edited, and the last bookable hour is 23:00.
• Opening must not be after closing. If it is, you get "Closing time must be the same or after opening time." and the tab will not save.
• Equal times are allowed and give you exactly one hour. 09:00–09:00 saves happily and produces a single 09:00 slot. It looks open, but customers see almost nothing. If a day is suspiciously empty, check this first.
• Odd values are corrected rather than rejected. A minute value above 59 becomes :59 in that hour, and an hour above 23 becomes 23:59. You will not get an error — the field simply changes under you, so glance at it after typing.

Closing a single weekday

Tick Closed on that row. The times are cleared and the pickup and return dropdowns disappear. Unticking it brings your previous hours back, or falls back to 09:00–17:00.

Allowing only some hours

Pickup hours and Return hours each list the hours in the day's window with a checkbox and a counter, for example "Pickup hours (9)". Untick an hour to stop it being offered.

Warning. Nothing stops you unticking every hour. A day with 08:00–17:00 in the time fields but zero ticked pickup hours looks completely open on this screen and offers customers nothing. If a single weekday is unbookable while its neighbours are fine, open both dropdowns and check the counters.

High and low season pricing

Each period carries Price table for time period — a choice between High season and Low season. The tooltip on that field says it plainly:

"High season vs low season: Your products can have different prices for high season and low season. This choice decides which seasonal price applies when someone books inside this opening period. Changing it affects pricing if your products use separate high and low season rates."

So the season lives on the opening period, not on the product. A product's high and low prices are set on the product; which of the two is charged depends on which period the booking falls in. If your products only have one price, the choice makes no difference — but every period still needs one selected.

The usual spring setup is two periods: a long low-season period on either side of a shorter high-season period across the busy weeks.

Blocking time after a booking (buffer)

Under Booking Rules you will find Blocking time after booking, described as "Buffer time before the next booking can start."

Pick a value from 0 up to 8 hours. That unit then stays blocked for that long after each rental ends, which is how you get time to clean, dry or recharge between customers. The buffer only affects availability — it is not added to the customer's rental time and it is not something they pay for.

It also caps how far a customer can extend a rental in progress: their extension has to leave the buffer intact before the next booking.

Size the value for the full turnaround, not just the cleaning. A case from support: electric-boat batteries need around three hours to recharge after a trip, so that operator sets the blocking time to cover the whole recharge — a boat can never be rebooked before it is ready to go out again. The 8-hour maximum leaves room for slow turnarounds like that.

Booking interval and booking length

Also under Booking Rules: Booking interval, "Time increments customers can book in." — 15min, 30min or 1h.

Booking Length Limits below sets Minimum booking length and Maximum booking length, each as Hours plus Days (up to 14 days). Minimum cannot exceed maximum — you get "Minimum booking length cannot exceed maximum booking length" and the tab will not save.

Change the interval first, not last. The interval decides which values the length and blocking-time dropdowns offer. If you switch from 15min to 1h, values that no longer fit the grid are rounded for you — minimums up, maximums and blocking time down. Set the interval, then set the lengths, then check the blocking time still says what you meant.

Close specific dates

Use the Custom dates card for a public holiday, a thunderstorm, or a day you are away: "Override regular open hours for specific dates — fully close them or allow only selected pickup and return hours."

1. In Select date, pick the day. Past dates are refused with "Cannot add a past date."
2. Press Add.
3. The date appears in the list with its own Pickup hours and Return hours dropdowns, with every hour unticked — that is, the day is completely closed.
4. To close it fully, leave it as it is. To open it partly, tick just the hours you want to allow.
5. Press Save.

The bin icon removes the override and puts the date back on its normal weekly hours.

Time before start that you can book

At the bottom of each period sits Time before start that you can book (-59 = possible to book 9.00 untill 9.59).

It controls how close to a start time customers can still book today:

• -59 minutes (the default) — the 09:00 slot stays bookable right up until 09:59. Best for walk-ups.
• -30 minutes — the same idea, but only half as far into the hour.
• 0 minutes and upwards, in 30-minute steps up to 1440 (24 hours) — a lead time. 120 means a slot must be at least two hours away before it can be booked.

Two things follow from this that surprise people:

• It only affects start times today. It never blocks tomorrow's bookings.
• A positive value here also becomes the cut-off for customers moving their own booking start time, if you have switched that button on. Set it to 120 and customers can no longer move a booking that starts in less than two hours. See Edit, move or cancel a booking.

When your changes clash with existing bookings

Shortening a season, closing a date or deleting a period can strand bookings that are already sold.

• On save you may get Affected bookings — "Your new open dates are affecting existing bookings. The following bookings are being affected:" — with each booking linked. Choose Save anyway to push the change through, or Cancel and Undo Changes to back out.
• Deleting a period first checks for bookings and shows "The following bookings will be affected if you delete this time period. You can still delete it, but your customers may experience problems with their bookings." You can still confirm with Delete anyway.

Read the list before you press through. Deleting a period does not delete the bookings inside it — it leaves them sitting outside any open period, which is exactly the state that produces "customers get no available times" later in the season.

If nothing is bookable, check in this order

1. Does the location have a period whose dates cover the days you are testing, and is it marked Active or Scheduled?
2. Do the weekdays in that period have Open and Close times, and is Closed unticked?
3. Do Pickup hours and Return hours still have hours ticked?
4. Is the closing hour late enough for the start times you expect, remembering that minutes are ignored and that 00:00 means the start of the day?
5. Is Minimum booking length short enough to fit inside a single open day?
6. Is the date in Custom dates with all hours unticked?
7. Did you press Save?