Double Seating in aleno: How to Set It Up Correctly

Overview

1. What You Need for Double Seating
2. Step 1 – Set the Stay Duration
3. Step 2 – Configure Variable Capacity
4. Practical Example: Setting Up Double Seating Correctly
Informing Your Guests
Summary

1. What You Need for Double Seating

With Double Seating, you can allocate your dining capacity twice in one evening – creating an early and a late seating. To make this work reliably, two key settings must be configured:

Limited stay duration (how long guests are allowed to remain)
Variable capacity (controls how many guests can book at which times)

Only the combination of both settings allows the system to free up guest capacity for a second wave of reservations.

2. Step 1 – Set the Stay Duration

Go to Settings → Shifts
Select the relevant shift
Click Edit stay durations

Here you define:

how long guests may stay depending on group size
whether online reservations should have a different stay duration than walk-ins

👉 Tip:
The stay duration determines when capacity becomes available again.
Without a limited stay duration, Double Seating is technically not possible.

3. Step 2 – Configure Variable Capacity

Open the shift and go to Advanced capacity settings
Select the duration of your time units (e.g., 30 minutes)
Define how many guests you want to accept in each time unit

What do time units do?

Time units act as a tool to control your guest flow:

Allocate more capacity in early time slots
Block or limit online availability during peak times (capacity = 0)
Reopen capacity again later in the evening

This naturally creates two reservation waves.

Good to know

In this section, you cannot create overbookings.
For online reservations, the system only considers:

bookable guest capacity
stay duration
variable capacity
optional: in mode 3 of automatic table assignment, the actual available tables

4. Practical Example: Setting Up Double Seating Correctly

A restaurant has 60 seats, and the kitchen is open from 18:00–22:00.

A. Define the stay duration

Stay duration: 120 minutes

This allows aleno to release capacity again, for example:

first seating: 17:30–19:30
second seating: from 19:30 onwards

In booqIn, you can see from which times guest capacity becomes available again.

B. Configure variable capacity for Double Seating

Goal:
Create an early wave of reservations and a second wave later in the evening.
To achieve this, reservations around 19:00–19:30 should not be allowed.

Recommended settings:

Time Unit	Capacity	Reason
18:00	40 guests	Encourage early arrivals
18:30	20 guests	Complete the early wave
19:00	0	Block peak time (key for Double Seating)
19:30	0	Block peak time
20:00	40 guests	Start of the second wave
20:30	40 guests	Second wave
21:00	40 guests	Late seating possible

DoubleSeatingGraphicEN

Result:

Guests naturally distribute into two seating waves
Kitchen and service operations become smoother
Capacity is used efficiently
The peak time (19:00–19:30) cannot block your Double Seating strategy
The system frees capacity automatically once the stay duration ends

5. Informing Your Guests

To avoid misunderstandings, you should inform guests about the limited stay duration. You can do this, for example:

in the automatic confirmation email
in the widget’s terms and conditions text

You can also use conditional text (if-conditions), so different booking times display different messages.

Example text:

„Please note that your seating is available for a stay of 2 hours..“

Or:

{{#if ReservationStartTime less '18:45'}}

Please note that your seating is reserved until {{ReservationEndTime}}. If you would like to stay longer, feel free to let us know in advance.

{{/if}}

6. Summary

For successful Double Seating, you need:

✓ Limited stay duration (frees capacity for a second seating)
✓ Variable capacity (blocks peak times and controls guest flow)
✓ Clear guest communication

With these three elements in place, you ensure that your seating capacity is used efficiently — without creating extra stress for your service team or kitchen.