A fully booked week is a good problem until it is a silent one: a client sees no availability, closes the tab, and books somewhere else, or just gives up. A waitlist is the fix for exactly that moment, it catches the demand your page would otherwise turn away and reconnects it the instant a slot actually opens.
Who should turn one on
Anyone whose calendar genuinely fills, popular coaches, in-demand consultants, class-based teachers running near capacity. If your page usually has open slots, a waitlist has nothing to catch and is not worth the extra surface. The signal to turn it on is clients emailing to ask when something opens up, that is a waitlist happening manually already.
How it actually works
- •A guest who sees no availability for the week can join the waitlist right there, name and email, no separate form to find.
- •Nothing is held or reserved, joining is just a request to be told.
- •When a cancellation frees a slot, everyone still waiting gets an email that a slot opened up.
- •It is deliberately not first-come-auto-booked: two people racing for the same freed slot could otherwise double book it, so the guest still confirms the booking themselves.
Managing it as the host
Your waitlist for a given booking type lives right next to that type's share and embed options, a simple list you can see and clear entries from. There is no separate dashboard to learn.
Waitlist vs group capacity
These solve different problems. A waitlist is for a page that is genuinely full. If instead you want more than one guest in the same slot on purpose, a workshop or class, that is group and capacity bookings, a separate setting on the session type. Start free and turn on whichever one matches your actual bottleneck.