Pending bookings filling up seats

[Anonymous]

Hi

Just launched a new site with what seems like a very good start.

There are a couple of things crop up though.

The first of which is that a couple of times visitors have made pending bookings three or four times before finally paying. This has resulted in on one occasion an entire event being shown as fully booked when only one seat has been sold. The events on offer have limited seats, so if someone does this it can damage potential sales.

We’ve chosen to manually authorise bookings as we thought this might avoid the issue. Sadly it doesn’t.

Is there a setting I have missed that doesn’t book out a seat until payment has been made or the booking has been manually authorised?

[Franky]

No such setting exists yet. The reason is that pending bookings actually can become real bookings, so what happens with those if all seats are suddenly taken while they already received payment instructions?

Some options:

– make a feature request

– allow more seats than actually present

– follow up closely bookings for such critical events

[Anonymous]

These particular events are courses, so 4-6 participants are the norm. If there’s a sudden flood of trade and they are 505 over subscribed returning funds or organising a second course due to popular demand is no problem. For larger events (say 100 or more) I would imagine refunding 50% is a real bind.

However when what happened today happens such as one person booking out an entire course because they either couldn’t decide or are just a bit of a numpty means a whole course can loose out if its not caught in time.

Allowing more seats is dangerous as some people will book the whole course for them and their friends, so turning one away could end up cancelling the course altogether.

Bookings will need to be followed up quickly anyway to make a confirmation and send out further details

Given all that I think it would be a very useful option to have. Definately a feature request.

[Author]

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