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Sections, tables & combinations

Sections structure your venue (e.g. dining room, terrace, vaulted cellar), while tables carry the actual capacity. Together they determine which party sizes VidiReserve can seat online and in the backoffice. For large parties, combine several tables into a table group.

Creating sections

Open My Restaurant → Sections and use "Create new section" to add your areas. The name is required (e.g. "Terrace"), with an optional description. The Active/Inactive switch lets you temporarily hide a section. Handy: when creating a section you can use "Create tables directly" to generate a number of tables with the same seat count and a name prefix at the same time.

When you delete a section, VidiReserve asks what should happen to its tables — "keep tables" (they will have no section afterwards) or "delete tables as well"; tables with upcoming reservations are always kept and are named in the confirmation message.

Creating tables

Under My Restaurant → Tables you create each table with these fields:

  1. Table number (e.g. "T1", "BG3").
  2. Min. persons and Max. persons — the capacity range within which the table is assigned.
  3. Location (indoor, outdoor, private) and the associated section.
  4. The Bookable online switch — determines whether guests can book this table via the widget (on by default for new tables).

The order of the table list is also the assignment priority: drag a row up by the handle on the left and that table is preferred during automatic seating. The new order is saved immediately. If several tables share the same priority, the smallest suitable one still wins — so large tables stay free for large parties. Handy to fill the dining room before the terrace, for example.

Auto-assignment follows two more rules: a table's minimum occupancy is respected as a preference — two guests will not be seated at the eight-seater with a minimum of 4 as long as any other table fits (it is only ignored when nothing else is free, so the booking is not lost). And ad-hoc table combinations always stay within one section — VidiReserve only combines across sections when you explicitly define that via a table group.

The bulk switches per section above the list set all tables of one section to "bookable online" or "active" in a single click — handy to take the terrace out of online booking completely during winter, for example.

Your plan limit only counts the online-bookable tables — the "X of Y tables bookable online" indicator at the top of the Tables page shows the current count. In the backoffice you can always seat all tables, even beyond the limit. Once the limit is reached, no further tables can be flagged for online booking — choose a larger plan or take another table offline. Tables that are already flagged always stay untouched, even after a downgrade (grandfathering).

Table groups for large parties

Under My Restaurant → Table Groups you combine several tables into one unit so VidiReserve can also seat larger parties. You drag the tables via drag & drop from "Available tables" to "Selected tables"; the group's total capacity is calculated automatically from its members. For VidiReserve to combine tables when needed, table combining must also be allowed in your booking rules.