Smarter Reservations: Customize Your Booking Form by Location, Date & Time
Our Five Star Restaurant Reservations WordPress Plugin is now more flexible and powerful than ever, with the ability to customize your booking form for different locations as well as different scheduling rules. Now that the update that brought these changes has been live for a little while, we’d like to recap what changed and why it matters for restaurant owners looking to streamline their booking process.
Background: Multi-location & Premium/Ultimate Features
- To manage multiple locations, you’ll need our Business Profile & Schema Plugin with the Multiple Locations integration enabled. Once that’s set up, you can assign booking schedules and reservation rules per location in the Five Star Restaurant Reservations plugin.
- With the Premium version, you unlock more advanced restrictions that can be applied per location.
- With the Ultimate version, you get everything in Premium plus schedule-specific controls — so you can apply restrictions to a specific schedule (like “Friday Dinner” vs “Monday Lunch”).
Before the July 30 Update
Previously, only a few restrictions could be applied at the location or schedule level:
- Max Reservations (Premium & Ultimate)
- Max People (Premium & Ultimate)
- Table Restrictions (Ultimate only)
Other important controls remained global only, which limited flexibility across branches and schedules.
What Changed After the Update
With the July 30 update, three more restrictions became available at the location and schedule level:
- Dining Block Length (Premium & Ultimate)
- Automatically Confirm Below Reservation Number (Premium & Ultimate)
- Automatically Confirm Below Seats Number (Premium & Ultimate)
This means you can now adjust time slot duration and auto-confirm thresholds based on the specific needs of each location or schedule.
Why This Matters
Restaurants rarely operate the same way across every branch or every shift. Now you can:
- Fine-tune Dining Block Length per location
- High-demand branches: enforce strict 90–120 minute blocks for faster turnover.
- More relaxed locations: longer, flexible blocks for a better guest experience.
- Customize Auto-Confirm Rules per schedule
- Automatically confirm small parties during quiet hours.
- Require manual approval for larger groups during busy dinner rushes.
- Balance reservations with real-world constraints
- Combine per-location and per-schedule controls to avoid overbooking, match staffing levels, and keep service smooth.
Where to Find These Options
You’ll find location- and schedule-specific settings in your WordPress dashboard:
Settings → Advanced → Global button (top right) → Select a Location or Schedule from the dropdown.
From there, all restrictions (old and new) can be managed at the appropriate level.
Final Thoughts
The July 30 update was all about flexibility. By moving Dining Block Length and auto-confirm rules from global-only into the location- and schedule-specific settings, we gave restaurant owners more tools to fine-tune reservations where it matters most.
- Premium users → take advantage of per-location control.
- Ultimate users → go even further with per-schedule adjustments.
If you haven’t already explored these settings, now’s the perfect time to see how they can help your restaurant handle demand, improve turnover, and deliver a smoother booking experience.
