Set a minimum advanced booking time

AI-generated Key Takeaways

• Merchants can set a minimum advance booking time for services, ensuring bookings are made within a specified timeframe before the service start time.

• This can be configured at the service level (affecting all slots) or at the individual slot level, offering flexibility in setting booking windows.

• Service-level settings use rules.min_advance_booking (in seconds), while slot-level settings use scheduling_rule_overrides.last_bookable_sec (as an EPOCH timestamp).

• Merchants still need to validate booking requests against the booking window on their end and handle potential booking failures appropriately, as feed-based limits might not cover all edge cases.

Setting a minimum advanced booking time

There are many cases in which a merchant would like specific services or slots to be booked a minimum time in advance. These can be set at either the service level and/or at the availability level. If it is set at both, the setting at the availability level will be used.

Service level definition

At the service level the field is called rules.min_advance_booking. This field should be set to the number of seconds in advance of the reservation start time that the booking needs to be made. For example if the booking always needs to be made 1 hour before the start time this field would be set to 3600 (so a booking for 3pm can be booked up until 2pm). This would apply to all slots for that service (unless overridden by slot level definition).

JSON

"service": [
  {
    "rules": {
      "min_advance_booking": 3600
    }
  }
]

Slot level definition

At the availability slot level the field is called scheduling_rule_overrides.last_bookable_sec. This field is the last time (EPOCH timestamp) that the specific slot can be booked. This would apply to each individual slot where this was specified.

JSON

"service_availability": [
  {
    "availability": {
      "scheduling_rule_overrides": {
        "last_bookable_sec": 1468081800
        }
    }
  }
]

Warning: Implementing advance booking limit in feeds does not prevent you from having to check if the booking is within the allowed booking window and handle it BookingFailure SLOT_UNAVAILABLE. There might be edge cases (such as a stall browser tab) where a CreateBooking might be sent outside of the booking window. Upon receiving a CreateBooking, your system must confirm that the booking occurs within the allowed booking window and, if it's not, respond with CreateBookingResponse.booking_failure = SLOT_UNAVAILABLE.