How it works
The path of a reservation, from the guest asking to the table being closed, and what HaiLa does on its own along the way.
The path of a reservation
#Every reservation that arrives through HaiLa starts as a pending request and moves through a short chain of statuses. Each move from one status to the next is what decides what the guest receives and what reaches your invoice.
| Status | What it means | Who sets it |
|---|---|---|
| Pending | The guest asked for a table and is waiting for your answer. | HaiLa, the moment the request arrives |
| Confirmed | You accepted. The guest has a table and a confirmation code. | Your team |
| Seated | The party arrived and is at the table. | Your team, from the dashboard or the Pro app |
| Completed | The visit is over and the guest is invited to leave a review. | Your team, or HaiLa on its own later |
| Cancelled | The reservation is off, whoever cancelled it. | Your team, the guest, or HaiLa when the guest deletes their account |
| No-show | The reservation was confirmed but the guest never arrived. | Your team |
Declining is not a separate mechanism. To decline is to cancel the request while it is still pending, so a declined request also ends up Cancelled. The buttons are named differently depending on the moment, but the end status is the same.
Reservations your team enters, by phone or at the door, skip pending entirely: they are created Confirmed, with a confirmation code, because there is nothing for you to accept from yourself.
How long you have to answer
#Every request has a response deadline: 4 hours for a same-day request and 24 hours for one on any other day. The deadline is never later than one hour before the reservation time, though, and a request that arrives after that point still gets 15 minutes, but never beyond the reservation time.
Along the way you get two signals: a reminder 15 minutes after the request arrives (the venue can change this to 30 or 60 minutes), and an urgent alert 30 minutes before the deadline. When the deadline is short, only the urgent alert is sent.
The deadline cancels nothing. Once it has passed, the request stays Pending, in your list and in the guest's account, and you can still accept it, decline it or propose another time. As long as you have not accepted it, it is not billed.
Proposing another time stops the clock
While a reservation carries a proposal waiting on the guest, you stop getting reminders about it. If the guest never answers, the request stays that way indefinitely. Call them if there is no answer by the next day.
What HaiLa does without you
#A confirmed reservation nobody touches closes itself at the end of the verification period after its time. One you marked as seated closes after 8 hours, counted from the moment you tapped rather than from the reservation time: a party seated an hour late closes an hour later. Automatic closing is identical to closing it by hand, including the review invitation sent to the guest.
That is why a reservation the guest never showed up for has to be marked as a no-show within the verification period after its time (HaiLa billing shows how long it is, under How it is worked out). After that it closes itself as a visit, and the review invitation goes out about three and a half hours after the reservation time: roughly two hours after the meal would have ended, on a standard 90-minute turn. A reservation marked as a no-show in time never gets the invitation.
The guest gets two reminders of their own for a confirmed reservation: one 24 hours before, which you can count on by email, and one an hour before, in the app. The in-app notification for the 24-hour one does not always fire, so do not rely on it.
Who can change a reservation
#A guest can change their own confirmed reservation up to 4 hours before its time, unless we agreed otherwise for your venue. They can change the date and time, the party size, the name, the phone number and the special requests.
Any guest change reopens the acceptance
Whatever they change, even a note, the reservation goes back to pending and the response deadline starts again. You get an alert that it needs accepting a second time. Until you do, the guest has no table.
When you change the same fields from the Pro app, the status does not move and the guest gets no notification at all. Their confirmation code stays the same. The one-hour reminder shifts to the new time, but the 24-hour one stays on the old: a guest moved from 20:00 to 21:00 is reminded about 20:00. If the change concerns them, call them.
After that cutoff, or once they have left a review, the guest can no longer change anything themselves. What they have left is cancelling, and your phone number.