Waitlist Overview

Don’t turn away would-be customers that are interested in booking an experience that is currently sold out. If there’s a cancellation, fill those newly opened slots automatically from a waitlist. If a visitor is interested in an experience and has flexibility for when they can attend, allow them to join the waitlist for a block of time to keep all of your experiences booked to capacity.

If Waitlist is turned on for a given listing, customers will be presented with the option during checkout to “Join Waitlist” when a time slot that does not have enough open spots to accommodate them.

You can also manually add a customer to the waitlist waitlist from your Xola Dashboard. 

What's covered in this article:

• How to Enable
• Configure waitlist for a listing
• Waitlist Example
• How to View Waitlist Customers
• Checkout Set Up
• Back Office Set Up 

How to enable waitlists

1. Locate Waitlist in the Xola App Store and select it.
2. Click INSTALL and agree to the terms of service, you may have to log out and back in to see installed in the account.

Configure waitlist for a listing

1. Navigate to Products > Listings > and select the pencil icon to edit your listing
2. Select Waitlist from the left side menu.
3. Toggle Enable Waitlist for Back Office and/or Enable Waitlist for Checkout
4. Decide if you want to send invites to customers automatically when there are enough open spots to accommodate a waitlisted group
   
   • All waitlisted groups that can fit the open spots
     • Ex. Send an email automatically to any customer that fits into that time slot and the amount of seats that just opened.
   • Groups whose waitlisted quantity would fill up at least X % of open spots
     
     • Ex. If you have it set at 50%, and you have two waitlisted groups -- one for 5 guests and another for 2 guests. If 6 spots open up, only the group of 5 will be invited.
     • This helps prevent smaller groups from taking up spots that larger groups could have potentially used.
5. For Checkout Only: Either use default or custom checkout message that is displayed to your customers when there is a time slot available for waitlist. 

Make sure email notifications are enabled for waitlists (go to Settings → Notifications and check Join Waitlist). If this setting is disabled, customers will not receive an email when they join a waitlist.

Waitlist Example:

If you configure waitlist for your listing like this:

And your event has 10 spots open up due to cancellation or due to your increasing the event capacity from the roster.

Then any waitlisted groups of 10 or less will receive the following email:

View Waitlisted customers

When on your Dashboard, you can easily see in all views (List, Day, week, and Month) how many waitlisted guests you have for each time slot. Waitlisted guest counts will show under your reserved guests. 

You can also filter by Waitlisted customers, to easily see which time slots have customers waiting to join. Navigate to your Dashboard> Next to the Reserve view, click on the Waitlisted view.  Now you will see only time slots that have waitlisted guest. 

From the roster you can hover over waitlisted groups to bring up the gear icon. Click the gear to see available actions.

The confirm booking option will not show if the event does not have capacity. If you click confirm booking you will be given options for how you wish to collect payment.

The invite to book button will also only be displayed if the event has capacity. Once you choose this option your customer will receive an email inviting them to confirm and pay for their waitlisted booking.

• If they have a flexible time they selected during checkout, you will be given the option to choose which time slot you want to invite them to:

The remove from waitlist option will always be available and allows you to remove a customer from the waitlisted group if they wish to be removed.