When you are sold out
Sold out is not the end of the sale.
A full departure is the strongest demand signal you get all season, and most systems answer it with a dead end. Ours collects the people who wanted in and tells them the moment something frees up.
Joining a waitlist
The booking widget showing a sold-out departure with the join-waitlist option.
Sold out, still visible
- A full calendar looks busy. An empty one looks broken. Sold-out departures stay on the calendar rather than disappearing, so a guest sees a popular attraction instead of a page with nothing on it.
- Visible is not sellable. Those departures cannot be added to a basket by any route — not the widget, not the till, not an upsell. They show, and that is all they do.
- You choose which slots take a waitlist. Set it on the schedule so new departures inherit it, or turn it on and off across a run of dates. Not every sold-out slot is one you want a queue for.
What happens when space opens
Space frees up constantly and quietly — a refund, a cancellation, a basket that was never paid for. Every one of those is a trigger.
- Told in the order they joined. Oldest first. It is the only ordering anybody can argue with fairly.
- Told in the language they joined in. All eleven, using your own message wording — with our copy as a fallback, because sending nothing is worse than sending something you did not write.
- A party too big for what opened is skipped, not stuck. If two places free up, the family of five does not block the couple behind them. They stay on the list for the next one.
- The link rebuilds their basket. They click, and the departure and tickets they wanted are already there. Nobody is asked to remember what they were trying to book three weeks ago.
A notification is not a reservation, and we say so
- Nothing is held for anybody. We tell everyone whose party fits and let them book normally. Holding a place for someone who may not open their email for two days is how a freed seat goes unsold.
- The wording says exactly that. Space may be available, and it is not being held. In every language. Promising somebody a spot and then losing them a race is a complaint you have earned.
- Losing the race is handled gracefully. If somebody else books it first, the link lands on the ordinary sold-out experience — not an error page, and not a basket that fails at payment.
- The same person is never told twice for one opening. Two things freeing up at the same moment cannot produce two emails about the same seat.
Built so it does not quietly stop working
A waitlist that fails silently is worse than none, because you believe it is running.
- A notification can never break a refund. Triggering the waitlist is deliberately kept out of the way of the money. A refund succeeds whether or not the resulting notification does.
- Which is why there is a safety net. Anything that should have gone out and did not is picked up and sent shortly afterwards, rather than sitting in a queue nobody watches.
- A skipped send counts as a failure. If email is misconfigured, the entry is not marked as notified. Nothing is more useless than a list of guests you believe you contacted.
- Links cannot be guessed or shared onward. Each notification carries its own single-use link. A new one retires the last, and the unsubscribe link keeps working forever.
The waitlist report
Reports → Waitlist, showing entries by departure with their status.
See it running on your own products.
Bring one activity, one ticket type and one price. We will show you what it looks like in a real checkout.