With Booking padding, you can set an amount of time and space in between bookings where members can't reserve the room. This is handy for making sure you have time to clean or set up your conference rooms in between reservations.
Set Your Padding Duration Setting
To use this feature, head over your campus settings by clicking the gear in top corner of your header in the dashboard.
In the "Calendar" section, you'll find a setting called "Padding time in minutes." To set or update this value, click the "Edit" button in the top right corner of this page. In the padding time field, you can insert the number of minutes you'd like to add between each member booking. For example, you may wish to reserve 30 minutes between each reservation.
Click the "Save" button at the bottom to save this setting.
Now every time a member books through the member app, it will automatically reserve an extra time at the end of that booking for the number of minutes you've specified. This will create a "Padding Booking" that is automatically assigned to your space admin. You can view those bookings in the calendar.
Note: Padding is NOT automatically created for managers who book via the admin dashboard. Automatic booking padding is only created when booking through the member app. Managers must manually add padding when creating bookings or events via the calendar in the dashboard.
Viewing Bookings With Padding In The Calendar
In the below example, a member has a booking from 10:00am to 11:00am, and you'll see a 30 minute booking immediately after. This is the 30 minutes of padding set by the booking settings.
Clicking on the padding booking will show you a booking clearly labeled "Booking Padding."
Filtering Padding Bookings From the Calendar View
You can filter out padding bookings from your calendar view if you do not wish to see them. Once you have a booking padding set (using the steps above), a new filter option will appear in your Calendar tab. Simply uncheck the "Padding" option in the "By Source" section to remove the paddings from view.
Deleting Bookings With Padding
Deleting a booking will automatically delete any of its associated padding bookings. Just delete the original member booking, and it will automatically remove the padding that is attached to that booking.
Handling Conflicts (Edge case)
By enforcing booking padding, Coworks will atomically reject any member bookings that don't leave enough time for padding. For example, if a member wishes to create a booking from 10:00am until 11:00am with 30 minutes of padding time enforced, but a booking already exists at 11:00am, their booking will fail due to there not being enough time before the next booking. This scenario is only typically possible if a manager has manually added bookings to the calendar (since padding rules don'y apply to admins in the dashboard), or if there are pre-existing bookings before you turn on this setting. Otherwise, every member booking will automatically come with the associated time for padding booked, preventing a scenario for conflict on the next reservation.
Happy Coworking!