Different venues, five capacity shapes, one schema underneath
Booking software is usually sold by the noun. Escape room software, restaurant software, bowling software. That is a sales convention rather than a technical one, and it is why an operator with two kinds of venue ends up running two systems that cannot answer a question about the same Saturday.
What actually varies is the shape of the capacity being sold. There are five of them, they cover this whole category, and they sit on one availability formula with sessions, holds and combinable resources underneath. Find your shape below rather than your noun.
A shape is something you choose, not a fixed property of your vertical. An escape room can be a private buyout or sold per head. A restaurant table can be combinable or fixed. The choice sits on each experience rather than on the account, so one venue can run more than one shape side by side.
The five shapes
- 01 · Fixed capacity, private
One booking takes the whole thing for a set length of time. Nobody else joins.
The slot is the unit. A party of two and a party of eight consume exactly the same capacity, so party size changes the takings rather than the availability.
Often chosen for escape rooms, karaoke booths, function rooms, VR pods, private cinema
- 02 · Fixed capacity, shared
A set number of positions in a session, sold to whoever turns up for it.
Groups fill part of a session and the remainder is still saleable, so the question is not whether the session sold but how much of it did, and whether a staff ratio allows the ones you sold to run at the same time.
Often chosen for axe throwing, bowling, darts, karting grids, laser tag, climbing, and for escape rooms sold per head
- 03 · Continuous flow, timed entry
People arrive on a timed ticket and stay as long as they stay.
There is no session to sell out. You are managing arrival rate against a headcount ceiling, and the constraint is how many are inside at once rather than how many chairs are free.
Often chosen for trampoline parks, indoor play, mini golf, arcades, museums
- 04 · Combinable resources
Small units that merge into larger ones and split back down again.
Two fours become an eight, then become two fours again an hour later. Capacity is not a number, it is a set of combinations, and a walk-in has to compete for the same units as a reservation taken a fortnight ago.
Often chosen for restaurant tables, bar tables, cabanas, function spaces, though plenty of floors are run as fixed covers instead
- 05 · Guide or asset constrained
The limit is not the space, it is the person or the thing that has to be there.
One guide, one boat, one kitchen bench. Two sessions can look independent on a calendar and be impossible in practice because they need the same constrained resource at the same hour.
Often chosen for walking tours, boat charters, brewery tours, cooking classes
A venue that runs two shapes is not two businesses
A site with lanes and a restaurant is running fixed shared capacity next to combinable resources. Nothing about that requires two subscriptions, two customer records or two versions of what Saturday earned. It requires one model that holds both shapes and one record of what happened.
That is the whole argument for a single platform, and it is a technical argument rather than a commercial one. The shapes are genuinely different. The schema underneath them does not have to be.
Written up so far
Each page below starts from the scheduling problem rather than a feature list. More are being written and will appear here as they land.
- Escape rooms →
Private buyout or per head, your choice
Rooms sold either way on the same grid, resets held as work rather than gaps, shared hosts limiting what can run, and outcomes recorded as they happen.
- Competitive socialising →
Fixed capacity, shared
A shared pool of lanes, targets or grids, coaching ratios that cap how many can run at once, and groups that split across adjacent resources.
- Restaurants and bars →
Combinable resources
Tables that merge and split, walk-ins competing with reservations for the same units, and a turn time that is a guess until it is not.
- Entertainment centres →
Several shapes at once
A ropes course, lanes, a play area and a cafe under one roof, which is four capacity shapes and usually three systems.
- Seasonal and built attractions →
Any shape, compressed
A trading year that happens in eight weeks, where a scheduling mistake cannot be recovered in the following month.