Configuring Estimated Wait Times

How Estimated Wait Times Work

The estimated wait times are calculated by looking at your historical data, going back several months, depending on how many parties you've seen. Ideally, it uses the information for the same day of the week and hour of the day, but will fall back to get more data if needed.

The minimum amount of data the system needs before it will calculate anything is 50 parties served in the last 8 weeks. The system will then update its calculations overnight and will be able to provide estimates the next day.

It calculates the average time it takes between serving parties of a given size for that day and time combination. Then, it looks at how many parties you have on your list right now of a given size, and multiplies to get the estimated wait.

So, for example, if it usually takes about 5 minutes to serve parties of 2 at 7pm on a Friday, and you have 5 parties of 2 on your list right now, it'll quote an estimated wait of about 30 minutes (since the next party of 2 will be the 6th, so 5 * 6 = 30).

The algorithm gets more accurate the more data you have, and will depend on how consistent your business is from one week to another.

Enabling or Disabling Estimated Wait Times

To turn this feature on or off, just check or uncheck the box in Settings > Waitlist Options:

If this feature is off, the system will use the wait time listed in your "Default Wait Time" option on the same Settings page:

You can update this manually as often as you like to set the wait times your guests see yourself.

Wait Times Displayed to your Guests

Your public pages can display the estimated wait times to your guests, or you can choose to disable this by unchecking the box in Settings > Public Pages:

If you do want to show the estimated waits, you can enable this.

If you are not using our estimated wait times (as described above), or you don't have enough data for us to predict the wait, the page will display your default wait time.

If you're using our estimated wait times, and there's enough data, our system will display the predicted wait based on the methodology described above.

Wait Times in Your Notifications

Did you know you can put the estimated wait time in your texts?

Just add it to your SMS confirmation text by saying something like: "You've been added to the waitlist. Your estimated wait is {quoted_time}. Check your place in line here: {link}. Reply N to cancel."