Setting your booking notice, and why six hours is the floor

Your booking notice is the shortest gap you will accept between a booking being made and the session starting. A guest trying to book inside that window is told the studio needs more notice and asked to choose a later start.

Six hours is the floor

The platform will not let any session be booked less than six hours out, no matter what you set. You can raise your own number as high as you want, but you cannot go below six.

That floor exists because a booking with no warning is a booking somebody is going to have a bad time with. Somebody has to unlock a door, and payment has to actually settle before a session starts.

Longer is not safer

The instinct is to set a big number, two or three days, so nothing ever surprises you. That instinct costs money.

Late bookings are not junk bookings. A band whose session fell through at another room, a producer with an unexpected free evening, an artist in town for two days: these are people paying full rate for hours that were about to earn nothing. A wide notice window turns all of them away automatically, and you never see the request.

Pick the number from your actual constraints

Ask what has to happen between a booking landing and a guest walking in:

• Does someone have to physically be there to let them in, and how much warning does that person need?
• Does the room need resetting from the last session?
• Do you need to move your own gear or your own work out of the way?
• Does anyone else in the building need telling?

Add those up honestly. For a lot of self-access rooms with a keypad, the honest answer is close to the six-hour floor. For a room where you hand over the keys in person around a day job, it might be a day.

Set it to that number and no higher. If you find yourself declining or scrambling, raise it then, using a real reason rather than a hypothetical one.

It applies to changes too

The window is not only checked when a booking is first made. A guest moving an existing session has to respect it as well, so nobody can edit their way into a start time you would have refused.

When you genuinely cannot take a booking

The notice window is the wrong tool for "I am away next week". That is what blocking the dates out is for. Notice is a standing rule about how much warning you need; blockouts are about specific times you are not available. Using a long notice window as a stand-in for keeping your calendar current just makes you invisible to everyone, all the time.