When a venue has more than one room, the default availability setup gets in the way: the first booking on a Saturday makes the whole Saturday look taken, even though the other rooms are sitting empty. The fix is to give each room its own service with its own booking limit, so the Main Hall and the Fellowship Hall each track their own bookings and a client can reserve either one on a date the other is already booked.
One service per room
A service is the top level of your package list, and it is the only level that has both its own name on your online booking and its own availability counter. That makes it the natural fit for a room. The packages under each service carry that room's pricing, so a small room and a large hall can have completely different rates and rental lengths.
Setting the booking limits
Booking limits live on the Availability Limits page. The column that matters here is Simultaneous Bookings: how many bookings that row can hold at the same time.
Here is how the limits work together. A service's limit only counts bookings in that same service, so a Main Hall booking never counts against the Fellowship Hall. The business-wide limit counts every booking in the account. That is the one that blocks a second room when it is set too low, and it is the setting most venues have to change, because single-operator accounts often start with it at 1.
Two events in the same room on one day
With the limits above, two different rooms can be booked on the same date. Whether one room can host two events on the same day is a separate setting on the same page: Does a booking block an entire day, or just the scheduled time?
- Entire Day (the default). One booking fills that room for the date. The right choice for a hall that needs setup in the morning and teardown at night.
- Just the scheduled time. A booking only takes its start-to-end window, so a morning meeting and an evening dinner can share the room. Pair it with Minimum time between bookings to leave room for cleanup and turnover.
The business-wide choice applies to every room unless you override it. To treat rooms differently, click Show More Settings on a service row and pick Business Default, Entire Day, or Just the scheduled time for that room alone. A common setup is Entire Day for the main hall and Just the scheduled time for a meeting room rented by the hour.
Shared spaces like a kitchen
Some spaces are used by more than one room. A kitchen might be available with either hall, but only one event can have it at a time. There are two ways to model this, depending on how you sell it.
The kitchen is an add-on. If kitchen use is an add-on that clients can pick with packages from more than one room, go back to Availability Limits, find the kitchen in the add-ons table, and set its Simultaneous Bookings to 1. That limit counts across every room, so once one booking has the kitchen for a time, it disappears from the other room's checkout for that same time.
Rooms that physically overlap. When a space is consumed by packages rather than an add-on, use an availability rule. The classic case is a hall with a divider wall sold as Hall A, Hall B, and Full Hall: booking the Full Hall has to take both halves. An availability rule is a named limit that several packages and add-ons draw from. When one checked item is booked, all the other checked items count as booked too.
A Full Hall booking now draws one unit from both rules, so neither half can be booked alongside it, while Hall A and Hall B can still be booked on the same date by two different clients. The same idea covers a kitchen that comes included with one room's packages but is an optional add-on for another: one rule named Kitchen, with the included packages and the kitchen add-on all checked.
Staff assignment and testing
One more thing can block a second room: staff. If a service uses Automatically assign a certain staff member and that person is already on a booking at that time, Check Cherry treats the service as unavailable. If you assign yourself to every room, the second room will block as soon as the first is booked. Most venues choose Do not assign staff in the service settings. If you want the assignment anyway, answer yes to If staff are booked for the date, should additional bookings be allowed for that date? on each room's service.
Once it is set up, test it before a client does. Open Test Availability under Business Settings, pick a date that already has a booking in one room, and check a package from the other room. If it comes back unavailable, the page lists the exact reason and the conflicting booking, which points you at the limit that needs changing.