You open a listing, pick a day, and the time you wanted is not there. Or no time is. It is almost never a fault: we do not decide which times can be booked — the restaurant declares them, and there are five rules that can take one away.
The five rules
- That service does not take online bookings. A place can keep lunch to the phone only and open dinner to the web. It is not a full slot: it is a closed channel, and it stays closed in three weeks too.
- The day has already passed. Obvious from the form, less obvious from an old link or an address typed by hand.
- Bookings for today are already closed. Many places stop accepting from the web at a set hour of the same day — noon for dinner, say: from then on the room works with the numbers it has.
- Notice is required. Half an hour, an hour, two: the time it takes to add a table. At 19:40, with an hour of notice, the first time you are offered is 20:45.
- The service has a last bookable time. Dinner can run from 19:30 to 23:00 and take bookings until 21:30: after that you can still walk in, but not book.
The last three apply to today only. Tomorrow that same service is whole again, from its first time to its last.
Why times go in quarters of an hour
Inside a service one is offered every fifteen minutes, starting from when the service opens. And when it is the notice that moves the first one, it climbs to the next quarter instead of printing the exact minute it expires: 20:45, not 20:41. Nobody books for 20:41 over the phone, and a form that offers it looks broken even when it is right.
When there is nothing at all
A service that vanishes from the form without a line reads like a fault, so the page says which of the five rules it was: «does not take online bookings», «bookings for today are already closed», «there is no longer enough notice to book this service today». Different sentences because they are different situations: the first does not change tomorrow, the second does.
And if I leave the page open?
Today’s rules expire while you look at them. A page opened twenty minutes ago can still show you 20:15 when the notice has already eaten it — and the restaurant would find out afterwards, with the booking already taken.
So the moment you press, the times are read again and your time is re-checked. If it has expired in the meantime we say so right there, and you pick again. It is the only check on this site we deliberately run twice.
One thing we do not do
We do not invent times to fill the form. If a restaurant does not send us its services, or sends them in a shape we cannot read, the page says so — stating that the problem is ours — and points you to the restaurant’s phone, which at that point is the real answer.
And at a place that does not use Bitebooker we have no real times at all: there you do not book, you request a table, and the form is a different one.
This site does one thing: find a table and book it.