Customers see no available times, or no products at all

Two different problems look almost the same to a customer:

• No products show up at all. Almost always a lock or inventory problem.
• Products show up, but every time is greyed out or "no available times". Almost always an open dates or booking rules problem.

Work down this list in order. The first checks take a minute each and catch most cases.

Step 1 — Check that the location has open dates covering the date

This is by far the most common cause, especially at the start of a season.

Bookings are only possible on dates that fall inside a time period you have created. If no time period covers the date the customer is looking at, the booking page shows nothing for that day — no error, just an empty time list.

1. Go to Locations.
2. Look at the Active open date column. It tells you the status straight away:
   • Within scheduled open dates — fine.
   • Open dates start in the future — nothing is bookable until then.
   • No active or upcoming open dates — nothing is bookable at all.
3. Open the location and go to the Open dates tab.
4. Check the Time periods list. Each period shows a status: Active, Scheduled, Ended or Dates not set.
5. If last year's period has Ended, create a new one with Create new time period and set Period start and Period end to cover this season.
6. Press Save.

Notes that catch people out:

• Time periods cannot overlap. If you get "Time periods can't overlap", adjust Period start or Period end.
• A gap between two periods is a dead zone — nothing is bookable on those dates.
• Price table for time period decides whether High season or Low season prices apply inside that period. It does not affect whether the dates are bookable.
• If you have several locations, you can copy a working setup with Import on the Open dates tab. Imported settings are staged — you still have to press Save.

The full behaviour of this tab is in Opening hours and open dates.

Step 2 — Check the opening hours for that weekday

Inside a time period, each weekday has its own Open and Close time. If a weekday has no Open time — or no Close time and To end of day is not ticked — that whole weekday returns no times.

1. On the Open dates tab, open the time period and check the day the customer is trying to book.
2. Fill in Open and Close, or tick To end of day if you close at midnight.
3. Use Match all days to Monday to copy Monday's hours (including pickup and return times) to the rest of the week.
4. Press Save.

Set opening times on the full hour. An Open time with minutes in it (for example 09:30) is accepted when you save, but that weekday will then produce no bookable start times at all. Use 09:00 or 10:00. This is a genuine trap — the field lets you enter it, and there is no warning.

Step 3 — Check the pickup and return hours

Open and Close define the outer window. Inside that window, Pickup hours and Return hours are per-hour checkboxes, and a customer can only start (or return) on an hour that is ticked.

If every hour is unticked, the day looks completely booked. Open both lists and confirm the hours you expect are checked.

Step 4 — Check for a custom date that closes the day

Custom dates override the normal opening hours for a single date. A date you closed for a thunderstorm last season, or an old holiday closure, will silently keep that day shut.

On the Open dates tab, look through Custom dates and remove or re-open any entry that should no longer apply.

Step 5 — Check that products are linked to an active lock

This step only applies to locations where Staff presence is set to Unmanned or Allockate — that is, locations that use smart locks — see Connect and manage your smart locks.

At those locations a rental product is only offered to customers if at least one lock has that product assigned and that lock is active. The number of active locks carrying the product is also the available quantity — the Inventory number on the product is not used for these locations.

1. Go to Stations and open the station for that location.
2. Look for these warnings in the locks table:
   • "Warning: All locks at this station are inactive." / "Customers will not see any products in the booking widget."
   • "Warning: No product is assigned to any lock at this station."
3. In the lock table, check the Product column. A lock showing No product assigned contributes nothing.
4. Check Active status on each lock. As the tooltip in the admin says: "When a lock is active, customers can book the product on that lock. When it is inactive, that product is hidden and cannot be booked."
5. Use Activate all locks if you deactivated them for the winter.

If you took one broken unit out of service by deactivating its lock, remember that your bookable quantity dropped by one. Deactivating the station does not take its locks out of availability — locks are switched off one by one.

For locations with Staff presence set to Manned, availability comes from the product instead: open Products, open the product, and check Number of units / Inventory ("How many units do you have available to rent").

Step 6 — Check whether everything is genuinely booked

Availability is the number of units minus every overlapping booking that is not cancelled and not returned.

Two things quietly eat into it:

• Bookings that were never returned. A rental that has ended but was never marked as returned still blocks its unit. Mark it returned so it frees up.
• Blocking time after booking. On the Open dates tab, under Booking Rules, this is buffer time added after every booking before the next one can start. A generous buffer on short rentals can consume most of the day. Set it to 0 if you do not need it.

Step 7 — Another customer may be holding the unit right now

While someone is in checkout, their unit is held. The hold lasts 7 minutes from the moment the booking was created. After that a background job releases it — that job runs every minute, so the unit comes back within roughly a minute of the hold expiring.

The same applies when a payment fails: the booking is not released instantly, it is swept up by the same 7-minute rule.

So if a single unit "disappears" and comes back on its own a few minutes later, that is expected behaviour, not a fault. Ignore any older advice about holds lasting half an hour or more.

Step 8 — Check the booking rules

All of these are on the Open dates tab of the location, under Booking Rules and Booking Length Limits.

Booking interval — whether customers pick times in whole hours, half hours or quarter hours. Two things follow from it:

• Customers are offered start times through the whole closing hour. If Close is 17:00 and the interval is a quarter of an hour, 17:00, 17:15, 17:30 and 17:45 are still offered as start times. Set Close to the last hour on which you want a rental to start, not the hour you lock up.
• The pickup/return checkboxes work per whole hour, so all the sub-hour slots inside an hour follow that hour's checkbox. You cannot enable 10:00 but disable 10:30.

Minimum booking length and Maximum booking length — set with days and hours, which are added together (2 days + 4 hours = 52 hours). Leaving a value at 0 means "no limit", not "zero".

These limits are applied by simply removing the times that don't fit from the pickup and return lists. The customer never gets an error explaining why — if the filtering empties a list, they just see "No available times".

So a minimum longer than a single day's opening hours allow makes the location look fully booked rather than misconfigured. These limits only compare pickup and return times on the same day — a booking spanning several days is not filtered this way.

Time before start that you can book — the lead time, set per time period. The field label spells out the unusual part: "Time before start that you can book (-59 = possible to book 9.00 untill 9.59)".

• A negative value is a grace period: customers can still book the 09:00 slot up to 09:59.
• A positive value is required notice: 180 means customers must book at least three hours ahead.
• If the required notice pushes past midnight, every slot for today is switched off. A 24-hour notice therefore means today never has availability — which reads exactly like "fully booked".

Step 9 — Check "To end of day" if you rent past midnight

If you close at midnight, do not type 00:00 or 23:59 in Close — tick To end of day instead. That is what tells the system your closing time is midnight of the next day. With it ticked, a 24:00 slot is offered, and it follows whatever you ticked for the 23:00 hour in Pickup hours / Return hours.

Step 10 — Check bookable weekdays on the product

If one product is missing while others are fine, check the product itself. Open Products, open the product, and look for Bookable weekdays / Limit which weekdays this product can be booked.

This limits the day a booking can start on. As the admin puts it: "This only limits the start day. A booking can still run across other days — customers just can't begin one on an unselected weekday." With nothing selected, all days are allowed. It applies to rental products only.

What the customer actually sees differs by booking flow, which is worth knowing when someone reports a problem:

• Normal rental booking: the date itself stays selectable in the calendar. The customer picks the day, and the product card is then disabled and labelled "Not available on selected day", with an Available: row listing the weekdays that do work. Customers often read this as "broken" rather than "wrong day".
• Fixed time slots: the unavailable weekdays are skipped in the date strip, so the customer cannot land on them at all.
• If several products are in the cart, only the weekdays common to all of them remain. When there is no overlap the customer is told: "These products have no shared bookable weekdays. Remove a product or change your selection."

Step 11 — Confirm you are editing the right location

Open dates, opening hours, booking rules and the lock setup are all per location. If you have more than one location, it is easy to fix the settings on one and test the booking button belonging to another. Check the location name at the top of the page before you conclude that a change did not work.

If none of this helped

If you have worked through all of the above and customers still cannot book, contact support. It speeds things up a lot if you include:

• the location name,
• the exact date and time the customer was trying to book,
• which product,
• and whether the products are missing entirely or just show no available times.