If you run a soft play centre, a trampoline park, or anywhere else with a school-holiday rush, you already know the question every parent asks: "when is it quiet?" They do not want the 11am Saturday scrum. They want the Tuesday afternoon where their toddler has the ball pit to themselves. And you want them on Tuesday afternoon too, because Saturday sells itself.
Until now the answer lived in your head, or in an Instagram post nobody saw. From today, your booking page can answer it for you. Busyness indicators show guests which times and days are quiet, steady or busy — right on the time slots and the calendar — so the guests who want a calmer visit book themselves into your empty sessions.
What guests see
Turn it on and every bookable time slot carries a small label: a green Quiet, an amber Steady, or a soft red Busy. Guests looking for a peaceful visit head for the green; guests who want the atmosphere of a full house know where to find that too.
There are no numbers anywhere. Guests never see how many bookings you have, what your capacity is, or how close to full you are — just one of those three words. A slow day never reads as desperate, and a busy slot is still bookable — it just is not hiding what it is.
Quieter days on the calendar
The calendar gets the same treatment. Days that are filling up carry a small amber or red dot, so the quiet days stand out as clean green squares. A family browsing the week ahead can spot the calm Tuesday without tapping into every day one by one.
Day levels compare against the month the guest is looking at, so "quiet" always means quiet for that time of year — a quiet day in August still means something, even though your August would swallow your November whole.
How it decides what counts as busy
You choose the comparison per session, and there are two ways to run it:
- Compare with other times that day. Each slot is measured against the busiest slot of that day. Best for venues where the day has a rhythm — a lunchtime peak, a dead mid-afternoon — and you want guests steered within the day.
- Compare with the session's capacity. Slots are measured against how full they actually are. A slot at a third of capacity reads quiet even if it happens to be the busiest thing that day. Best when you have hard limits set and want the labels to mean "how much room is left".
By default only the session's own bookings are counted, which is right when your sessions run in separate spaces. If everything shares one big room, flip on Count bookings from every session and the labels reflect the whole building.
And if our idea of busy is not yours, move the goalposts. Every session has two thresholds — where quiet ends and where busy begins — so a venue that only feels full at 90% can say exactly that, and everything in between shows as steady.
Setting it up
Busyness indicators are a per-session setting, so you can show them on your open play sessions and leave your private party packages alone. Open the session in the editor and head to the Features tab.
Switch on Show busyness indicators, pick your comparison, tune the level thresholds if our defaults do not suit, and decide whether you want the calendar highlighting too. That is the whole job — the labels appear on your booking page from the next time a guest loads it.
The quiet parts of quiet
A couple of details we sweated so you do not have to:
Nearly-empty days stay quiet everywhere. If you have one booking on an otherwise empty Tuesday, the system will not paint that one slot "busy" and everything else "quiet" — that would tell the world exactly where your only booking is. Below a sensible minimum, the whole day simply reads quiet.
Sold-out slots stay sold out. A full slot shows as unavailable the same way it always has. Busyness labels only ever appear on times a guest can actually book.
No capacity limit? No problem. If a session has no capacity configured and you picked the capacity comparison, it quietly falls back to comparing within the day rather than showing nothing.
The words are yours. Quiet, Steady and Busy — and the calendar hints — are ordinary language strings, so if your crowd would rather see "Chilled" and "Buzzing", change them the same way you change any other wording on your booking page.
Getting started
Busyness indicators are live in your account now, switched off until you want them.
- Open Manage → Sessions and edit the session you want them on.
- On the Features tab, switch on Show busyness indicators.
- Pick your comparison mode, and turn on Highlight quieter days on the calendar if you want the date picker involved.
- Load your booking page and look at next week through your guests' eyes.
If your quiet times still are not getting the love they deserve, tell us how you would want them shown — this is the kind of feature we will keep tuning.