The following steps will guide you through enabling 'Join Waitlist' from Google so your guests can add themselves to your waitlist directly from their Google search results. Guests can also use this feature to check on your wait times in real-time.
1. Set Restaurant Name & Location
2. Confirm Open Hours
3. Enable Google Call Aheads
Once Google call aheads are enabled, the 'Join Waitlist' button should appear on your Google places card, in search results on Google search and in Google maps within 24 hours.
Restaurant Name and Location
This information is used to identify your restaurant to Google so that your waitlist data is associated with the correct restaurant when showing in the Google search results. To configure your restaurant name in the Guest Manager app, go to Account > General Info and start typing your restaurant name. You should see a list of names autocomplete based on your location and the name you have entered. Selecting your restaurant from this list will associate your venue to an existing Google Place ID and will populate additional information such as open hours and phone number from data already listed for your venue on Google. If you do not find your restaurant on this list, you may need to first register your business for free with Google.
Confirm Open Hours
Before allowing guests to check the wait at your restaurant and add themselves to the list, Google will first ensure that your restaurant is currently open.
If you selected your restaurant name from a drop-down list of locations already known to Google, these hours should be populated, otherwise, you will need to manually enter your open hours for each day of the week.
You can override your overall pacing settings to accept more or fewer parties for any one time period during your open hours. You can also configure special events for certain times when you want to accept more or fewer reservations.
Accept Google Call Aheads
The final step in allowing guests to join your waitlist directly from Google is turning Accept Google Call Aheads to ON. This will enable the 'JoinWaitlist' button in the Google search results.
NOTE: After enabling this setting it can take up to 24 hours to take effect in the Google search results.
Disabling
You can instantly disable self-serve call aheads by toggling the Accept Google Call Aheads to OFF in your call ahead settings. This will disable self-serve call aheads through Google.
