Block product availability

Use a blocking rule when you want to make products temporarily unavailable in the booking form.

This is useful for situations such as:

closing the center for part of the season;
blocking a product during a group booking or event;
blocking specific dates or time slots;
preventing bookings on weekends or other non-operating periods.

Blocking is done through a Product Availability Rule, but instead of opening availability, the rule blocks it.

Create a blocking rule

Go to Settings → Product Availability → Rules and create a new rule.

Set:

Available slots = 0
Maximum number of students = 0

Both fields must be set to 0 for the rule to block availability.

Add a clear description so you can easily recognize the rule later.

Choose what to block

A blocking rule uses the same filters as a normal Product Availability Rule.

You can block availability by:

product category;
product;
location;
date range;
week days;
weeks in month;
time slots.

This means you can use a blocking rule at different levels.

Close the center for winter

Create a rule for all products, for the relevant date range, with both capacity fields set to 0.

Block a product for a group booking

Create a rule for the specific product, date, location, and time slots that should not be bookable.

Block weekends or fixed off-days

Create a rule with the relevant week days selected.

Place the blocking rule in the right order

Rule order usually does not matter for normal Product Availability Rules, but it does matter for blocking rules.

In most cases, place blocking rules above the availability rules they should override.

That is why many businesses keep their blocking rules at the top of the list.

You can also place a blocking rule in the middle of the list.

In that case:

rules above the blocking rule can still apply;
rules below the blocking rule will be blocked if they match the same criteria.

Use this carefully if you want to block only part of your existing setup.

Block a single day from the Daily Overview

You do not always need to create a blocking rule manually from the Product Availability page.

From the Daily Overview, you can use Block availability to block a single day directly.

There, you can choose criteria such as:

date;
product;
time slots;
location.

In practice, this creates a Product Availability Rule for you.

That rule can still be changed or removed later if needed.

This is a quick option when you want to block a specific day without manually building the rule from scratch.

Understand how blocking affects scheduled products

Blocking rules also apply to products that use the Availability Schedule.

This means that even if a product has times enabled in the Schedule, a matching blocking rule will still block that availability.

So if you use both Product Availability Rules and the Availability Schedule, the blocking rule still takes priority when it matches the same product, date, location, or time slot.

For more about scheduled products, see Set tide-based availability.

Test the result

After adding a blocking rule, test the result in the booking form.

If availability is not behaving as expected, use the Availability Tester to see which rule is affecting the result.

For the full process, see Test product availability.

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