The first week of August was full in March
It happens every year. By early spring the school summer holidays are booked solid, the Christmas and New Year fortnight is close behind, and the phone keeps ringing with people asking for the same dates. You say you are full, take a name and number, and write it on the pad by the till or in the back of the diary.
Then in June a family cancels their two Labradors for ten days in August. Someone at the desk remembers a lady who asked about a big run for those dates, but not her name. The pad has six entries for August, two of them for cats, one crossed out, and none with dates written clearly enough to match. The run gets filled by the next person who happens to phone, and the woman who asked in March books somewhere else and tells her friends you never called her back.
A waiting list that is not connected to the diary
The trouble is that a waiting list is only useful if it can be compared against the runs that come free, and on paper it cannot. A kennel booking has a lot of moving parts: arrival and departure dates, number of dogs, whether they share, their size, whether they need a quiet block away from the barking end, and whether they are regulars. A cattery booking has its own version: single pen or family pen, heated chalet, elderly cat that needs the ground floor.
- Waiting requests are written down in different places by different staff.
- Dates are noted loosely, such as "first half of August".
- Nobody records when the request came in, so order is guesswork.
- A cancellation is handled by whoever takes the call, from memory.
- Partial overlaps (a run free for four of the seven nights wanted) are never spotted.
Most booking software used by kennels handles confirmed bookings well and waiting lists poorly, if at all. So the list drifts back to paper, and the person best at matching it is the owner, who is also out on the runs.
What a lost space costs in peak weeks
Peak weeks are where a boarding business earns the margin that carries it through the quiet months. A run that sits empty for a week in August because a cancellation was not matched is income you do not get back, and it is often the only kind of empty run you have all summer.
There is a softer cost too. People who were promised a call and never got one do not come back, and in a local business where most new customers arrive by word of mouth, that matters. Meanwhile the desk spends peak season answering the same availability question over and over, and staff who should be cleaning and exercising dogs are stuck on the phone.
A waiting list that watches the diary for you
What we build is a waiting list that sits beside your booking diary, whether that diary is a kennel booking system with an API, a shared calendar or a spreadsheet we move into a proper database.
- Every waiting request is captured in one form, from the phone, the website or an email: dates, number of dogs or cats, sizes, sharing, run or pen type and any must-haves.
- Each request is time-stamped, so the order people asked in is on record rather than remembered.
- When a booking is cancelled or shortened, the system checks which waiting requests fit the freed run and dates, including partial fits you might accept.
- The first matching customer gets a text or email offering the space, with a link to accept and pay the deposit. If they do not respond within the window you set, it moves to the next person.
- Staff see a simple list of offers out, accepted and expired, and can override the order for a regular or a special case.
| Situation | What the system does |
|---|---|
| Two-dog family cancels a shared run | Offers it to waiting requests for two dogs that can share |
| Cattery family pen frees for four of seven nights | Flags customers whose dates overlap, for staff to decide |
| Regular customer asks late | Lets staff move them up the list with a note of why |
| Offer not answered | Expires it and offers the next match automatically |
You decide the rules: how long an offer stays open, whether regulars get first refusal and which run types can substitute for each other. The system follows them.
Cancellation day, the new way
A cancellation comes in by email on a Tuesday morning. Someone marks it in the diary and, within a minute, the waiting list shows three people who wanted those dates for a large dog. The first gets a text. By lunchtime she has accepted and paid the deposit online, and the run is filled without anyone going through the pad.
At the end of the season you can also see how many people you turned away for each week, which is useful when you are deciding whether another block of runs or a few more cattery pens would pay for themselves.
Is this your peak season?
- Your waiting list is on paper, in a notebook or in someone's inbox.
- Cancelled peak runs are filled by whoever phones next.
- You cannot say who asked first for a particular week.
- Customers have told you they were never called back about a space.
- Staff lose hours in summer to repeated availability calls.