How do I sell shorter and longer seats that share the same sauna capacity?

Shorter and longer sauna seats must draw from one physical seat pool so a 30-minute guest and a 60-minute guest cannot together exceed the room. Zettlor does not ship a "half session" toggle on one price row that auto-splits a parent slot into first-half and second-half steppers.

What Zettlor does today

This behavior is partial. You configure session lengths per room and session type; many studios run different durations on different templates. Overlapping slots on the same sauna or cold plunge space share concurrent seat limits, so two duration offerings on one space still compete for the same physical seats. There is no Part session or Half session screen that marks one booking as "first half" of another parent session and rebalances the other half automatically.

Guest booking, cancel, and credit self-serve steps stay on Help. This page is for operators.

Desk path

Scheduling → Configuration for seats per slot and session length on each offering or repeating schedule template; Schedule to place shorter and longer offerings so they overlap on the same space only when concurrent seat limits should apply. Pair with pre-buffer and post-buffer minutes when private turnaround must stay clear of the mixed-duration window.

Do not invent a settings path beyond what is listed here. If the product does not include a control, the desk workaround is the path.

Failure mode

Operators clone a 30-minute schedule and a 60-minute schedule as separate rooms with separate seat counts. The barrel sells fourteen people into an eight-seat shell because each template thought it owned the full capacity. The failure is splitting duration products without a shared concurrent seat pool on one space.

Operator example

Alchemy Springs wants weekday lunch to sell either a 45-minute contrast seat or a 90-minute deep session in the same eight-seat sauna. Staff publish both offerings on the one sauna space so concurrent seat limits apply across the overlap. A full 90-minute party of six leaves at most two seats for any overlapping short block; when eight short seats fill a half window, a long booking that needs the whole window cannot oversell. Cold plunge stays on its own four-seat space unless deliberately shared.

A sauna and cold plunge operator can copy the shape of this example without copying another brand's private pricing or customer lists.

How to do this

1. Decide the physical seat count for the sauna (and separately for cold plunge if it is another space).
2. Create or edit offerings for each duration you sell—for example 45 minutes and 90 minutes—on that same space.
3. Set seats on each slot or template to the physical room cap, not a carved-up half of the room for each duration.
4. Align start times so short and long offerings overlap only when they should compete for the same concurrent pool.
5. On Schedule, book a test mix: several short seats plus one long seat in the same window, and confirm concurrent limits refuse the oversell.
6. Add turnaround buffers on private or reset-heavy offerings so mixed-duration sell-through does not erase cleanup time.
7. If you need true half-of-parent rebalancing (first half vs second half steppers on one parent session), use the overlapping-offering workaround above or contact Zettlor support—there is no half-session menu on the desk today.

Related questions

Can one cart mix short and long seats?

Guests can book multiple seats in one checkout when the offering allows multi-seat quantity. Mixing two different duration offerings in one cart depends on how those offerings are published; test checkout with your published offerings rather than assuming one cart can mix two duration products automatically.

Why does the long session still show seats when a short window looks full?

Concurrent limits and per-slot remaining seats can diverge when windows only partially overlap. Read remaining seats on each offering and on the space, not only the headline on one tile.

Is this the same as turnaround buffer?

No. Session buffers add dead time before or after a slot for cleaning. Part-duration inventory is about two paid lengths drawing from one seat pool during the occupied window.

Follow-up guides

• How do I set shared-capacity seats on a sauna or cold plunge session?
• How do private hire and shared drop-in share the same sauna slot without double-booking?
• How do I set tiered ticket prices on one shared-capacity sauna session?
• How do I add a turnaround buffer between private sauna or cold plunge sessions?

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