Guest Bookings: Seats for a Board Meeting in One Go

Imagine Marta, executive assistant to the management board of a 200-person company. In three weeks the company hosts its annual general meeting: twelve shareholders and advisers from outside, a morning session in the large meeting room, a working lunch in the small one, and an afternoon where several guests want a quiet desk to read documents. Most of them will arrive by car, and the car park already runs full on Tuesdays.

None of the guests has an account in the company's booking system, and none of them should. Marta's usual options are poor: a spreadsheet nobody reads, paper signs on desks the evening before, or booking each space under her own name — which puts "Marta" on fourteen seats, sends her fourteen confirmations and, if nobody checks in by the deadline, releases half of them as no-shows while the guests are still in the morning session.

What a guest booking is

A guest booking is an ordinary booking of a desk, a parking spot or a meeting room, held under the name of the person who made it and flagged as being for a guest — someone from outside the organisation. The flag changes a small, deliberate set of things:

• Nobody sees a name. On the booking map, in the room schedule and on the room tablet, the space is simply shown as occupied. Not even the assistant's own name appears there.
• Nobody needs to check in. A guest booking has no check-in deadline and is never released as a no-show. The seat is held for the whole time window you chose.
• Nothing is announced. No confirmation or cancellation e-mail, no calendar invitation, no Slack or Teams post. The booking also does not appear in the holder's personal calendar feed.
• Reports keep it apart. The seat counts as used, so utilization stays truthful, but it is counted as a guest's, not as a person's.

Who can do it: the Executive Assistant role, available on every plan, and administrators. Both are already exempt from the one-desk-and-one-spot-per-day rule that applies to employees, which is what makes booking a dozen seats possible in the first place.

Marta's afternoon, step by step

1. Switch to guest mode. On the Reservations page, Marta switches the header from My bookings to For guests. A violet banner explains what the mode does, so nothing she books now is mistaken for her own day in the office. The Book for guests tile on the dashboard leads to the same place.

2. Pick one date and one window. Book for guests opens a dialog with a single date and a single time window — say 8:30 to 16:30 on the day of the meeting.

3. Select the seats. Marta selects the spaces she wants, on the floor or parking map or in the list: eight parking spots on the lower level, both meeting rooms, four desks near the board area. One request can hold up to 100 spaces. This is done on the desktop dashboard: selecting dozens of seats needs a large screen, so on a phone the Book for guests button is not offered.

4. Read the result. Each space is reported back as either booked or skipped, with the reason. Skipping one space does not fail the rest: if one desk was already taken by an employee, the other thirteen seats are booked and that one desk stays selected in the dialog with its reason, so Marta picks a neighbouring desk and submits again. Normal overlap rules apply — a guest booking never pushes out a booking someone already holds.

5. Check the group. In guest mode the list shows the request as a guest group: one card with all its seats. Outside guest mode, those rows stay on Marta's own reservation list with a Guest chip, but they never ask her to check in.

6. If the date moves. When the board moves the meeting by a week, Marta does not cancel fourteen bookings. She uses Cancel group on the card, and every seat of that request is released together. Then she books the new date the same way.

Why the reports matter

Fourteen seats under one assistant's name would distort the numbers facilities teams rely on: they would look like one very busy employee, and if released as no-shows they would inflate the ghost rate.

Guest bookings avoid both. The seat counts as used in utilization, and the reports state how much of that use came from guests: a Guest seats KPI, a Guests row in the department table and its CSV export, and a Guest visits card that lists each request — date, space type, number of seats and time window — without any names. Person- and department-level metrics such as attendance, no-shows and sharing ratio ignore guest rows, because no employee was actually there. If a guest uses a board member's desk that was released for the day, the released desk still counts as used, just not as any employee's claim. For background on measuring real use rather than bookings, see measuring real office occupancy.

Guest bookings are not the visitors module

Desk & Park also has a visitors page, and the two are easy to confuse. The visitors module registers a named guest so that reception knows who is expected and who is hosting them; it does not reserve any space. A guest booking reserves the space and registers nobody. They answer different questions — "who is coming?" versus "where will they sit and park?" — and nothing stops you from using both for the same event.

Practical tips

• Book early and in one go. Fewer requests mean fewer groups to move later; fix skipped seats in the same dialog.
• Use separate requests for separate windows. One request has one date and one window. If guests need parking all day but a room only from 10:00 to 12:00, book the room as its own request.
• Tell your colleagues why the map looks full. Because no name is shown, employees will only see occupied seats. A one-line message to the floor ("lower-level parking is reserved for the AGM on Thursday") avoids confused questions.
• Let an admin step in. Administrators can make and cancel guest bookings too, which helps when the assistant is away the week before the event.
• If you sync room calendars (Pro and Enterprise), a guest-booked meeting room is still blocked in Outlook or Google Calendar, always with a neutral subject, so nobody books it from their calendar by mistake.

What it does not do

A guest booking does not create accounts for guests, send them anything, or record their names anywhere in the booking system. It cannot be made on behalf of another employee; it is always held by the assistant or admin who made it. It does not check guests in, and the seat is not released early if they leave at lunch — it stays reserved until the end of the window. Planning parking for a large event is still a decision about capacity; for the everyday side of it, see corporate parking management and the parking booking page.

FAQ

Who can make guest bookings?

Users with the Executive Assistant role, which is available on every plan, and administrators. Ordinary employees cannot; they stay limited to one desk and one parking spot per day.

How many seats can one guest request contain?

Up to 100 spaces — desks, parking spots and meeting rooms — for one date and one time window. Each space is reported as booked or skipped with its reason, and the whole request can be cancelled together as a group.

Will the guests get e-mails or calendar invitations?

No. A guest booking sends no confirmation, no cancellation, no calendar invitation and no Slack or Teams post, and it does not appear in the holder's personal calendar feed. If you want to welcome guests, do it in your own e-mail.

Will the seats be released if nobody checks in?

No. Guest bookings have no check-in deadline and are never released as no-shows. The seat stays reserved for the whole window you booked.

Is this the same as registering a visitor?

No. The visitors module registers a named person for reception and does not reserve a space. A guest booking reserves desks, parking spots or rooms and registers no one. You can use both for the same event.