Opening a six-weekend season of timed entry without typing 200 slots by hand

How many slots does a six-weekend season actually need?

Count it before you build it. Six weekends is twelve open days; eight arrival times a day is ninety-six sessions; add the half-term weekdays and you are at a hundred and thirty. That is comfortably inside the two-hundred-session limit on a single generation, which means one pass through the slot generator and you are done.

If your season is longer than that — a patch that opens every day through October with hourly arrivals runs past the limit — generate it in two passes. The bound is per generation, not per visit, so a second run for the later dates adds to the same listing without disturbing anything already on sale.

How big should one arrival slot be?

Size the slot to the constraint you actually have, which is almost never the field. For most farms it is the gate itself — how many families your staff can check in per fifteen minutes — or the car park, or the tractor. Whichever is smallest is your slot size, and the field capacity is a number you will never reach.

Each session holds its own inventory pool, so an eleven o clock sell-out has no effect on midday and the booking page shows live availability per slot rather than one number for the day. That is what lets you push demand into the quiet hours instead of turning it away.

• Check-in rate: how many entries can your gate scan in fifteen minutes, honestly, with a family unloading a pushchair.
• Car park: spaces divided by the average visit length, which is the number that actually bites at half term.
• Activity chokepoints: the tractor, the maze entrance, the doughnut queue.
• Weather headroom: leave room on the popular slots, because the wet weekend pushes everybody into the dry one.

Should the whole autumn be one visit or one visit per weekend?

This is the decision with the most money attached and it is easy to make by accident. bindro schedules one payout per visit, and only once every session of it has ended. Publish the whole season as a single visit and you are paid two days after the last Sunday — one payment, in November, covering September as well.

Publish a visit per weekend and each one pays two days after its own Sunday, so the money arrives while the season is running and while you are still paying staff. The cost is more listings to manage and more links to share. For most farms that trade is worth making, and it is far easier to decide now than to restructure in October.

What should be an entry type and what should be an add-on?

An entry type is a price for coming in: weekend, weekday, a comp for under-threes. An add-on is something bought alongside it with its own stock — a hayride seat, a pick-your-own bag, a parking space. The distinction matters because add-on stock is decremented inside the same transaction that takes the money, under a constraint that cannot oversell.

What an add-on does not carry is a time of its own. A hayride add-on is a thing bought, not a seat on the three o clock trailer, so who rides when is still your team job at the barn door. If a ride genuinely needs its own arrival times, it wants to be its own visit with its own slots.

What should I check before the first Saturday?

Walk the booking yourself on a phone, on the farm, on mobile data. Buy two entries and watch what happens: you will get a roster email, because any order for more than one entry becomes a roster of places and an unnamed place is refused at the gate. That is the single behaviour most likely to bite you on the first busy morning, and the fix is knowing it before your visitors do.

• Buy a real multi-entry order and confirm the roster email arrives and the link works.
• Scan a real entry at your actual gate, with your actual device, from your actual field.
• Confirm every slot shows its own availability and that a sold-out slot says Fully booked.
• Decide your refund posture, knowing visitors can refund themselves in full until their slot starts.
• Set the sales tax rate if you charge it, and remember bindro holds it rather than paying it to you or filing it.