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Riserva has two levels above your tables:
  • A location is a property. It comes from Shopify — you don’t create one here.
  • A venue is a bookable space inside that property: the tasting bar, the restaurant, the cave, the lawn where tours meet.
Find both under Settings → Venues & floor maps.

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Your Shopify locations sync automatically

There’s no sync button. Every time you open Venues & floor maps, Riserva pulls your locations from Shopify and updates them. What always follows Shopify: name, address, phone, and whether the location is active. Edit those in Shopify (Settings → Locations) and they change here on your next visit. If a location disappears from Shopify, Riserva deactivates it rather than deleting it — your reservation history and its venues stay intact, listed under Inactive locations.
Good to know If the list looks stale and a banner says “Couldn’t refresh locations from Shopify”, Riserva is showing you the last successful sync rather than an empty page. Reload in a moment.

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Set each location’s timezone

This is the one location field that is yours, not Shopify’s, and it matters more than anything else on the page: every bookable time at every venue under a location is generated in that location’s timezone.
  1. Open Settings → Venues & floor maps.
  2. Click the pencil icon beside the location’s timezone, in its header.
  3. Pick a zone — Pacific, Mountain, Arizona, Central, Eastern, Alaska, Hawaii, or Other (enter IANA name) to type one such as Europe/Paris.
  4. Save.
On first sync, Riserva uses your Shopify store’s timezone.
Good to know Set the timezone before you take reservations. Changing it later doesn’t rewrite the dates and times already stored on existing reservations, so those can sort and read in the old zone.

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Add a venue

  1. On Settings → Venues & floor maps, find the location.
  2. Click Add venue.
  3. Give it a name — “North Tasting Bar”, “The Restaurant”, “Cave Tour meeting point”.
  4. Pick a type: Tasting bar, Restaurant, Tour, Event space, or Other.
  5. Optionally open Arrival pacing (optional) and set a limit (below).
  6. Create venue.
You can add as many venues to a location as you like. Venues on a location that’s inactive in Shopify can’t be added to.
Good to know A venue has no address and no timezone of its own — it inherits both from its location. And it has no capacity number: capacity comes from the tables you put in it. See Tables and the floor map.

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One venue or two? How capacity is shared

Every experience you schedule at a venue draws from the same tables and seats. Riserva never holds seats back for one experience: if the Estate Flight and the Library Tasting both run at your tasting bar, whichever party books first gets the seats. That’s deliberate — it keeps the room full, and it matches how the room actually works. When that’s not what you want, you have three levers, in the order worth trying them:
  1. Share the room (the default). Right whenever the offerings genuinely share the space. An empty seat serves whoever books it.
  2. Split the schedule. Same venue, different hours — tastings 11–3, dinner from 6. The experiences never overlap, so they never compete.
  3. Split the space. Give the experience its own venue — “Reserve Room” beside “Main Tasting Bar”, each with its own tables. A venue is the unit capacity belongs to, so a separate venue is how you dedicate capacity to an experience. Venues are free to create and both can live on one location.
You can also cap one experience within a shared room — Max per slot on the experience limits how much of the pool a single time can take, without reserving anything.
Good to know Keep a venue to one kind of capacity. Tables and tour vans should not live in the same venue — Riserva treats a venue’s resources as one interchangeable pool, so give the tour fleet its own venue (“Tour departures”) and the dining room its own. A whole-venue buyout takes the venue it’s scheduled at, which is one more reason the room being bought should be its own venue.

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Arrival pacing

Pacing is the quiet feature that stops a good service turning into a bad one. Even when tables are free, seating too many parties at once overwhelms the kitchen or the pour staff. Pacing caps how many guests can start a visit in any 15-minute window; guests who don’t fit are offered a later time instead. Set Max new guests per 15 minutes when creating the venue, or edit it later on the venue page as Arrival pacing — max new guests per 15 min. A good starting point is how many first courses (or first pours) your team can comfortably begin in 15 minutes. Leave it blank for no limit. Pacing counts every experience running in that venue, so a tasting and a lunch service share the same arrival budget.

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Edit a venue

Open the venue from its location card. You get:
  • Venue details — name, type, arrival pacing, description
  • Photo — drag one in, or replace / remove an existing one
  • Tables and seating — see Tables and the floor map
  • Floor map button — the visual layout editor
  • Status — Active or Inactive, in the page header

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Turning a venue off

Venues can be set Inactive, and that’s the only way to retire one — there is no delete. This is deliberate: reservation history, reports and floor maps all point at venues, and deleting one would put holes in your past. An inactive venue stops being offered for new reservations. Existing reservations stand.

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Connecting venues to experiences

A venue doesn’t decide what happens in it — an experience does, and one experience can run in several venues. You link them on the experience itself, under Where it runs, and each schedule you add is attached to one of those venues. That’s how a single “Estate Tasting” can run at the bar Thursday through Sunday and in the barrel room on Saturdays only.

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Blackout periods

The Blackout periods card closes dates to new reservations — a holiday, a private buyout, the harvest crush. Existing reservations stand; a blackout only stops new ones, so cancel and contact affected guests yourself if you must close a date that already has reservations. Click Add blackout period:
  1. Name it for your team — “Christmas and New Year”. Guests never see the name; they simply see no availability.
  2. Applies to — All venues and experiences, or Specific venues or experiences: tick whole venues, or expand a venue’s list and tick just the experiences to pause there. Ticking a venue ticks everything in it; a partially ticked venue shows a dash. A fully ticked venue closes the venue itself — including experiences you add to it later.
  3. Date range — one calendar: click the first closed day, then the last. Both ends are included; for a single day, click it once.
Each period lists with its name, dates and coverage, and Edit reopens the same dialog. Remove deletes the period and reopens those dates instantly. With none set, the card reads “No blackout periods”.
What things mean on this screen: What things mean: Settings