How Flexible, Overlapping Time Slots Can Fill Your Escape Room’s Quietest Days
Posted in Escape Room Business Management by Mairi Nolan on Wed 5 August 2026
But this might not work quite so well on a quieter day. What happens if a prospective team plans to finish lunch at 2:15pm, and would love to play an escape room right after? They’ll miss that 2pm booking, and the booking widget will say “next slot available at 4pm”. How about if someone needs to be done by 7:30pm? Your 6pm slot might be cutting it a little too close for them. In each of these cases, a fixed booking schedule wouldn’t work for those players, even if your room is sitting empty at the exact time they want to play.
Having flexible, overlapping slots solves this problem, and this is a feature we’ve had at Buzzshot Bookings right from the start, being used by many escape rooms around the world. How this works is you set how long your room is (including briefing and reset time) then choose how frequently you want slots to be available throughout the day, for example at 15 or 30 minute intervals. When someone books one of these slots, it automatically blocks out and removes those relevant times from the overall availability but all your other slots remain bookable. This means you can offer your players flexibility to pick a time that works for them, and you don’t risk double-booking or have to wrangle a custom setup for them.
How Just Escape Rooms uses Flexible Bookings
But don’t just take our word for it. This is a feature that is being used by many escape rooms already. To get a sense of how it works in practice, we spoke to Jordan Couch, the director of Just Escape Room in Lombard, Illinois, who says flexible bookings have been a huge game changer for them.
Jordan took over Just Escape Room in 2023, where they’d previously been running since 2017. His focus since then has been to rebuild each escape room one by one, training his team and fine-tuning how the business runs. One of his most interesting scheduling decisions when setting up the room slots is how he handles weekday availability.
"Monday through Thursday, I run slots every 15 minutes," Jordan explains.
"I try to give my customers the time to book at any time - they can book literally anything that's available."
A snapshot of Just Escape Room’s current booking widget, on Buzzshot Bookings.
At Just Escape Room, on a busy weekend, the slots tend to fill up quickly, so it makes sense to run them at tight regular intervals and not leave any dead time in between. But on a quiet weekday, the priority isn’t optimisation, it’s making sure that everyone who does want to come can find a time that works for them. The flexibility is used where it’s most useful, on days when capturing every possible booking matters the most.
Before they started using the feature, Jordan explained,
"I was definitely losing potential bookings on certain games. I'd stagger my games one at 4:30, the next at 4:40, then 4:50. We found the game with the later time slot was getting booked more because people were planning dinner around certain times. With flexible bookings, I think I get a lot more bookings overall."
Jordan noted that escape room players in his local market tend to book around thirty minutes in advance on weekdays. Flexible, overlapping bookings therefore work best as they can cater for impulsive walk-ins who’d like to play in the next 15-30 minutes.
The Cabin, and The Attic - two rooms at Just Escape Room
It’s also worth considering that when customers can book any time they like, their choices can tell you about when your players want to play. More data is always a good idea when it comes to planning and running a busy escape room. Over time, the flexible booking patterns can reveal the shape of your demand on quieter days. Do people come in after lunch? In the evening? What size groups are playing when, and how can you encourage them more. Jordan commented on this as being a unique side effect of this:
"You can definitely see what times on what days which rooms get booked more and a view of which timeslots sell the actually have the most bookings” he said.
"And then if you wanted to go back to fixed time slots, you could, but just adjust accordingly."
When to use fixed bookings, when to use flexible bookings
Flexible escape room slots might not be the right answer for every day, or even every escape room. No two escape rooms are the same, and no two markets are the same either. But it’s worth being aware of when different booking schedules work best.
For example, one of the potential downsides of running a flexible, overlapping bookings schedule are the gaps it inevitably creates. If someone books your 60 minute room at 3:15, and someone else has booked for 5pm, that means you have a gap of 45 minutes from 4:15 and 5pm. If only the earlier booking had been 15 minutes earlier, you could have sold that extra slot in the middle. I am of course paraphrasing a little, you also need to factor briefing and resetting time, but the principle remains the same. You can cater for more players and last minute bookings, but this could come at a cost of awkward gaps in your schedule.
When we spoke to Jordan, he was open about this,
"It can hurt your top line if you're getting bookings constantly. Weekdays, I'm never fully booked, so it never hurts, it just gives more flexibility."
It’s clear overlapping slots are the most valuable when your priority is to capture any booking, rather than optimising for a full schedule. On days you’re likely to fill up anyway, a fixed schedule is a smarter operational choice. But on quieter days where the risk is empty rooms, then flexibility pays for itself.
Setting up custom rules for bookings in Buzzshot
Our goal with Buzzshot has always been to make a tool genuinely useful for escape room owners, so however you want to run your booking schedule, the platform can take care of all the hard work so you can focus on actually running your business.
Getting started with overlapping bookings
Overlapping slots are available right now to everyone in Buzzshot Bookings, and it's a feature we’ve had available for quite a while, being used by many escape rooms around the world. If you’re already using Buzzshot Bookings and want to try this, you can check out our Knowledge Base article here, or get in touch at support@buzzshot.com and we’ll help you with the setup.
If you’re not yet using Buzzshot and you’d like to explore how Buzzshot Bookings and flexible scheduling could work for your escape room, schedule a call with Tom here and we’ll get you set up with a free trial.
Many thanks to Jordan Couch at Just Escape Room who chatted to us for this article. You can learn more about their company by heading to their website here.
