Reservations System

[wojtix27]

Hello everyone! I’m a complete beginner in Airtable and would greatly appreciate your guidance. I’m trying to set up a simple “Lab Reservations” system and have created the following structure:

1. Terminy (Slots)

   • Stores all available lab time slots.
   • Fields include: Date, Start Time, End Time, Researcher, and Status (Available/Reserved).
   • I’ve built a form called “Add New Slot,” where I want to include this instruction for lab assistants:

     “Here you can add your availability when you can conduct research in the laboratory. Remember that each study lasts a minimum of 30 minutes. Please add slots in 30-minute increments. For example, if you’re available on February 13 from 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM, you should add six separate slots: 1:00–1:30 PM, 1:30–2:00 PM, and so on.”

2. Rezerwacje (Reservations)

   • Allows people to sign up for a specific slot.
   • Fields include: Full Name, Email, and a linked record to the Terminy table.
   • I also have a form, “Registration Form,” which should only display slots with Status = “Available.”

I want to automate two things:

• Confirmation: As soon as someone books a slot (via the “Registration Form”), the slot’s status should change to “Reserved,” and a confirmation email should go out to the participant (and possibly the researcher).
• Reminder: Each day, I’d like an automatic reminder email sent to participants who have a reservation scheduled for the next day.

Since I’m new to Airtable, I’m not entirely sure how to:

1. Properly display only “Available” slots in the “Registration Form.”
2. Structure the daily reminder automation and filter the correct records.
3. Ensure that updating the slot to “Reserved” happens smoothly when a reservation is made.

Any detailed, step-by-step advice, best practices, or examples you can share would be incredibly helpful. Thank you so much in advance!

link for my work so far: https://airtable.com/applRJ6l2V4rV8Vvg/shrNDuZJxz3BAYcPZ

[TheTimeSavingCo]

Assuming your data looks like this:

Then I'd recommend having a form in the Registrations table with a linked field to the Slots table, where you set the records that can be selected to be filtered like so:

And this is how it would look in use, and a link to the form can be found here

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For the reminders, if you're alright with sending out one email per slot, then that's really simple.  You'd have an automation that triggers once a day, and its action would be to look for any slots that are reserved for that day, and then use a repeating group to send out emails as needed:

Link to base

If you wanted one email to be sent per person, regardless of how many slots they've booked, then that gets more involved.  You'd either use a script helper or create a new table that contained all the people that have reserved, and then use that table to build your automation