When a customer selects seats and begins checkout, those seats are temporarily held to prevent two customers from booking the same seat simultaneously.

How the Hold Works

• Seats are locked the moment the customer starts the checkout process.
• The hold is released automatically after the configured timeout if the booking is not completed.
• Once a booking is confirmed, the hold is converted to a permanent reservation.
• If the customer abandons the checkout, the seats return to available inventory within one minute of the hold expiring (cleaned up by a background cron job).

Configuring the Hold Duration

1. Go to Eventer → Settings → Seat Plan.
2. Set Seat Hold Duration to the desired number of minutes (1–60).
3. The default is 15 minutes.
4. Save settings.

Recommendation: Set the hold duration to match your payment gateway’s typical checkout time. 10–15 minutes is suitable for most card payments. Increase to 20–30 minutes if you expect customers to take longer (e.g. group bookings requiring coordination).

Hold Cleanup Cron

Eventer registers a WordPress cron job (eventer_seating_hold_cleanup_cron) that runs every minute to release expired holds. Ensure your WordPress cron is functioning correctly — if you use a server-side cron instead of WP-Cron, make sure it is configured to fire frequently.