Your waitlist is a callback list — and most of it never gets called
Every sold-out day quietly collects names under Operations → Waitlist. From that one screen you can offer a spot with a 48-hour clock, mark a lead converted, and watch a conversion rate build. Most operators have never opened it.
This week: the waitlist.
Where to find it
On the left-hand side, open Operations → Waitlist.
What you'll see is a list of people who asked to be told when a spot opened up — their name, email, the product they wanted, and the preferred dates they picked. Some of those dates are already in the past. Some are still ahead of you.
What you can do from that screen
Four actions, per lead:
- Offer a spot — pick the date, optionally a specific time, and send it. The guest gets accept and decline links and 48 hours to take it.
- Mark converted — for the ones you closed over the phone or at the counter.
- Cancel — the lead is no longer live.
- Delete — removes it from your system.
Before you send an offer
Check that the date is actually open. The offer names a specific date, and the guest can accept it the moment they read the email. Don't offer a slot you have already sold.
RentalTide also offers automatically when a spot frees up — a cancellation on an inventory item someone is waiting for triggers the same 48-hour offer without you touching it. But automatic offers only fire when something is actually released. On a fully booked August, nothing is released, and the list just keeps growing until someone opens it.
Nothing gets deleted on its own
Old entries stay. That's deliberate, and the main reason is next season.
There is usually a reason a guest picked a specific date — an anniversary, a family week, the same stretch of summer every year. A lead who couldn't get on the water on August 3rd is a very warm name to email the following spring, before that week sells out again.
The two numbers to watch
At the top of the page: conversion rate and average time to convert. They stay empty until you start converting leads. Once they fill in, they tell you the thing no booking report can — how much of your sold-out demand you are actually recapturing, and how fast you have to move to get it.
Sold out isn't lost revenue. It's a callback list.
See you next week.
Transcript
All right, so this week it's going to be about waitlists.
If we head to the left-hand side, over at Operations and down to Waitlist, what we're going to see here is quite a few names that are on a waitlist for preferred dates. A lot of these are in the past, a couple in the future. You can see when they were created and what product they're interested in.
From here we can offer a spot directly — they only have forty-eight hours to accept that. You can also mark them as converted, cancel them, or of course delete them out of your system.
We don't delete any old stuff, for quite a few reasons. One being you may want to market to them next year. Usually there's a reason why someone chooses a specific date, so the following year might be a better time to try to convert this.
However, if you were to offer this spot on this date — which would be August 3rd — and you sent that offer, just make sure that you do have that available. We also offer automatically if that spot becomes available, but in this case, none of them did.
And then this conversion rate and average time to convert will start getting filled out as you start converting your leads. So in this case, this would be a great thing for an operator to keep an eye on.
Hopefully this helps some of the other operators out there.