Distillery Booking System: Tours, Flights and Masterclasses

A distillery takes tour and tasting bookings online by publishing each experience — a still-house tour, a spirit flight, a gin masterclass — as its own bookable session, then serving it through an embeddable widget on your own website and a hosted booking page. In TableNest each experience carries its own length, its own cap on guests per booking and its own daily limit, so a twelve-seat masterclass and a walk-through tour of the still house fill independently of each other. One-off nights — a single-cask release, a private hire for a whisky club — run as dated sessions with a covers cap of their own. From the Business plan up you can attach a deposit, charged through your own Stripe or Square account. Every confirmed booking sends an SMS and an email carrying a one-tap cancel link, so a guest who cannot make it releases the place instead of quietly not turning up. Flat monthly fee, no commission per guest.

What does a distillery need from a booking system?

A distillery is not selling tables for an hour and a half. It is selling timed experiences with a hard limit on how many people can stand around a copper still and still hear the distiller talk. That changes what the software has to do, even though a lot of the machinery underneath is the same as any venue taking scheduled, capped, paid bookings.

The parts that actually matter for a spirits producer:

Each experience as its own product. A still-house tour, a four-dram whisky flight and a gin-blending masterclass are three different things with three different lengths. In TableNest each is a service with its own name, description and duration, and guests choose one before they choose a time.
A cap per booking and a cap per day. You can set the maximum guests one booking of an experience may hold, and the maximum number of bookings of it you will take in a day. Both are enforced when the guest checks availability and again when they submit, so an eight-person tasting bar does not quietly become a ten-person one.
Its own running times. Each experience gets a per-weekday schedule — a start time and a last-booking time — so a masterclass that only runs Saturday afternoons is simply not offered on a Tuesday.
Dated one-offs. A single-cask release night or a bottling-hall open day is a dated session in its own right, with a start, an end and a maximum number of covers.
Booking surfaces you own. An embeddable widget that sits on your own site, plus a hosted booking page you can link from Instagram or an email footer. TableNest has no Google reservation integration — those two surfaces are where bookings come from, and the guest record stays yours.
Automatic messages with a way out. Every confirmation includes "Booking confirmed at {venue}. {date}, {time}, {party_size} guests. Cancel: {cancel_link}", and the reminder before the visit carries the same link. Tapping it opens a short cancellation page — nothing to remember, nothing to type.

If your site produces wine alongside spirits, the equivalent write-up for that side of the business is our booking system for wineries page. And if the distillery has a public bar attached, the booking system for bars page covers the everyday drinks trade rather than the scheduled experiences below.

How do you run still-house tours, spirit flights and masterclasses as bookable sessions?

Set each one up as a separate experience, give it a length, a cap and its own days, then publish it. The point of keeping them separate is that a sold-out gin masterclass should never block a tour that still has room in the same afternoon.

Name it the way a visitor would say it. "Still House Tour and Tasting", "Reserve Whiskey Flight", "Gin School: Blend Your Own" — the name is what appears in the booking widget, so plain beats clever.
Set the length honestly. The duration drives the time slots offered, so include the part where people linger at the sampling counter, not just the guided section.
Cap the guests per booking. If the tasting bar seats eight, set eight. A larger party is told so before they waste time picking a date.
Cap the bookings per day if the still house cannot take more. Once that number is reached, the experience shows no remaining availability for that date rather than accepting an overflow you would have to unwind by phone.
Give it the days it actually runs. A per-weekday schedule with a start and a last-booking time keeps the Thursday-only masterclass off the Sunday calendar.

Where an experience has variants, you do not need a separate listing for each. An experience can carry per-guest options with their own prices — a standard flight and a rare-cask upgrade, or a non-alcoholic option for the designated driver — and the guest assigns each person in the party to one. Those chosen options add up to what the booking is actually worth, which is the figure a percentage-based deposit is then calculated from.

One-off nights work differently and deliberately so. A dated session has a fixed date, a start and end time, and a maximum number of covers — and that cap counts guests, not bookings, by adding up the party sizes already confirmed. When the covers are gone, the next person who tries to book is told the session is fully booked. You can also attach a condition of entry to a dated session — your own wording, such as a stated cancellation deadline or a no-refunds note on a limited release — which the guest has to tick before the booking is accepted.

Should you take a deposit on a paid tasting or masterclass?

If a no-show costs you poured spirit, prepared botanicals or a staffed hour, yes. If it costs you a few minutes of a quiet weekday, probably not — the reminder and its cancel link already do most of the work, and a payment step on a free walk-through tour is friction you are choosing for no return.

On TableNest, deposits unlock on the Business plan and above, and they run through your own connected Stripe or Square account. The money lands with you: TableNest takes no cut of a deposit and no commission per guest. Three shapes are available:

Per head — an amount multiplied by the party size. Set it to the full ticket price and a masterclass is paid for in advance.
Per booking — one flat amount to hold the session, whatever the party size.
A percentage of an estimated spend per person, for paired dinners and long-format sessions where you already know roughly what the night is worth.

Worth being straight about the mechanics: there is no separate ticket-price field and no separate ticketing checkout in TableNest. It is the deposit engine doing the work, and the guest sees the charge described as a deposit even when it equals the full price of the masterclass. Payment happens on a secure hosted checkout page, and the confirmation messages go out once it clears.

The rules are scoped rather than blanket. A deposit policy can be limited to a party-size range, particular days of the week, a time window, a specific area of the site, a named experience, or a named dated session — so the Saturday gin school can require a payment while the weekday tour stays free to book. Refunds are set in hours before the start: a full-refund window, an optional shorter window closer to the session that refunds an agreed percentage, or non-refundable outright for a release night where your costs are already sunk. You can also mark a deposit as credited against the bill, which is the version guests mind least. For how to pitch it and how much to ask, see our guide to taking deposits for bookings.

How do you handle group and corporate distillery bookings?

Groups are where a distillery makes real margin — team offsites, birthdays, trade visits, whisky clubs — and where a late cancellation hurts most. Handle them as their own thing rather than as a stack of individual bookings.

Run a private hire as a dated private function with its own covers cap, start and end time, so it occupies the still house exclusively and cannot be booked into by walk-up traffic.
Attach the deposit to size, not to everyone. A policy that only triggers from, say, ten guests up leaves ordinary pairs and fours booking friction-free while the bookings that would really cost you are secured.
Put the terms in front of them. A dated session can carry a condition of entry the organiser must agree to before the booking is accepted — useful for a stated cancellation deadline on a group that needs stock ordered in.
Sell gift vouchers for corporate gifting. On Business and above you can sell vouchers online, redeemable against a future masterclass — a cleaner answer than invoicing a company for a session nobody has booked yet.
Keep the organiser reachable. They get the SMS confirmation and the reminder, both carrying the cancel link, so a change in numbers reaches you early enough to resell the places.

SMS is included in every plan rather than billed per message, so a run of group reminders does not arrive as a surprise line item: in Australia, 120 messages a month on Starter, 240 on Business and 400 on Pro; in the US, 240, 720 and 1,200 respectively. US allowances are larger because US messaging costs materially less to send.

What does distillery booking software cost?

TableNest is a flat monthly fee with no commission per guest — you keep the full value of every tour, flight and masterclass you sell. The plans a distillery is realistically choosing between:

Starter — $29/mo AUD, $19/mo USD. The booking widget, the hosted page, experiences with their own caps and schedules, dated sessions, and SMS confirmations and reminders with a one-tap cancel link. No deposits, so sessions run as free bookings. 120 SMS a month in Australia, 240 in the US.
Business — $49/mo AUD, $34/mo USD. Everything above plus deposits, gift vouchers, and Square POS and Xero connections so takings and invoices reconcile without re-keying. 240 SMS a month in Australia, 720 in the US.
Pro — $69/mo AUD, $49/mo USD. For a busier site: 400 SMS a month in Australia, 1,200 in the US, plus a visual floor plan, a white-label widget and priority support.

A Pro+ tier sits above these for high-volume operations running several screens across a floor. Whichever you pick, there is no per-cover commission and no per-ticket fee on a session.

Every plan starts with 30 days free and no card needed to begin, so you can build your experiences and walk the booking flow yourself before deciding. A card is only required when you go live to the public — serving the widget, sending SMS or email to guests, or taking deposits and voucher payments — and to keep using the dashboard past day 30. TableNest is affordable, not free: there is no permanently free tier. What a flat fee usually beats is the percentage-per-booking model, which quietly scales its bill with your best months. The arithmetic is on our affordable booking system page.

Ready to open your tours and flights for booking? Start a free 30-day trial — no card required to begin. Build each experience with its own cap and schedule, take deposits on the sessions that warrant one, and keep every dollar of what you sell.