Need a concise term for 'Dates to accept bookings within'

Question

I maintain and operate an online bookings platform for all kinds of events and activities. Some of these events can span multiple dates and so require that customers completing a booking must select the date they wish to attend the event.

As part of the booking platform, we enable event organisers to control not only the date range over which the event takes place, but also the dates within which customers are allowed to visit the webpage and submit bookings for the event. Naturally, these dates if set, would precede or overlap with the actual event dates, but never extend beyond them, for hopefully obvious reasons.

Now, a perennial problem I have experienced with this particular feature is helping event organisers setting up their events to understand the true nature of these extra date fields within our user interface, since I cannot find a good concise term for these that is unambiguous and absolutely cannot be misinterpreted as being the date range customers should choose within for their visit.

The heading over the date fields at present reads 'Dates to accept bookings' which is clearly somewhat ambiguous. We provide a significant explanation of the fields within the mouse hover tooltip for the fields, as shown below, but despite this, we invariably have event organisers setting the dates to match the actual dates of their event, which ultimately results in their customers not actually being able to make bookings until the event has started. D'oh!

Somewhat annoyingly, the user has already entered actual event dates quite a bit further up the form when they encounter these fields, so why they feel we are asking for the same dates again has always puzzled me, but that's another matter.

Hopefully my explanation of the problem is clear enough. In a nutshell, what is a good brief term (two or three words ideally) to express "the range of dates within which a customer can visit the event booking webpage and create a new booking for your event"?

Answer 1

I think there is confusion over what you mean by "booking".

If I understand this correctly, I would call it "Ticket Availability".

Answer 2

How about the term reserving instead of booking?

• accept reservations between these dates

• when to allow users to reserve their place

• reserve seats for event between these dates

The phrasing tickets available instead of booking, as Amadeus suggested, is also less confusing, in my mind.

Answer 3

I think the confusion is that whether it's a booking or a reservation, if you just make a phrase with "booking" and "date" in it, people will assume you mean the date they want to book/reserve, not the date they do it.

I think the fix is not to label the range but to label each date:

• Bookings go on sale
• Last day to make a booking

You will still need the alt text, and I think yours needs work. I would mention this is the date of the purchase, or the date the user makes the booking, not the date of the event or the date the user expects to attend.