When you or a customer initiate the booking process by selecting a date and entering the number of passengers we put a temporary hold on those seats, in order to prevent someone else from buying them while you or the customer completes the purchase.

The default hold time is 10 minutes, and the clock restarts each time you or the customer click a link related to the booking.

Our hope is that this configuration will strike the perfect balance: giving you or the customer ample time to complete a booking, even if you are temporarily distracted by a phone call, but still freeing up the seats if the booking is not completed in a reasonable amount of time.

If the booking is not completed before the hold period elapses, Starboard Suite automatically releases the seats back into the availability pool for someone else to purchase.

Due to this hold period, you may occasionally notice that the number of seats available seems too low, relative to the number of seats that you've sold on a given trip. For example, you may see that 6 out of 30 seats are "available", even though you've only sold 20 tickets. This means that someone is in the process of booking those additional 4 seats. Rest assured that if they don't complete that purchase within the hold period the seats will be freed up automatically.