Waitlist

A queue people join once your event reaches its capacity, so that overflow demand gets captured instead of lost. It does two jobs. It tells you honestly how much bigger the room could have been, and it refills seats as cancellations come in, which is why a waitlist is the natural partner to overbooking. On Luma the waitlist is event wide rather than per ticket, so it only switches on when the event hits its event capacity. A single ticket type filling up just reads Sold Out. Waitlisted guests do not count toward capacity until you approve them, and approvals are manual, so somebody has to actually work the list. The film set version is the standby background actor sitting at basecamp with a coffee, already dressed, waiting to be pulled in.

Source: Luma Help Center, which documents the event capacity versus ticket capacity distinction, the manual approval flow, and the deferred payment hold for paid waitlists (Luma help, waitlist). On why waitlists convert, eventcloud’s organizer guidance recommends making the released-seat offer time limited and asking waitlisted people to confirm intent, since the people keen enough to join a waitlist are usually the most committed attendees (eventcloud).

First used in: 2.2 · Registration ops: the no-show math.