Set up and manage a waitlist
Waitlists can hep you manage demand when interest in your event or its sessions exceeds available capacity. With Customer Insights – Journeys, you can configure waitlists at both the event and session levels, giving you more control over registrations while providing a better experience for attendees.
Event organizers can monitor and manage waitlists from within the event or session records. The registration and attendance view provides visibility into each contact’s status – registered, waitlisted, invited, or canceled – making it easy to track changes and intervene manually if needed.
For more information, see Set up and manage an event waitlist.
Waitlisting for an event
When the number of interested attendees exceeds your defined event capacity, enabling a waitlist allows new contacts to be queued for registration. You can choose to handle this process manually or allow the system to automatically register waitlisted contacts when space becomes available.
If automatic registration is enabled, the system promotes waitlisted contacts to registered status in the order they joined the list. If not, you can use journeys to identify waitlisted contacts and invite them to register once a space opens up. This flexibility helps ensure you’re always in control of the registration experience, whether you’re managing a small workshop or a large multi-day event.
Waitlisting for sessions
Sessions within an event can also be waitlisted independently, which is useful if your event has multiple tracks or limited-seating workshops. Similar to event-level waitlisting, you define the maximum capacity for each session and choose whether waitlisted contacts are automatically registered as space opens up.
This session-level control is especially important for events with overlapping sessions or tiered access, as it ensures that popular sessions are managed separately from the overall event capacity.
Using event and session waitlisting together
Waitlists can be enabled at both the event and session levels simultaneously, allowing for a more refined registration process. The behavior depends on which component- event or session – is at capacity:
If the event is full but sessions still have space, attendees are added to the event waitlist and their session preferences are held until they are fully registered for the event.
If the event has space but an individual session is full, attendees are registered for the event and added to the session waitlist.
If both the event and session are full, the contact will wait until both have availability before being fully registered.
This layered approach ensures that attendees can express interest in specific sessions even if they’re not yet confirmed for the overall event, and that organizers can prioritize engagement based on available space.