How do I prevent empty occupancy times due to reservations?

Rationale

The situation: customers are given the opportunity to book flexibly. Bookings can be made every half hour. But the periods are at least an hour.
What is the risk here? As the daytime occupancy becomes fuller, we see gaps emerging. Half hours remain. These half hours remain and this can lead to loss of turnover.

Procedure solution

There are still a few things that can be thought of in the process to fill the half hours.

1. Speak to the booker to place a booking half an hour earlier or later. After this, a full slot will be available again
2. Sell the last half hours separately.
3. Offers existing reservation (at reduced rate) an extension

Automatic solution

There is a construction for this situation. Bookings are sent via a setting at product level. With the aim of improving the situation and having less loss. The setting is called "avoid slots that are too small". Really.

It should be noted that this construction can never guarantee full occupancy. It remains a matter of bringing supply and demand together at the right time. If bookers do not have the right options at the time of booking, they can drop out. So be careful when applying.

The configuration in main features.

How does this work in practice?

We take a day with opening hours from 2 p.m. to 11 p.m. Periods of 60 minutes that count every half hour. This produces a list of slots.

We see here that all slots are bookable, not a single reservation has been made yet.
"avoid slots that are too small" is still set to NO.
Now if a booker creates the 2:30 p.m. Then the result for the next booker is:

It is clearly visible that bookings can no longer be made from 2:00 PM - 2:30 PM. Even though no one is there.

We now set "avoid slots that are too small" to YES. Note that we cannot (or cannot) reverse the above scenario.
We are now taking another day, without reservations the same day, at least in terms of opening hours, looks like this

What can you see here? Two slots can no longer be booked immediately. The second ending and the penultimate one.
For every situation it is possible to look both forwards and backwards.

A first booking comes in. Not yet reported, but to make it a little more complex: in this case there are 3 jobs available.
The booking made is from 17-18 and concerns three courts. Fully booked at this time.

Much more stands out here

• 17-18 is of course fully booked
• 16.30 is also full. This slot runs until 5:30 PM and nothing is available between 5:00 PM and 5:30 PM. So red.
• Second and penultimate slot, just like in previous scenario, is not available
• 3:30 PM is not available. A booking at that slot will leave half an hour open between 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM
• 6:30 PM is not available. A booking at that slot will leave half an hour open between 6:00 PM - 6:30 PM

The above has demonstrated the core of the solution.
One more scenario which is a bit more complex. We'll take a new day. Same opening hours and settings.

Here we place a booking from 17-18 with 2 lanes (out of 3).
And a second booking from 4:30 PM - 5:30 PM for 1 court.
Availability from 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM is 2 lanes, from 5:00 PM - 5:30 PM is FULL and from 5:30 PM - 6:00 PM availability is 1 lane.

Surprising at first glance, the slots appear to be moving up.

• The 16 o'clock slot would create an empty space and is therefore no longer selectable.
• ItThe 4:30 PM slot can still be booked, but for a maximum of 1 court
• The 6 p.m. slot can still be booked, but for a maximum of 2 courts