Help · Getting set up
Your timezone, and why it is set once and never guessed
Side Quest Booking stores the time you type — "7:30am" — and reads it in your business's timezone, never the browser's. This page is why, and what a change would mean.
Why it belongs to the business, not the browser
A browser knows where it is, not where your boat is. If the timezone came from the browser, a 7:30am departure typed by your manager in Honolulu and the same departure typed by your bookkeeper visiting family in Florida would land six hours apart, and nothing would say so. So the zone is a setting on the business, shown under Settings, and every date input in the dashboard means "wall-clock time at the business". The server does the conversion, not the page in front of you.
It is a real zone name, like Pacific/Honolulu or
America/New_York, not an offset. Hawaii has no daylight saving;
Florida changes twice a year. A named zone knows that; "UTC-5" does not.
An "8 hours long" course across a clock change is still 8 elapsed hours.
What customers see
The booking page, confirmation emails, reminders and the QR pass all show times as they are at your business. A customer booking from another zone sees your 7:30am, not theirs.
Changing it
It is set when your account is created and shown read-only under Settings; to change it, ask us. That is on purpose: every date you have already created keeps the exact instant it always had — the boat still leaves when it leaves — but every reading of it shifts by the difference between the two zones. A schedule full of 7:30am departures suddenly reads 1:30pm. Correct and alarming in equal measure, and the way to avoid it is to get the zone right before the first date exists. Side Quest Booking refuses an offset or a misspelt zone rather than guessing.
Two places, two zones
Locations share the business's zone. Running in two zones at once is unusual enough that we would rather talk it through than let a setting quietly do the wrong thing — ask.