Renters booked your hall before anyone vetted them

The booking page worked exactly as sold: a renter picked a date, picked the hall, and confirmed. That was the problem. Someone the board had never spoken to could lock in a Saturday night without anyone checking who they were, what the event was, or whether they'd wrecked the last place they rented. So the board switched the whole thing off and went back to phone tag and a shared spreadsheet.

They didn't need to abandon the software. The thing that let a stranger self-confirm is a single setting, and nearly every booking tool has a "hold it for me" version of it.

The gap is auto-confirm, not the tool

Most booking tools default to instant confirmation because that's what a salon or a dentist wants — fill the slot and move on. A shared community hall is the opposite case. You want the slot held, not filled, until a person says yes.

Turn on request-to-book

The label varies by product. In most facility and space-booking tools it's called approval required, request to book, manual confirmation, or pending. If you can't find it, search the vendor's help docs for those words rather than assuming it isn't there.

1. Log into the booking tool as an admin, not as a public user.
2. Open the settings for the hall or resource itself — approval mode is usually per-space, not global.
3. Find the confirmation mode and switch it from instant/auto to approval required.
4. Turn on the notification so a real person gets an email or text the moment a request arrives. Point it at a role address the board shares, not one person's inbox that goes quiet on vacation.
5. Add the fields you need to decide: full name, phone, event type, expected headcount, and whether alcohol will be served.
6. Submit a dummy booking yourself and confirm it arrives as pending and does not block the calendar as confirmed.

Build the vetting step you actually shut down for

The approval gate is only worth anything if approving means checking something. Write the checklist down so any board member on rotation applies the same test.

• The name and phone are real and reachable — call once before approving a first-time renter.
• The event type is allowed under your hall rules and within the occupancy limit.
• If liquor is being served, the renter needs an AGLC Special Event Licence — in Alberta you can't just serve at a public-hall rental without one, and that's on the renter to hold, not you.
• Any damage deposit is arranged before you click approve, not after.

Pending is leverage. You lose it the moment the booking is confirmed.

Where this stops being a settings change

Request-to-book handles the common case cleanly. It stops being enough when you need different rules for different people — members book instantly but the public waits for approval — or when you want the deposit, the licence check, and the approval chained together so a booking can't be confirmed until all three are done. Most off-the-shelf tools don't branch that way on their own. At that point you're wiring the booking form to a workflow behind it, and that's a build, not a checkbox. But you don't reach for the build until the checkbox has failed you, and for most halls it won't.