Max Pax and Tables work in tandem, but it is important to understand when these Tables take precedence over Max Pax Settings.

As an example, every 30 minutes, your Core Max Pax setting could be 40 pax.

However, the total table number could only be 20 and not more than 5 tables, as shown in the screenshot below. 

So, what happens when bookings are made?

When a booking is made and a table is found, the booking is assigned to the best-matched table, and the table's average time duration is applied.

If a table cannot be found, the booking will be placed in the unallocated section and the seating time will be reset to the core average seating time (in this case 30 minutes).

Let us say this happens a few more times and staff have to manually assign the bookings to the extra tables.

In this scenario, all tables have been reserved, resulting in a total of 20 people. According to the system, you could still hold 10 more customers (30 is your Max Pax), however since tables have been activated, your Tables have taken priority here. If we move over to the booking widget, you will notice that the 'X' timeslots are blocked due to a lack of tables.

To summarise, if Tables is enabled and all tables are booked, the widget will stop accepting bookings for the duration of the booked tables, regardless of your core Max Pax settings.