The suggested lottery uses the Zapier integration as a daily scheduler but you could also use another solution such as the Make integration or an external crontab on your server with a single daily API call to Planyo freeing up availability at a scheduled time.
In this tutorial we configure a day-based resource but it would work just as well for hour-based entry. We use the waiting list feature as a mechanism to allow customers to enter a large number of reservations of which only max 10 customers manage to be admitted.
The Planyo configuration is straightforward: we add a day-based resource, here named Event:
The resource has the max. capacity of 10 persons and in this case we'll allow a single customer to only make a single reservation. In order to make sure a customer doesn't attempt to increase their chances by making two reservations, we'll add a Pricing Manager rule which prints an error message if a customer attempts a second reservation for the same day. Note that this configuration allows them to make multiple reservations for different days.
In Reservation process we set the confirmation method to AUTO although you could require an extra step such as manual confirmation or online payment. Here we select Enable waiting list and can set the max. waiting list size or leave it without a limit. The option Upgrade of waiting list requests to valid reservations once a slot is freed can be set to Automatic (random order / lottery) or Automatic (recent customers last). Let's choose the first of these two choices.
Here are the differences between the two available lottery types:
In Time-related settings we set a fixed duration of 1 day. Max. time between reservation and rental can be set to prevent reservations for too many days in advance.
Now we'll add a vacation for all available slots on every day in the next X years in order to make the event resource permanently unavailable to the customers therefore forcing all reservations to be added to the waiting list. Note that this solution still allows the administrators to add valid reservations for any future date - these spots will be unavailable to the lottery and so on given day simply less winners will be drawn automatically.