The booking policy is written for the people taking bookings, not the people making them

Keep both. Put the guest-facing material first, under headings a guest would search, and put the procedure below under a heading that names it as internal. You do not need two files, and two files is usually worse, because the second one drifts.

The exercise of splitting is itself useful, because it surfaces how much of the document is procedure that contains no guest-relevant fact at all, and how many guest-relevant facts are hidden inside procedure. Most booking policies come out of this pass about a third shorter on the internal side and considerably longer on the guest side.

If you would rather the procedure was not indexed at all, keep it in a separate document and simply do not upload that one. That is a legitimate choice and it is cleaner than trying to word procedure so it reads acceptably to a guest.

Take each limit and write it from the guest's side, then add what to do about it. Bookings for more than the published number are arranged by a call to the venue. Bookings for the same day within a couple of hours cannot be taken through the form and should be phoned through. The diary opens a set period ahead and is not open beyond that.

The route half is what turns a refusal into an answer. A passage that says the limit and nothing else produces a message that closes the conversation. A passage that says the limit and the next step produces one that continues it, and the difference is one clause.

This is a conversation to have with whoever runs the diary, and it takes half an hour. How long is a table held. What happens if somebody is fifteen minutes late, and what happens at thirty. How long is the booking for, and does that change at busy times. Which areas take dogs, pushchairs, or wheelchairs, and which do not. Whether a high chair or an accessible space has to be requested in advance.

Every one of those is a real question with an established answer that has never made it into a document. They are the highest yield sentences you will add all week, because they are asked constantly and currently produce either a refusal or a guess.

Write them as statements, one per line, under a heading like what your booking includes. Resist the urge to smooth them into a paragraph.

Pick the event, write it in one sentence, and describe what the guest receives when it happens: a message from a named sender, an email with a reference, a text. Guests check by looking for that thing, and if the document tells them what to look for, most of the are we booked messages stop.

Then state what happens if it never arrives and who to contact. A booking policy that defines confirmation without defining the absence of it has covered the half of the problem that never generates a message.

A guest asks whether they can book for a large group. The strongest match is the line in your procedure telling staff to take a card and mark the booking provisional for parties over a certain size. The answer that comes out is a version of that instruction, cited, and it is disorienting to read, because it is addressed to somebody other than the reader and describes a process they are not performing.

The fact inside it was right. The cost is a guest who cannot tell what they are supposed to do next, and a booking that does not get made because the answer read like an internal note rather than an invitation. Restating the same fact in the second person, with the route attached, is the entire fix.