Table booking system: what it has to do and how to choose one

Every restaurant handles table bookings differently: a notebook by the phone, Instagram messages, a booking platform or a form on the website. Each way has a price, and with some of them you only see it at the end of the month. Here is what to actually ask of a table booking system.

First work out what today's setup costs you

• The phone in the middle of a shift. Ten calls in an evening are ten interruptions for whoever is on the floor.
• Bookings outside opening hours. A guest looks for a table at ten at night or on Sunday morning, when nobody picks up. That guest goes somewhere else.
• A fee per guest. Platforms charge per booking or per new guest. At a hundred bookings a month that is often more than a whole year of an ordinary system.
• An empty evening because a group never came. A table for six you held for two hours cannot be sold any more.

What the system has to do

Assign the table itself, by party size. The guest says how many people are coming and the system finds the smallest suitable table that is free. Without that you are splitting tables up by hand and double bookings are only a matter of time.

Work with how long a table is held. You set how long a visit usually takes and how many minutes you need to clear and lay the table again. The system then offers the last booking of the day so that it ends before closing time.

Keep some tables off the internet. You usually want a few tables left for walk-ins. It should take one click per table to switch online booking off.

Send a confirmation and a reminder. The confirmation goes out right away, the reminder the day before with a link to cancel. A cancelled table can be filled again, a table you hear about at eight in the evening cannot. More on that in the article about reminders.

Show the menu. A guest choosing a restaurant looks at the dishes and the prices. A PDF menu opens badly on a phone and loses plenty of guests before they ever reach the booking form.

Let you keep your guests. Ask who owns the contact details and whether you can export them. On the platforms the guest tends to be theirs, not yours.