Online table reservation systems

Why should you implement an online table reservation system?

- Alex, let’s go somewhere tonight?

- Sure, I’ll book a table at our favorite restaurant!

- And wait until they call back again?

Unfortunately, this is how it works in most venues. You leave an appointment, wait for them to call back, and it turns out that there are no tables for your time, you wait until they offer another one, and so on. That’s how it looks from the client’s perspective.

Let’s look at the problem from the business side. Firstly, if you have a large restaurant or a chain with several hundred/thousand daily guests — using an ordinary excel or notebook is not an option at all. The probability of error and its cost are too great. The manager forgot to write it down, the hostess got confused in the papers, someone was late, and it is not clear whether they will come at all.

From this follows the next point. Booking tables is one way to increase turnover.

Booking allows you to better plan the capacity of the venue and reduce idle times. Also, guests who came through online booking are likely to have already familiarized themselves with the menu and make an order faster than visitors from the street.

And thirdly, there is no interaction between the kitchen and the hall. This leads to the chefs not knowing what the kitchen will be loaded with today, what products should be prepared in advance or purchased in addition.

And remember these endless problems, when an order comes in, the dish is prepared, and the waiter simply forgets it? Oh, I’ve been in similar situations myself — this does not add good fame to the venue. But such problems can be avoided.

I’ll tell you even more — you can plan any minor things in advance, and bring the service to perfection. After such improvements a number of regular visitors will grow several times. How? I’ll tell you below.

Don’t forget this if you are going to make an online booking!

We vote for a full-fledged booking, rather than for just a call back request.

We also vote for IT and automation. And have considerable experience in such matters. Therefore, feel free to read what to look for if you are going to implement an online booking system in your establishments.

1. It’s a must-have to make a project scalable. Each restaurant dreams of becoming a restaurant chain one day. It makes more sense to initially suppose that you will eventually have new places and venues. Everyone can have their own menus, opening hours, tables and dining halls. Keep this in mind at the very beginning of the project. In our case, for the restaurant “Friends” (the largest restaurant-brewery in the CIS), we did just that. And when, after some time, Beergarden and Karaoke were added, there was no need to make any “crutches”.
2. Scaling may also have a different form. For example, you want your booking engine to be usable on a third-party site. You can simply make it into a widget — no problem. As we designed the website to allow that initially. Another case if a third-party resource wants to supply orders to you — they will be able to easily integrate with your API.
3. The implementation of an online interaction with the customers — gives you, as a business owner, an additional channel for analytical and marketing information: you know who orders, what, and when. And, obviously, it gives you the optimization of business processes, which over the time significantly saves you money.

What will happen on the Front side?

How to identify a client on the site/in the application?
-Implement authorization during the booking process, by phone number, social networks, email. Hint: best option — phone number. Because in the case when a person does not come to a reserved time, you can contact him directly. Also knowing the tastes and characteristics of each guest, you can make personal offers, thereby increasing revenue and guest loyalty.

Select the date of booking and the number of guests.

It would seem as an easy task, wouldn’t it? But practice shows that not many people will think of limiting the time you can book a table, or making sure that one person is not seated at a table for 6 people.

How to show a client that he is not booking a “pig in a poke”?

Make a map showing occupied tables in real time. Make an option to select a table directly on the map, as when you choose a seat on the plane during online check-in. You can add tables on the map, by clicking on which you can see a photo & the view around. Came in a big group? Choose adjacent tables.

Important! Limit booking time.

This will avoid the scenario that a person started choosing a table, and then for some reason did not finish, left, and the table hung. Also add to the statuses “occupied” and “free to book” the following “in the process of booking”. This is necessary, to avoid “the race” when two people choose the same table and the one who filled out all the fields faster got it.

An even more important point!

Is it possible to book the same table several times during the day? In “Friends” — it is impossible. For example, implementing a scenario where I booked a table for 14:00, came in, sat there for a couple of hours, and when I left, the table became available again, is very difficult, since it will require a lot of development hours.

A little less important, but still.

Grant the administrator rights to disable the ability to reserve certain tables. For example, if you periodically have VIP guests.

Thanks to authorization, you get a convenient tool for personalized offers, both online and offline. A person has booked a table, then you sync the order data with that person’s account. Next time, for example, you can offer him drinks he usually takes rather than ones he avoids to buy.

Paid booking. To do or not?

At a minimum, you can let the restaurant decide on its own. For example, choose what payment will be — in the form of a pre-order or a deposit. Or decide on which days it will be paid, and on which — no.

Features worth implementing:

• Joint preparation of pre-order and payment of the deposit. What for?
• Imagine you decide to meet on graduation day. Someone will need to take on the role of “collector” and ping everyone to pay or ask for order preferences.
• In our case you can simply send a link to a group chat, and everyone choose own orders & pays his part.
• In the same case, it would be cool to invite guests after booking: send everyone a notification or an invitation to the calendar so that you can plan an event and not forget about the appointment.

What will happen in the Back office?

It is important to think about a convenient interface for those who meet guests. The hostess must quickly find all the information so that the client does not have to wait 10 minutes until they find where his table is.

Even cooler if you have a facial recognition system. It’s not as difficult as it sounds, but you can greet regular guests by name. Which greatly increases loyalty.

Also, the hostess should keep a record in her interface of the guests who came, mark those who booked and did not come, check whether the deposit/entrance was paid. It must be done quickly. And then be able to compare the number of real guests with those declared when booking.

It is important to log who did what, often there are debriefings between waiters, hostesses and guests like: “I didn’t press it, something happened on your side”, etc.

Show the hostess on the map occupied tables, guests who are late, people in the booking process — so he/she will know exactly where to put people who came without a reservation.

Kitchen load based on pre-orders

All orders flow into a single system in which the kitchen can see what and how many dishes should be cooked by what time and at which table to serve. The same tool allows the kitchen to manage purchases, since it will know in advance which products are needed.

The kitchen, unlike the administrator and the hostess, must have the rights to manage the menu — put some dishes in “stop”, replace, add new ones.

Having such extensive information about customers and their order history allows you to create a real CDP to segment your base and increase your revenue per client.

I hope now that you have learned what opportunities lie behind the “simple” online table reservation, and the desire to implement it in your business has increased. After all, it correlates with the profit of your venue. If you are interested in analyzing your venue in a similar vein, write to me, we will be happy to discuss the details.