No-shows: the torment of every restaurant

The frustration with people not having the courtesy to contact your restaurant if they have to cancel their reservation. How could they just not bother to show up? Do they not care that this costs you time, money and stress. Even though no-shows happen every single week for restaurants, the feeling of being utterly powerless to stop this happening still remains.

No silver bullet will solve no-shows for every business. So let’s figure out how we can try to reduce the number of people not showing up, whenever possible.

Sell a restaurant experience

People who have not been to your restaurant before, have to use other metrics to judge whether your restaurant is worth their time and money. What do they imagine a day/evening will be like at your venue?

Restaurants are not just about food, cutlery, tables and chairs. The ‘job’ of a restaurant can vary greatly from venue to venue. It might be to make people feel special, connect with friends and family, forget the stresses of life, relax for the evening or get ready for a big night out.
Figure out what kind of experience most people expect from your restaurant and sell that to them. Showcase it in your marketing, your website, social media messages, imagery, and any other touch-points customers will interact with.

By selling the experience to people, there is a sense of loss to them if they don’t show up. To most people, not showing up at a restaurant is not a big deal but missing out on a romantic night with your partner or catching up with friends is something people will regret.

Take non-refundable booking deposits

Taking deposits is likely to reduce no-shows, but a lot of restaurants also worry that requiring payments upfront may also reduce since customers may just go somewhere else that does not require a deposit.

This solution is not right for every restaurant but for busy venues who are already turning away business, yet suffering because of no-shows, this may well help them to be more selective with their booking policy.

The Restaurants Association of Ireland said it wrote to members asking them to request non-refundable retainers on tables. Chief Adrian Cummins said:

“We were gearing towards groups of four but are leaving it up to individual restaurants to set parameters. If every place does it, it will be effective.”

Remove any barriers

Not every restaurant is easy to find. Being off the beaten track venues also suffer more because of no-shows, as they can’t rely on walk-ins to fill those now available seats.

Not everyone will remember the date and time they booked for. People may have made reservations weeks/months in advance.

These two simple things can cause people to get lost or be late, and then decide not to bother going to your restaurant.

We created the Table Wow ‘When & Where’ email specifically to help inoculate these issues. Once a restaurant confirms a booking in the Table Wow Planner, the customer gets an email with all booking details, plus a link to Google Maps. People can open this email on their phone and follow the directions right to your front door.

Show them you want their business.
The customers are the ones with the power here. You need to show them that you want and value their business. If you can turn a bad thing into a great experience, you can elevate people’s perception towards your business.

When in doubt, pick up the phone.
If a booking looks strange to you, call the customer before you confirm the booking.

Have a follow-up process in place.
Maybe call after 10mins if they are late. Some people may assume if they were late their table would be gone.

Turn a no-show into a customer.
For all you know there could be a genuine reason why they did not show up to their booking and could not contact you first.

Look at no-shows without emotion. You already have their contact details and know they are interested in your restaurant. They are already a ‘warm lead’. Send a friendly message or share a link to great customer reviews.

“Sorry you could not make your reservation with us. We hope you’ll book again soon and experience why so many of our customers come back again and again. In the meantime here is a link to one of our most recent reviews from another happy customer.”

Don’t leave it all to the machines

If your booking system uses real-time availability and the system automatically confirms bookings you have probably lost bookings already.

Auto confirmation by machine has not reached a point where it can spot the difference between a real person booking, a spam bot, a troll, a disgruntled employee, or a competitor with a chip on their shoulder. You could end up with a lot of ghost bookings that were never going to show up.

Experienced staff members have an intuition for this that computers can’t match. You may decide to start requiring deposits for someone who was a no-show last time, seasonal times, busy nights, etc. There’s no one size fits all, so try to keep your restaurant booking system flexible enough that you can adapt how you handle bookings depending on how business is going and the volume of no-shows you’re seeing.

Don’t sit back and accept no-shows, start experimenting with different approaches/systems and figure out what works for your business.

I’d love to hear from you about what you’re doing to help reduce no-shows in your restaurant.

Originally published at table-wow.com on January 7, 2018.