In hospitality, the aim of every restaurant manager is to have the maximum amount of bookings every day and night with the minimal amount of fuss in your back of house operation. It’s not a big ask, but it does need all hands-on deck and up to date information at your fingertips.

During your peak periods, being able to glance over your tables and get up to the minute information, enables you to turn your tables over accurately while maintaining a good customer experience. Otherwise you will be dealing with unwanted double bookings, over or under booking, losing revenue and potentially unhappy customers.

If you’re reading this, then you are probably contemplating the next step toward automation, which starts with gracefully surrendering your well-loved paper diary to replace it with an automated restaurant booking system.

Imagine being able to see every table in your restaurant and its status, at one glance?

Imagine how much more efficiently you would be able to handle bookings.

Imagine how many more customers you could serve.

Imagine how much more revenue you could make – 20% increase is very realistic!

Double bookings or double tables?

Double booking is when you make a reservation for a table at the same time, and only you can know as a restaurant owner how your business can or cannot handle this scenario. It is common for restaurants to overbook and double-book as they do not want to be left with vacant tables when people don’t turn up.

But managing this comes down to knowing your business like the back of your hand and understanding your percentage of no shows, your clients’ dining habits and tolerance levels.

Double tables is making a booking for two sittings during your peak sitting times, for example at 6.15pm – 8.15pm and 8.30pm – 11pm, instead of one from 6.30pm-10pm. This is becoming more and more common as our dining habits have changed. Over the last ten years there has been a significant increase in people dining out for breakfast, lunch and dinner, and so restaurants not only need to accommodate more sittings in one night to increase revenue, but also because we are wanting them to!

With this increasing trend, you need a rock-solid automated restaurant booking system, that also provides the option for online booking 24×7.

Double bookings and double tables made more efficient with BooKBooK

Either way, whether you choose to double-book or double your tables, you will need a restaurant booking system that won’t let you down, with an online booking facility so that your potential customers can make a reservation with you 24×7.

H&L’s BooKBooK makes all this possible, so that you can happily proceed with maximising your bookings while minimising stress back of house.

Manage customer bookings easily on the phone or online, capture their emails and preferences and grow your database at the same time.

Manage your tables correctly with a colour coded system to let you know which table is at what stage of their dining experience, at a glance.

Automatically allocate tables based on pre-existing settings that the venue chooses. For example, automatically add a new booking 2 hours exactly after first one.

Build customer database and store data such as attendance frequency, punctuality, and average spend.

Change the floorplan as needed for specific dates such as Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day.

Special customer requests can be placed under each booking and will pop up when the customer arrives.

No need to pay exorbitant third-party restaurant booking fees

There are two main benefits to having your own online booking system:

  • You are marketing your own business as your restaurant name will be advertised front and centre of the booking, not a third party’s,
  • You will not be penalised for working hard to bring new customers through your doors, and you will save up to $3 per person for each sitting – that’s $18 for a party of six in your pocket!

Call H&L to discuss an automated reservations system for your restaurant

The team at H&L live and breathe hospitality. Our solutions are specifically designed for the hospitality industry by hospitality people.

Call us on 1800 778 340 to discuss how to transition to an automated booking system for your restaurant, we are here to help you make this as seamless as possible and you’ll be wondering why you didn’t do it sooner.