No shows handling for Restaurants

Should restaurants get a guarantee for a table reservation? There are a lot of factors influencing the decision, as there are no fix rules for achive the maximal revenue. All restaurants are distinct. In this article you can know more concerning the no shows handling for restaurants.

It´s Saturday evening and the restaurant is fully booked. Last table available for the first sitting, which has been swiftly occupied by random guests. Tonight, the restaurant has all the requirements to reach the maximum occupancy but… five guests did not show up and the table remained empty until closing. A very common scenario, isn`t it?

Well, most of the restaurants nowadays are asking to themselves if getting a credit card as means of guarantee is a good idea or not. All restaurateurs should think strategic if penalty conditions are suitable for their business, anyway the decision is based on different criteria:

• Restaurant`s position & occupancy
• Restaurant`s level & status
• Number of guests
• Season & time factor

The first two elements to consider are the position and the occupancy. If the restaurant is placed in a touristic area and there are a lot of tables available, with different sittings per day and with all-day kitchen service, there is a high probability to easily reach the break-even point every day early and to have a constantly high revenue. Quite the opposite is the situation for restaurants on suburb, secondary streets, small city or in hardly reachable location.

Secondly, the restaurateurs must deem the restaurant`s status and level too. In fact, restaurants with high status are losing more revenue for no shows, as medium and low level restaurants. The higher the standards, the higher the costs for staff and products. Beyond that there is a lower possibility for passing customers. Nevertheless, a restaurant attended by high standard guests, has a very low risk to receive complaints about a guarantee taken. In fact, many of the guests which are frequenters of low standard restaurants, might not understand the penalty condition.
Furthermore, there is a big difference between new opening and restaurants opened since years with established clientship.

Another important point is related to the number of guests. Some restaurants, for example, are taken a guarantee for groups with more than 10 people. It makes sense to choose penalty conditions based on guest`s number, because depending on the general occupancy and on the type of event, it might be a big loss to have a certain number of no shows for a big table or even for a big event.

The last topic is concerning season, day of the week, time of the day and sitting hours. Sometimes it is meaningful to get a guarantee for all reservations on Saturday evening in a city like New York, but it`s not sensical to get it for a Saturday evening in August, in a city like Dubai. As regards, Dubai in August is very sultry and the city is in low touristic season. The time is significant too, because there is a big difference between Friday noon and Friday evening.

In short, any restaurant should consider different points before to take in consideration to ask for a credit card as guarantee of the table. Related to the fact that the principal purpose is to reach the maximal revenue, on the other side there is the guest`s satisfaction too, which cannot be underestimate. In some cases, a good idea could be to combine different operations. The operations should include flexible conditions, which are depending on the factors listed above. At the end the most important thing is to be clear with guests and to inform them about all conditions before to confirm any bookings.