The Frustrating Reality
It’s Saturday morning. Your booking widget just told a party of 6 there’s “no availability.”
Thankfully they called you (most people do not follow up with a telephone call) and said, we know you are full tonight as we just tried to book a table of 6 online, however, we just called in case you can squeeze us in at 7pm tonight for a table of 6.
You look at your booking system. There are empty tables! In fact, you can see that you are only about 60-65% full.
How is it possible that i am only 60% full and the booking system is advising online bookings that there is no availability!
How many customers didn’t call? How many just accepted “no availability” and booked somewhere else?
Why is my booking system not telling me each time they reject a booking! Why is my booking system not helping me take care of my customers and allow me to fill up my venue!
How much damage is my online booking system doing, by sending my customers away to book at other restaurants, how much revenue is it costing my business?
The Problem: This is not a one off-glitch. It is happening every time your venue is over 60% full for a service
So why can’t your online booking system do what your staff can do manually?
Simple, because all booking systems like OpenTable, SevenRooms, Yelp, Resy and NowBookIt are based on legacy 2-D frameworks that use “Tables” and “Table Combinations”.
These legacy systems behave just like a game of Tetris when they are over 60% full, that is they need a booking request to be a perfect match to a table for the booking to be taken. They have no ability to react, they have no ability to reason, they have no ability to rearrange things like a person can do manually to take the booking, hence the process of rejecting bookings when you are are 60% full is just built into their systems and inherent in their allocation logic and something that they have tried to fix for years without success.
Can you afford to keep using a system that you know is designed to reject bookings?
Why is booking rejection a feature of restaurant booking systems and why can’t they fix it?
To be fair, OpenTable, SevenRooms, Resy, Yelp, NowBookIt and the other booking systems did not set out to create booking systems that can easily reject bookings when your venue is only 60% full.
They did not set out to create a booking system that was flawed and can easily reject new bookings when your venue is only 60% full, it is just that they did not know any better.
Unfortunately, they now have this mess and they do not know how to stop rejecting bookings when your venue is only 60% full if they do not have a perfect “Tetris” match.
I can only suggest that your booking systems, if they really cared and wanted to keep you informed they would be trying and telling you when they are rejecting new booking requests or what you can be specifically doing to avoid bookings being rejected.
The Deeper Problem: Is that your booking systems appear to be trying to hide the fact that they can easily a new booking request when they are only 60% full
After all, how is OpenTable’s “Smart Assign” special if it can not stop new bookings being rejected when your restaurant is only 60% full?
Similarly, what is the purpose of the SevenRooms allocation system being able to review 10,000 table combinations per second if it is still rejecting new booking requests when your restaurant is only 60% full.
With these promotions your booking companies are trying to give you the impression that they are doing amazing things for your restaurant when they can still easily reject bookings that they are not telling you about!
Hidden rejections mean hidden revenue losses that you are probably not even aware of, that mean you have potentially lost more than $100K+ in revenue per year
Let’s put real numbers on this.
Based on what we see, a typical restaurant using legacy booking systems can easily reject 10-15 bookings per week that could have been accommodated with dynamic allocation.
Conservative estimate for a small restaurant is: 3 rejected bookings per week with an average party size of 6 people and 1 rejected booking booking for a party size of 8, at an average revenue per person $65 the revenue loss is:
26 people lost each week at $65, is $1,690 per week or $87,000 per year
Obviously, with larger and busy restaurants the lost revenue would be a significantly higher amount.
This isn’t theoretical revenue. These are real customers who wanted to give you money. Your system told them no.
Why AI Voice bots answering your phones and making bookings don’t work
Here’s what’s interesting: when customers call and a staff member answers the phone, they can normally manually rearrange things to take the rejected bookings.
Why? Because you and your staff can think dynamically.
They look at the floor plan and realize they can rearrange bookings and/or tables to take the new booking requests.
The problem with AI voice receptionists is that the Voice AI is simply a “voice” interface connected to a legacy booking system. This means that the AI Voice assistant is only as good as the underlying system that it is attached to.
It can therefore be easily understood that the use of AI Voice Assistants by OpenTable, SevenRooms, NowBookIt and all other booking systems mean that those booking systems will simply continue to advise the AI Voice Assistant that they cannot take any more new bookings requests when your venue is 60% full unless there is a perfect fit as is required by Tetris.
The simple solution is to use WizButler
