You run a restaurant, cafe or bar. Guests arrive and queue at the door; staff manually try to reconcile the fixed table layouts on their reservations and POS screens with how tables have been physically rearranged. Staff scramble, customers wait, tables sit empty or customers are turned away incorrectly.
The problem is visibility and real-time information.
That is exactly where a space management system differs from Table-Based systems, whether the Table-Based booking systems have AI assistance or not. But these two tools are not the same thing, and choosing the wrong one can cost you money, guests, and operational hours you cannot get back.
This guide breaks down what each restaurant booking system does and why Table-Based booking systems are now outdated legacy solutions.
What Is a Space Management Booking System?
A restaurant space management booking system understands your complete space as well as nuances such as which sub-space offers better utility than another sub-space. Also as tables are just items that can be added within your space, a space management system has the ability to rearrange the tables within your space in line with customer requirements and your booking and revenue strategy. Think about a Saturday early dinner seating where your venue generally has bookings for larger groups than it does for a later time with a fixed table arrangement that uses fixed predetermined “table and table combination” allocation rules you get rejected bookings, seating delays when customers arrive, confusion as to availability for walk-in customers and general chaos and confusion. Busy restaurants understand these problems as they are subject to them every time they have a busy service.
A space & time management system, in effect, restaurant capacity management software, fixes these problems as it provides real-time visibility of table arrangements and bookings in real-time, it also provides forecasted table arrangements for future times and future days. No fixed table layouts, no disconnect between the table arrangements, layouts, and positioning between what is on your screen and what is happening on the floor, it gives staff the correct information so that for smoother service and better real-time under-pressure decisions.
WizButler as a complete all-in-one system manages space both in real-time and future time. Instead of focusing on fixed table arrangements to manage the entire restaurant, cafe or bar as a dynamic operating space, helping businesses maximise capacity, improve utilisation, and make better decisions from a single system.
What Is an AI Table-Based Booking System?
Table-Based booking systems and AI Table-Based booking systems are similar in that they both use the same framework to allocate bookings, namely, allocating them to fixed table layouts with fixed table and table combination options. The only difference being that AI would utilise a faster process that may lead to the same or different allocation than a non-AI Table-Based booking system.
An AI Table-Based booking system like SevenRooms advertise that their Table-Based booking system uses AI that can evaluate 10,000 table combinations per second to find the optimal seating allocation for a booking. However, the real question is not how many different potential combinations an allocation system can evaluate, it is the fact that it is making allocations using fixed table layouts that cannot change and pre-set table allocations and no matter how you setup these preset arrangements you can never forecast what size bookings you will get for a service or what order those bookings will come in to setup a perfect “Tetris” forecasting system. This fixed table allocation process means that Table-Based booking systems, whether they use AI or not can reject new booking requests when a venue is only 65% full. For venues comparing platforms like SevenRooms, this is the real distinction: faster fixed-table maths still produces a fixed-table outcome — which is why WizButler is increasingly positioned as the SevenRooms alternative for venues that need true real-time space, not just a quicker calculator.
Summary
For busy, fast-paced venues that want to maximise their bookings and optimise their revenue, and that want real-time visibility, where the table layout in their system matches the table layout on the floor, a Space Management booking system is the only solution. WizButler is the only available space management booking system as space management is a new and patented solution only available through WizButler.
Apply for a Space & Time Demo and discover how WizButler helps Australian businesses optimise every square metre, every minute, and every booking opportunity.