Customer no-shows are a huge problem for restaurants. Running at 5% to 20% per service, they cost the industry up to £16bn a year, according to the booking platform ResDiary. But have such booking sites – others include OpenTable and Bookatable – encouraged this rude, potentially ruinous behaviour?
Tim Hayward, the Financial Times’ restaurant critic, describes a situation where, instead of booking by phone and making a personal connection with a restaurant (increasingly, restaurants will not answer the phone, he complains), diners are now nudged towards pushy, faceless platforms that alienate customers and erode the responsibility they once felt towards their dinner plans: “Customers have changed their attitude, but can anyone blame them?”
“There’s a legitimate argument that something has been sacrificed in people getting what they want, which is ease,” says Will Beckett, a co-founder of the Hawksmoor restaurants. Hawksmoor takes bookings anywhere, from phone to Facebook, but its busiest channels are its mobile site and the OpenTable app: “People want to book quickly on the tube. I [also] prefer to go to one place, press a button, done.”
Booking platforms have been blamed for fuelling no-shows by making it easier to make multiple bookings, then not turn up. For Joe Lutrario, the deputy editor of Restaurant magazine, that issue is overplayed. Sites actively combat no-shows (OpenTable suspends users after four in 12 months, for instance) and making multiple bookings is not easy: “Unless you’re intentionally using several booking sites, you’d need multiple email accounts to get the bookings accepted. Plus, more restaurants are taking deposits.”
Many people loathe handing over their card details when booking. They consider it accusatory. It implies mistrust. But if we want smaller independent restaurants in particular to survive (“A decent indie makes 10% profit; if 10% of people don’t turn up, that turns into a loss,” says Beckett), we may have to get over our indignation.
Le Cochon Aveugle in York takes online bookings, then the manager, Victoria Roberts, phones diners who do not reply to their emailed booking reminder. But the restaurant’s best deterrent against no-shows is far blunter: charging unexplained absentees £50 each. “We’ve only had to charge two tables in two years,” she says. “It’s had the desired effect.”
