Restaurants

Filling the table a no-show left empty

Offer the seat to your waitlist the moment a booking goes cold, not when the shift ends.

What goes wrong today

A four-top does not turn up at 7:30. The host notices at 7:45, releases it at 8:00, and the table sits empty through the busiest hour of the week. The waitlist that would have taken it went home.

What starts it

Your booking system — A reservation passes its hold time with no arrival markedDescribed rather than named: we have not verified what this vendor calls the event, and inventing a name would waste your afternoon.
SMS — A confirmation text goes unanswered by the cut-offDescribed rather than named: we have not verified what this vendor calls the event, and inventing a name would waste your afternoon.

How it runs

1Hold time passes
The booking is still unarrived at the grace minute you set.
2One last text
A single message to the guest: are you still coming? Ten minutes to answer.
3No answer
The seat is treated as available. The booking is not cancelled — a person does that.
4Offer the waitlist
The top of the waitlist gets a text with a time-limited offer of the table.
5Host decides
The host seats whoever is physically in front of them. The text is an offer, never a booking.
a person does this

What a person still does

None of this runs unattended. If it did, we would be selling you something else.

Actually seats people. This never assigns a table.
Cancels the no-show record, and decides whether it counts against the guest.
Overrides all of it on a night when the room is not behaving like the system thinks it is.

Skip this if…

You do not take reservations, or you do not keep a waitlist with phone numbers. There is nobody to text.
Your no-show rate is under about 3%. You will spend more on the build than on the empty seats.
You are a small room where the host already sees every table. A text is slower than looking up.

Build it yourself

Roughly a week or two, and it lives or dies on the wording of two text messages.

Download the build checklist

Want this one built for your setup?

Tell us what you already run and we will tell you honestly whether this is worth building for you — including when the answer is no, which is what the skip list above is for.