# Filling the table a no-show left empty — build checklist

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

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

## Before you start, read this

Do NOT build this if any of the following is true of you:

- [ ] 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.

If none of those apply, carry on.

## 1. Prove you can hear the trigger

- [ ] Your booking system: A reservation passes its hold time with no arrival marked
      Find what your vendor actually calls this event before you write any code.
      We have not verified the name, and guessing it wastes an afternoon.
- [ ] SMS: A confirmation text goes unanswered by the cut-off
      Find what your vendor actually calls this event before you write any code.
      We have not verified the name, and guessing it wastes an afternoon.
- [ ] Log one real event end to end before building anything on top of it.

## 2. Build the steps, in this order

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

## 3. Keep these jobs with a person

If your build quietly takes any of these over, you have built 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.

## 4. Before you turn it on

- [ ] Run it in report-only mode for a week and read every message it WOULD have sent.
- [ ] Decide who gets paged when it stops firing, and prove the page works.
- [ ] Write down what "it is working" means as a number you can check next month.
- [ ] Confirm you have consent for any message this sends to a customer.

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Generated from the recipe at https://ustechautomations.com/recipes/restaurant-no-show-recovery
by seo/scripts/v1-gen-recipe-checklists.js — do not edit this file by hand.