The Floor, and the People Who Do Not Turn Up

A booking list tells you who is coming. It does not tell you whether you can seat the couple standing at the door, and that is the question a restaurant actually has to answer twenty times a night.

Who it is for

Restaurants with tables and a door. It matters most where walk-ins and bookings compete for the same room, which is most places on a Friday.

A view of the room, not a list of names

The floor plan is a picture of your actual room: which tables are occupied, which are booked and from when, and how long each one has.

That converts the hardest question on the floor — can I seat these two now? — from a judgement into a glance. Without it, the honest answer is usually a guess, and the guess goes wrong in both directions: turning away a table you could have seated, or seating one you then have to move.

It is a dense, wide screen and it works best on something larger than a phone. The diary itself is fine on anything.

Walk-ins and bookings in the same room

The two are usually managed separately and that is where the failures come from. A walk-in seated at a table booked for eight o'clock is a problem discovered at eight o'clock.

Holding both in one view means the seating decision is made with the booking in front of you — this table is free for ninety minutes, that one is not. It also means a walk-in you could not seat now can be recorded rather than lost, with a realistic wait rather than an optimistic one.

Who turns up, and who does not

Every booking ends in one of two states, and recording which matters more than most venues assume.

A customer's history of turning up builds into a trust score: a record of whether the bookings they made were bookings they kept. It is not a credit rating and it is not a character assessment — it answers one narrow question about one narrow behaviour.

It informs your decision. It does not make one. Mosey does not refuse a booking on your behalf, and the version of this product that quietly declined customers with a poor record would be making commercial decisions about your restaurant without you in the room. What you get is the information, at the moment you would want it: when somebody books a twelve-top on a Saturday.

Deposits, applied where they earn their keep

The obvious response to no-shows is a deposit on everything. It is usually the wrong one.

A deposit is friction. It is one more step between somebody wanting a table and having one, and a proportion of people abandon at that step. On a Tuesday two-top, the friction costs you more than the no-show risk does — you have lost a real booking to protect against an unlikely loss of a table you could have filled anyway.

Where a deposit earns its keep is where a no-show is genuinely expensive:

• Large tables, where one no-show is six or ten covers
• Peak times, where the table could have been sold twice
• Set menus and anything pre-ordered, where you have already bought the food
• Bookings from somebody whose record suggests it, which is what the trust score is for

Most venues who get this right apply deposits to perhaps a tenth of their bookings and leave the rest frictionless.

Deposits are 0%. A deposit is your money held against a risk rather than a sale, so Mosey takes nothing from it and passes it to you in full.

The cheapest intervention is still a reminder

Before deposits, before scores, before anything: remind people.

Most no-shows are not decisions. Somebody booked three weeks ago, the date moved in their head, and nothing reminded them. A confirmation and a reminder the day before removes a meaningful share of them at zero cost and zero friction, and it happens without anybody doing anything.

Deposits are for what is left after that.

What to do when somebody does not turn up

Very little, and that is the honest answer.

A single no-show from somebody with no history is noise. People get ill, cars break down, and a restaurant that treats one missed booking as a character failing will spend a lot of energy on nothing. Record it — which happens anyway — and move on.

The pattern is what matters. Somebody who has missed three bookings is telling you something, and the response is not a ban, it is a deposit on the next one. That way they can still book, you are covered, and you have not had a conversation with a customer about their behaviour.

What it costs

Nothing. The floor plan, the diary, reminders and no-show tracking are part of reservations, and there is no commission on a booking however it was made.

A worked example

A restaurant with 45 covers losing roughly four no-shows a week, mostly on Fridays and Saturdays.

Reminders remove perhaps half of them, because half were forgotten rather than abandoned. Deposits on tables of six or more and on Saturday peak slots catch most of the rest, without adding friction to the 80% of bookings that were never the problem.

At an average spend of €40, four recovered covers a week is somewhere around €6,000 a year — from a reminder and a deposit rule that applies to a minority of bookings.

What it connects to

• Reservations and deposits — the diary in full
• Take bookings on your own site — the other doors bookings arrive through
• Restaurant waitlist — the table a cancellation frees up
• Walk-in queue — the people at the door you cannot seat yet
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page