Start with your room, not the feature list
Write three sentences before you look at a product: how many covers you seat on a busy service, whether you take walk-ins, and who takes bookings today (you, the floor, a phone that rings in the kitchen). Software for a forty-seat room and software for a group of venues solve different problems.
Add the awkward cases: the party of eight that needs two tables joined, the private dining room, the bar with no bookings at all. A product that cannot do your awkward case is the wrong product, however good its demo is.
What does it cost when you are busy?
There are three pricing models. A flat subscription costs the same whether you seat ten covers or a thousand. A subscription plus a fee per cover on bookings that come through the product rises with your success. A marketplace charges commission on diners it introduces to you.
Ask for the total for a month at your real volume, including any fee on deposits and charged no-shows, text messages, extra sites and the website. Our comparison pages set out where each of the big platforms charges beyond the headline price, with sources.
Who owns the guest list?
You are the controller of your guests’ data and the software is your processor. Ask whether you can export guests and reservations yourself, whether the vendor uses your guests to recommend other venues, and whether there is a data processing agreement.
If the answer to “can I take my guest list with me” is “ask support”, treat it as a no.
Instant confirmation, or request and confirm?
Instant confirmation needs availability rules that are right: tables, how long each booking holds one, how many covers you will take per slot. When those rules are right, guests get an answer at once. When they are wrong, you are honouring a booking you should not have accepted.
Request and confirm puts a person in the loop. It suits venues where party size, table choice and special requests vary, and it costs the guest a short wait. Decide which mistake you would rather make.
Does it understand your floor?
A table is not a seat count. It has a shape, a room, neighbours it can be joined to for a big party, and a length of time it is occupied. Ask to see a party of eight seated by joining two tables for one night, and what happens to that join the next day.
Ask what “free” means. The floor view and the booking form must use the same definition, or you will double-book the table the form offered. Our guide to table management goes through what to look for.
How does it handle no-shows and deposits?
Ask whether it takes a deposit, a prepayment or a card guarantee, where the money goes, what fee applies when a no-show is charged, how refunds work, and what the guest sees before they commit. The last one is where venues get into trouble, and the rules are in our guide to deposits and no-show fees.
Also ask what it does short of charging: confirmations, reminders with a cancel link, a clear record of who did not show. Those reduce no-shows without taking a guest’s card.
What does it connect to?
List what you need it to talk to: your till, Google’s reserve button, your accounting, your website. Then ask which connections are live today and which are planned. “Coming soon” is not a feature.
Check the connection you can check yourself. Before you buy anything, see how a guest can book you today: a broken booking link on your Google listing costs you covers whichever software you choose.
Can you try it before you talk to sales?
A product you can open yourself tells you more in an hour than a demo does. Book a table from your phone as a guest, then look at the other side: how the request arrives, how you confirm it, how you seat it.
If the only way to see a price is a call, you cannot put it next to anything else.
What happens when you leave?
Ask for the notice period, for the export of reservations and guests, and for what is deleted and when. A contract is easy to sign and expensive to leave, so read this one before the feature list.