The no-show add-ons

With guest bookings, there is always the risk that they do not show up. But Resos is here to help you prevent this! With two powerful no-show tools, no-show fees and guest flagging, you can limit no-shows and protect your maximum booking capacity every day. Here’s how each one works.

These tools have separate product pages. Restaurant no-show fee software covers the card authorization and payment policy. Repeat no-show guest alerts cover guest history and the warning shown on a later booking.

Before you decide how strict to be, it helps to know what normal looks like. The Resos No-Show Index puts the recorded no-show rate at 2.33% across 3.77 million reservations, rising to 2.63% at dinner and falling to 1.15% for parties of ten or more, so you can compare your own numbers against the benchmark before applying a policy everywhere.

1. No-show fees

This add-on lets you store your guest’s payment information and charge a fee if they don’t show up, for both online and manually added bookings. Payments, refunds, and payouts are handled through Stripe, which involves extra fees. Read the full setup steps, including enabling the add-on, configuring fees per opening hour, and handling manual bookings, in How to set up the no-show fees add-on. The no-show fee product page explains the policy workflow before you configure it.

2. Flagging a no-show guest

Here is how you can activate this add on:

• Go to Menu → Settings → Bookings → Flag guests.
• There are two different ways to “flag” a guest who did not show up to their booking. Both methods lead to the same result, which is further discussed below.

1. You go to Menu → Calendar and find the specific booking where the guest did not show up. Then, you simply need to click on the icon for “View customer profile”, and then click on the flag icon which will flag your customer.
2. You go to Menu → Customers, use the search function to find the guest who didn’t know up, and then click on the flag icon to flag your customer.

What happens next?

Whenever a guest books a table, Resos will check the guest’s user information. We look for an email address, phone number, user-id, or similar. If the guest is stored in the flagged customer database, a warning is automatically added to their profile. Therefore, you can see that the guest is flagged in two ways:

• A warning will pop up in the system if the guest tries to book again online/if a user of the system adds the guest.
• A flag icon is present next to the guest’s information everywhere in the system.

You can always remove the “flag” from the guest by simply clicking on the flag icon again from their customer profile .

Read more about repeat no-show guest alerts and how staff see the warning on a later booking.

Please, let us know at hi@resos.com if you have questions or if something you need is missing. We are happy to help!