Can you imagine the horror? Your VIP guest comes to your club just to find out his reservation wasn’t properly documented. Not only was it not documented, but the table he reserved is now full of other guests. You can’t seat him, he gets explicitly mad, leaves your venue with a bad taste in his mouth, and has his expected experience (maybe even a better experience) elsewhere.
We’ve seen this scenario time and again, and it always comes down to the same cause: poor processes and double-booked VIP tables. While we live in a socially-digital era, we’re still stuck in 1980s-style operations. Too many clubs operate with pen and paper to manage table reservations. Some have graduated onto email as their medium of choice, but this still results in errors.
It’s nearly impossible to keep track of reservations using these old school processes. Reservations are coming in from different sources, tables are over promised, and what ends up getting marked down isn’t true to what’s actually going to happen that night.
The best way to keep track of reservations to mitigate double-booked tables is through a central technology platform to which everyone has access. This means any of your employees or partners can:
1. Log into the system with their personal username and password</li>
2. Add a guest reservation for a specific night</li>
3. Identify remaining tables for the night and select the most appropriate one
Tables that are already reserved won’t show up in the system, which means they’re never double-booked. Not only that, but the person who refers a guest for a reservation (ex: a promoter) is the person who makes the reservation. They don’t need to email anybody to make it happen or jot it down on a piece of paper to hand to the hostess. It’s all streamlined and centralized to maximize efficiency and accuracy.
You can’t afford to have table hiccups. Your guests are too important and their spending habits are too critical for your bottom line. It’s time to let technology handle the back-end operations so you can be as efficient and profitable as possible.
Whitney Johnson is the global director of marketing for BookBottles. Contact her at whitney.johnson@bookbottles.com.
