For the past year or so restaurants have been calling me and asking me to confirm my dinner reservation, generally about 24 hours in advance. I had thought this might be because of ReservationHop, but evidently that service was shut down last year very soon after it started.
So what’s up with these “just checking” calls? It’s a hassle for me (the customer) because I have to either take a call or call back. Does it really benefit the restaurant a lot? Are there a lot of people out there who will change plans and then just not cancel their dinner reservation?
If I don’t call back, am I in danger of having my reservation cancelled?
Because that table represents hundreds, even thousands of dollars a night to them and they want to make sure you are committed to holding up your end of the deal.
As for canceling your reservation if you don’t return their call, that depends on the restaurant. I would imagine they will mention it in their message if that’s the case.
In either case, it’s just good practice to ask for all the details of their policy when you make the reservation.
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Yes, there are. There is no cost to the consumer to skip out on a reservation, but if it is at a busy time, there is a big opportunity cost to the restaurant in that they hold open a table that could have been making money for them. If something as cheap as a confirmation call ahead convinces a fraction of these folks to fess up that they are not actually coming, it’s a savings.
I’ve been at restaurants where I’ve seen the staff turning people away with tables kept open for reservations that never showed up. So it happens.
I have gotten confirmation calls from restaurants, but only a few times- and only when I was dealing with a fancy restaurant near Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day or some similarly big event.
On MOST nights, a fancy restaurant won’t mind if a few people with reservations don’t show up. But on a few big days, like the ones I’ve mentioned, upscale restaurants are going to be booked up well in advance, and may have to turn away customers at the door. They don’t want to turn away customers because an open table is being held by people who aren’t going to show.
When I book via Open Table, I almost always get a call from the restaurant to confirm. I guess they get a lot of no-shows from people who book through that web site.
That’s how my wife and I do most of our dinner reservations, but it seems I’ve only been noticing the confirmation calls in the past couple of years. Am I imagining that?
Are confirmation calls more commonly associated with higher-cost restaurants?
I once made reservations at a very pricey restaurant in DC (Minibar, owned by Jose Andres). To confirm your reservation you actually had to send them a signed contract with your credit card number. No-shows were charged in full for the prix fixe dinner. I think this is still the case. Today it is $250 per person, and they only seat 6 people at a time. I don’t mean 6 per party, 6 in the whole place.
There are a good few fake (or just in case) reservations going around or people forgot the booking, changed their mind, etc…
And if a restaurant takes a booking for a set time, they have to provide that seat for that time.
On a Tuesday evening in March, that might not be a problem, but on lets say a a busy day like Valentines-Day, they can have several settings at that table, meaning revenue for the restaurant.
Also some reservation sites do charge the restaurant for making a booking.
Depending on the restaurant, they may organize the amount of staff they have working that very day to serve & cook by the bookings.
With all this in mind, its very simple to understand, why they call to confirm the bookings in advance.
Presumably you’ve never sold (or even given away) something on Craigslist. if you had, you’d know that people are incredibly selfish, and in general, think nothing about standing up a stranger or making them waste their entire day with no calls/no shows. My wife also works in a specialty area in healthcare where people have to sometimes wait months for an appointment. Several times a week she has one or more people no call/no show. This is after their appointment time is selected by them, they get a card in the mail, AND they get an automated phone call 24 hrs in the advance. Of course, people then call and complain and want to be seen right away the next day when they miss their appointment and then say they ‘never got notified’.
I suspect there are a number of people who either change their mind (date flakes/is sick, or they just felt like doing something else), or even people who make conflicting reservations at multiple places so they can offer a number of choices to their dining partners at the appointed date/time of dinner. Obviously if you are a restaurant, you want to make sure they are still coming, and if it is a time when it would otherwise be a crowded night, it seems totally reasonable for them to call or even tell you that if you are more than 15 minutes late, your table will be given away.
When I read this, the first thing I thought of is the old “I Love Lucy Show” rerun where Lucy wants to prove what a draw Ricky is to the nightclub after they fire him, so she makes a lot of different reservations under different names and then cancels or doesn’t show up.
I imagine it’d be too many for the competition for a restaurant to do, but it’s a thought for a competitor to undermine someone.
I suspect that it’s a function of the caliber of restaurants where you’re making reservations, and maybe a particular issue with reservation-skipping in your city.
We make reservations at nicer (though certainly not super-high-end) restaurants probably once every other month, either through Open Table or the restaurant’s own web site. I haven’t gotten any phone calls from the restaurants to confirm anything. (FWIW, I’m in suburban Chicago.)
There’s a high-end restaurant in Chicago call Alinea where you don’t book a table but instead buy tickets in advance for it. I believe if you decide not to go, you could sell the tickets on the secondary market. (I also believe it’s a prix-fixe restaurant, which makes it easier to operate this way.)
As a Chef, I can confirm that OpenTable does indeed charge us for each reservation, even if they don’t show up. Also, we make staffing decisions based on reservations.
I’d be hesitant to give anyone my credit card number in written form. I guess they expect you to use a sign-for-delivery service, or bring it by personally?
I’d rather them give you a one-time-use number when you make the registration, and then you use that.
In days of yore, before the Age of the Internet, people would order stuff using these things called catalogs. Imagine a website showing merchandise, but actually on paper. One way to order stuff was to write out what you wanted on a paper order form, including providing your address and credit card number. Edited to add, then you’d stick the order form in an envelope and send it by the Postal Service to the company.
In a similar spirit, some in-demand restaurants have actually started charging for reservations. In some ways, this system is more flexible because you can actually vary the costs of a reservation based on demand. If you want a table a 8.00 p.m. on a Saturday evening, it might cost you $50, but if you’re happy to eat a 5.30 on a Tuesday, there might be no reservation charge at all.
There was an article about this in the Atlantic a while back.
There were others, like ReservationHop (mentioned by the OP) that actually sold reservations without the knowledge of the restaurants involved.
As the author of this piece notes, plenty of people get rather upset at the idea of paying for a reservation before you even pay for your food, but it actually sort of makes sense if the reservation itself is in high enough demand. If you’ve got 100 of something (seats in a restaurant), and there are 300 people who want that thing at 8.00 on a Saturday night, why not charge what the market will bear for it?
What threat model are you guarding against? Anyone who sees or swipes your credit card gets access to your credit card number. And credit card companies have to cover fraud by law.
Regarding reservations, I read a great article about a restaurant that was trying something different for reservations. They sold the reservations as a minimum table order.
So, if you paid $20 for your reservation, you were just pre-paying for $20 of your meal. In addition to providing an incentive for people to show up, they could use it for price discrimination at busy times. If you wanted a reservation at 7pm on Saturday night, it might be $100, while a reservation on a Tuesday afternoon might only be $10.
People who wanted to try the restaurant, but who didn’t necessarily want to spend much, were incentivized to make reservations at less busy times.
You do this basically every time you use your credit card in person. The only vulnerability here is the exposure in sending it through the U.S. Mail. That vulnerability is relatively small compared to the number of people who handle your card number every time you use it to buy something, not to mention the fact that it may be in lots of databases with who-knows-what vulnerabilities.
That’s a good solution but as far as I know is not available except for certain types of electronic transactions.