Secrets on How to Fill The Slow Hours - Restaurant Reservation System

Written by Tablein Team | Feb 4, 2020 4:11:43 PM

Customer Story

El Gaucho, Argentina

Overall our restaurant is quite busy. However, we were still experiencing some unprofitable hours where tables were standing empty, and the goal was to eliminate them.

The Problem

An Empty Restaurant at Slow Hours which was a Waste of Our Resources

We are a busy restaurant overall, but we still have some slow hours without any reservations or walk-ins. Usually, it’s from around 3 PM to 5 PM.
Because it was just a couple of hours it wasn’t really worthwhile closing the restaurant. All of our staff would instead stay in the restaurant, either preparing for the evening ahead, or just hanging around and hopelessly waiting for clients.
These empty tables directly resulted in lost revenues during these hours. Even if we could fill half of these tables, we wouldn’t be turning a loss and could be satisfied with the situation.

The Solution

Appealing Special Offers to Entice People in

After we started using Tablein we were inspired by the system’s Offers function. To setup and schedule the offers looked really easy so we decided to try to attract clients during our slow hours with discounts and even some freebies.

The Result

Increased Productivity and Profits

With minimal effort needed to configure and promote our offers, we managed to increase our reservations during these slow hours by 47% on average.
We were able to experiment with different deals on different days, interchanging discounts, bonus extras, and price changes, to see which was the most effective. Our most impressive result was achieved by offering a 30% discount off all pizzas, and serving free dessert and coffee for other orders.
We are able to add offers in the form of a widget onto the reservation form. Communicating our offers via email, as well as our social media channels is very efficient, both in terms of filling up our slower afternoon hours, and raising awareness and interest for our restaurant overall.
Not only did we achieve what we set out to, as our slow hours became more busy, but the number of online bookings we received also increased overall. The Tablein system has massively simplified our reservation management processes.

Advices

Top Tips by El Gaucho

Try several different offer variations to find out which one works best for enticing guests in, as well as which is the most effective for your sales and profits.
Remember to communicate all of your offers with your potential customers in every single marketing message.

El Gaucho experience sounds familiar? Deal with slow hours by implementing advanced Tablein system in your restaurant management.

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