Guide · Overbooking
How to prevent overbooked seatings at a hotel's specialty restaurants
A seating gets overbooked when two people or two channels book against different counts. Four decisions prevent it: set each seating's capacity in covers, not reservations; keep one record for the concierge, the web and the app; block the seating the moment it fills; and make going over an exception with a name and a time, not an oversight.
Mesatto team · Updated
Why a seating gets overbooked
It's rarely bad faith. There's simply more than one source of truth. The lobby concierge writes in one sheet, the club concierge in another, and the hotel app has its own allotment. Each sees open seats the other already gave away.
The second cause is counting reservations instead of covers. Twenty reservations can be forty people or seventy. A seating that "still has room for three reservations" may not have a single chair.
The third is last-minute changes: the table for four that is now six, the guest who was told "I'll put you down" in the hallway. None of them go through the capacity check, and all of them show up at the door.
Five decisions that prevent it
Set capacity in covers, per seating
Capacity is how many people the kitchen and the dining room can serve well in that seating, not how many reservations fit on the sheet. Each seating has its own: the first dinner and the late dinner don't have the same capacity.
Where tables rule, declare the tables
At a specialty restaurant the total isn't enough. Forty seats at tables for two won't seat five parties of eight. Declare how many tables you have of each size, or draw the dining room, so a reservation only goes in if there's somewhere to seat it.
One record for every channel
Concierge, guest booking page, app and front desk have to draw from the same capacity at the same moment. If a channel works from its own allotment "so they don't collide", that allotment gets wasted or double-booked.
Block the seating when it's full
The system, or the person keeping the sheet, has to say no. Show the guest the seating as full and offer another seating or another day, rather than hiding it.
Make going over a named exception
There will always be a case: the general manager asks for a table, a party arrives with a reservation entered wrong. There should be a way to open extra covers, but with a permission not everyone has and a record of who did it and when.
Signs you're already overbooking
- Guests with a reservation standing at the door.
- Tables set up in a hurry in the middle of service.
- The host finds reservations that aren't on their list.
- Seatings where more guests arrive than there are seats.
- Complaints along the lines of "I had a reservation and wasn't seated".
What about overbooking on purpose to offset no-shows?
Some restaurants take more reservations than they can seat because they know some won't show. At a resort it's riskier than at a standalone restaurant: the guest left without a table doesn't go somewhere else. They stay at your hotel, upset, and write it in their review.
If you do it, do it with your own no-show data by seating, with a small margin and as a recorded exception. And before that, go after the cause: the no-show guide explains how.
How Mesatto handles it
Capacity per seating with an automatic stop, across every channel
In Mesatto, the concierge, the guest booking page and the API draw from the same capacity. The seating blocks itself when it fills. The guest booking page and the API depend on the plan.
- Capacity in covers per seating, each with its own hours and release time.
- Tables by type and seating, or a floor plan: a reservation only goes in if there's a table.
- Change the party size and the table is reassigned automatically.
- Going over capacity is an exception with its own permission, logged with user and time.
- Occupancy by seating and day in the reports.