Why You Really Need to Cancel Your Dinner Reservation If You Can’t
Thanks to apps, restaurant websites, and the usual old phone calls, making reservations for dinner is easier than ever these days. But for some reason, people don’t cancel if they can’t make it. It’s rude, yes, but it also affects the restaurant in ways you might not have thought.
Restaurant reservation service OpenTable checked their stats and found that 6% of visitors to book their tables and do not come. It might not sound like a lot, but Chef Michael Voltajo of Ink Los Angeles explains what this really means for restaurants in terms of lost profits :
“If you do some simple math, even if you have a $ 50 check per person and two people don’t show up a night, 365 days a year, that’s over $ 30,000 you are losing in your business this year … “
However, the no-show cost is beyond that. They have a certain number of staff on hand, depending on what is required for overnight reservations, food such as pre-snacks and complementary meals are prepared in the kitchen, and there is a table they cannot give to passersby because they waiting for you. And if this is a good place, they may have done even more prep work to prepare everything for your experience.
Voltajo doesn’t understand why people treat dinner reservations differently than any other service. People have no problem canceling Ubers or canceling theater tickets, but you also get a rating based on how you deal with one and pay upfront for the other. However, when you think about it, skipping dinner during dinner is no different than any other occasion where you say you’ll be somewhere and don’t show. Just because you don’t know them personally and haven’t paid yet doesn’t mean it’s acceptable practice.
The establishments try to track repeated no-shows and deny particularly disgusting criminals, but for the most part restaurants are gullible guys with flowers in their hands, hoping that their date will show up even if they are 45 minutes late. It’s not hard to do the right thing in these situations, so please try to set aside an extra minute or so to cancel if you fail.