Relax to the max: Serve more guests without going berserk

Running a restaurant is great but hard work. Competition is fierce, many restaurants are in the red, costs and rents are high, especially in large cities. Only few restaurants benefit from opening morning to night. All others have to make optimum use of the short opening hours at noon and in the evening in order to make ends meet, i.e. hosting as many guests as possible and generating the highest possible turnover per guest. Of course, restaurants have to offer great value in return. No surprise that restaurants offer such exceptional quality in cities like Zurich - despite all complaints! But how to get the most of your restaurant? What does optimal capacity utilization really mean?

At first, a restaurant is only as good as its service and its cuisine - but both can reach their limits at high capacity. What puts a lot of money into the tills in the short term - the restaurant is crowded, lots of orders - can burden the books in the long term. Cold service and food, long waiting times and limited time at the table. The guests won't come back and won't write good reviews either. The maximum is not necessarily the optimum.

But, and this is good news, IT-solutions such as aleno can help you to make the maximize your optimum. Two things are important for optimal capacity utilization. First, have as many guests as possible within a given period of time. State-of-the art online reservation systems such as aleno help you to set the exact times at which guests can make reservations and how long the table is available to them. With such reservation systems it is very easy to sell tables several times an evening.

Second, the kitchen and service must not suffer from the rush. The biggest problem is the lack of overview. One thing is to sell tables more than once, another thing is to provide your best food and service at full capacity. And this aspect is still often neglected, by gastronomes as much as by most IT-solutions. To ensure that everything runs smoothly, the kitchen and service must always know the number of guests at any time, how long seats are available and at what times. When you sell your seats only once, you hardly get into trouble - and you won't get out of the red. However, when you do multiple seating, but also want to respond to individual wishes, (e.g. longer seating times) then taking reservations and seating guest quickly becomes a complex game of chess - and  there is no time for that.

The aleno restaurant reservation system displays the utilization per shift and per time, how many reservations you have, and how many guests there are in the restaurant, and for each request whether there are still places available for the desired time, number of persons and length of stay. Easy to read symbols replace a complex calculation and bring great relief to your staff when it comes to reservations requests, service and planning. And which is often forgotten thereby: A better overview, not only prevents overburdening, errors, chaos, and dissatisfied guests, it also helps to sell more seats and increase your returns!