Apartment booking system – 87 more tables in the season
Instead of booking only by phone, we opened an online schedule. It turned out that 34% of guests prefer to book a table at 11:00 PM when no one answers the office.
Bistro Widok in Mrągowo was losing customers because no one answered the phone in the evenings. We introduced a simple online booking system that works itself while the service sleeps.
The challenge
The owner, Mr. Mariusz, noticed a strange thing. Every morning there were 7-9 missed calls on the company mobile from the previous evening. People are looking for a table for dinner or lunch for the next day, sitting with a phone in hand in the evening. At Bistro Widok, reservations were taken by a waiter, but only until 6:00 PM. Then the phone was silent.
Additionally, in the peak of lunch, waiters ran between tables and rarely had time to go to the phone. We estimate that about 16% of potential guests gave up and looked for another place in Mrągowo where they could secure a place faster. No time to waste on Excel errors, let alone on losing guests because of a dead phone.
Our approach
The Mazury Streamline Experts team didn't want to turn the restaurant upside down in the middle of the season. We spent 3 days at the bistro to see how the staff manages the tables on the terrace. We chose a simple tool that displays the schedule on a tablet at the bar.
We focused on making the process for the customer short. A booking must take less than 47 seconds. We trained 4 service people in two afternoons. Honestly, at first the barman turned his nose up that it's another thing to click, but he quickly saw that the phone stopped ringing in the hottest moments of serving dishes. It simply works when everyone knows their task.
The solution
We implemented a system synchronized with the bistro's Google business card and Facebook. Now the customer sees the 'Book a table' button directly in the search engine. We added an automatic SMS confirmation function.
Each table in Bistro Widok received its digital equivalent in the system. The waiter now sees on one screen which table is free and which is occupied for the next 2 hours. The system blocks the places itself, so there's no question of an error and overlapping bookings. We also added an option to leave a short note for the service, which guests planning birthdays or anniversaries really liked.
Results
The 2024 season showed that people in Masuria want to book digitally. The bistro served a record number of guests without chaos at the entrance.
Timeline
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July 3, 2024Telephone traffic analysis and setting up the table structure.
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July 8, 2024System configuration and integration with the Google Maps business card.
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July 12, 2024Staff training (took exactly 1h 15min).
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July 14, 2024Full start of the system and monitoring of the first bookings.
"I was skeptical about newfangled things because we always had a notebook. But when I saw that in the morning I had 6 new bookings made at night, I stopped complaining. Facts on the table: the system paid for itself in the first week."