Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/807384
12 / the tasting panel / april 2017 The restaurant industry has a serious, life-threatening problem. It's called "no-shows." If 10 percent of the people who make reservations for a given night don't show up and don't bother to call, it can be the difference between making a profit and losing money. Enough nights like this (and 10 percent no-show is about standard) and you're out of business. What can you do? There are a number of steps that can be taken. Unfortunately, none of them solves the problem entirely, but they can help. First, sign up with at least one reservation service. They can help police the situation. Open Table, for example, penalizes habitual no-shows by dropping them from the program if they don't show up four times in a calendar year. Recently Australia's booking site Dimmi, the nation's largest, made waves when it put nearly 40,000 diners on a blacklist. Their offense: being no-shows. This policy has had a significant impact: Dimmi has shown a 25 percent drop in no-shows since. Personally, you can also take several more immediate steps: Hire a good reservationist—someone who is organized and intelligent and whose manner is friendly but a bit intimidating; establish some protocols—take the name, spelled correctly, the phone number and repeat it all back to the caller. In the old days, this was enough, but now more is needed. Some places ask for a credit card at this point, telling the caller that the card will be charged an arbitrary amount—say $20 per person—if they don't show up. Because of the impersonal nature of booking online, it is common for people to make multiple reservations and decide, at the last minute, which one to honor. Most of the time, they don't bother canceling the reservations that are not being used. The next step is to require people to pay in advance for their meals. Some high-end places, such as Trois Mec in Los Angeles, require customers to subscribe and pay in full in advance in an online lottery every other week. Another strategy that is slightly less punitive is to require parties of five or more to pay in advance. Two-top and four-top no-shows are easier to replace with walk-ins. However you deal with this bothersome problem, it needs to be taken seriously and planned for. Solving it could very well save your business. Anthony Dias Blue No-Show Me LETTER FROM THE EDITOR