Our Book A Table feature is really gaining traction with Restaurants who had previously been paying around $1 per seat to take bookings online, now enjoying the feature as part of their online marketing package with Marketing4Restaurants.com. Some of our customers are saving over $500 per month by not paying for bookings that are coming from their own marketing efforts. For Restaurant owners, the opportunity to pocket an extra $6,000 a year in savings is a huge advantage in these very difficult times.
But not every is so happy about it.
One of our customers received this email.
Yikes!
It looks like your booking system has made 5 bookings for me for tonight! I was trying to actually search for availability in January. Can you please cancel all bookings in your system tonight?
I might just find another restaurant with an easier online booking system to use.
Cheers,
K
Seemed a little unusual, as none of the research that we have been able to find points to the ease of an online booking system as being a critical factor in where people choose to eat, so we did a little digging.
Firstly, it appears that the person actually made five bookings, and then a person with the name of the person making a booking was found in Linkedin with the title of Group Manager at one of the online booking companies, our competitor. So it appears that a Group Manager has visited the customer to place the bookings and then complain about it. Interesting! Could it be an honest mistake or is the online booking industry very scared that what was once a very lucrative revenue stream is now being exposed as an unnecessary charge on the marketing efforts of restaurants. The better at marketing a restaurant is, the more customers they drive to their website and the more they have to pay to take online bookings. Thankfully, those days are over, with Marketing4Restaurants offering the feature for free to our online marketing customers and for just $39.95 for customers with their own website that they don’t want to upgrade to our all in one restaurant marketing solution.
What do you think? Is charging for online bookings an unfair tax on your marketing efforts?
Book A Table is on track to save the Hospitality industry $1,000,000 this year alone and growing fast as restaurant owners enjoy the extra cash flow that “Book A Table” is freeing up for them.
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Is Poor SEO Killing Your Restaurant?
Too many times we see customers with websites that are costing restaurants thousands of dollars every month through poor design, poor messaging and poor SEO. If your website could be improved to bring in 200 extra visits per month and just 10% of those made a booking, and each booking was for 2.5 seats on average at $50 a seat, you would have an extra $2,500 in revenue a month. A 30% food cost, that is $1,750 in profit extra a month. This ignores those customers coming back as regulars – which is more profit.
Remember, if these customers aren’t finding your Restaurant, they are finding your competitors.
Get one of our obligation free 7 point website SEO audits to see what you can get your web developer to fix to increase your revenue today.