Choose a Pub Booking System Without Booking Every Seat

Picture the Sunday service you know. The diary says the dining room is full from twelve until half past three. By ten past twelve, two tables of four have not turned up, nobody rang, and the chairs sit there while three couples stand at the bar asking if there is anything going. You cannot give the tables away because the booking might still arrive. At half past twelve a party of twelve walks in and asks for a table together, and the only space big enough is already promised to people who are not coming. The kitchen has cooked to a number that was written in a diary in two different hands.

That is the daily reality behind the headline figures. Zonal and CGA research, reported by Restaurant Online in October 2023, found 12% of consumers not honouring their reservations and not telling venues in advance, which the report put at £17.59bn a year in lost revenue for the sector. It is a sector-wide figure from 2023, and a hospitality-wide one, so it tells you the scale of the problem, not your own rate. Your own diary tells you your own rate. If you have never counted, that is the first useful number to collect.

Here is the sum for a pub, as an illustration and not a forecast. Take a Sunday with 120 covers booked. If 12% do not arrive, that is 14.4 covers. At an average spend of £18 a head, a figure to replace with your own, that is 14.4 × £18 = £259.20 of unsold lunch, or £13,478.40 across 52 Sundays if every week looked the same.

For a wet-led pub the cost is wider than the empty chair. A no-show on a Sunday is a roast you prepped and could not sell, a table that could have gone to a walk-in, and a bar team who spent the afternoon turning people away. A phone booking scribbled in a diary adds a second layer: no confirmation goes out, no reminder, no deposit, and nobody can see from the bar what the kitchen has been told.

Faced with that, the instinct is to tighten everything: book every seat, take a deposit from everyone, and tell walk-ins the pub is full. It protects the Sunday kitchen and quietly damages the rest of the business. A pub is a place people can drift into. The couple who stand at the bar and end up staying for a roast are the same people who become regulars. If every seat is spoken for weeks ahead, they never come in, and you have swapped a bar full of spontaneous trade for a dining room full of promises.

The opposite instinct, staying walk-in only, leaves you guessing at covers, cooking too much or too little, and with no way to take a large group. The answer sits between the two. Book the parts of the pub that need planning, keep the parts that live on spontaneity open, and make the booking system respect the line between them.

That is the real test for any pub booking system, pub reservation system, bar reservation system or café reservation system you look at. A tool built for a table-service restaurant can happily fill every table it knows about. A tool that suits a pub lets you say which tables it is allowed to fill, when, for how many people, and what happens when the booking does not turn up.

Table booking for pubs comes down to five decisions. Make each one deliberately and the diary stops being a source of arguments.

Draw the pub as it is. The dining room, the snug and the restaurant end are bookable. The bar, the standing area and perhaps the front of the pub stay walk-in. The garden sits in between, because its capacity moves with the weather. In a system that allocates real tables, only the tables you put on the floor plan are handed out to bookings. A bar drawn as a counter or bar fixture is part of the picture, not something a guest can reserve.

This matters more than any feature on a vendor page. A system that treats the whole venue as one pool of covers will eventually sell the bar stools. A system that works from your floor plan can leave them alone.

Opening hours tell a guest when the doors are open. A service is the sharper rule underneath: Lunch, Dinner, or a Sunday roast sitting, each with its own first and last seating, its own booking interval, its own capacity, its own party limits and its own deposit. Sunday roast is a different product from a Tuesday supper. It has a fixed menu, it needs a kitchen cap, and it usually asks for a deposit when the group is large. If the system only has one set of rules for the whole week, you end up fixing it by hand.

In this worked example, assume the roast runs from 12:00 to 14:00 sittings with a ceiling of 60 covers at once and a two-hour stay. Two turns of 60 gives the 120 Sunday covers used in the cost section below. Those numbers are an illustration for you to replace with your own kitchen's limit.

A party of twelve at the door is a kitchen problem, not a seating problem. Set a maximum party size per service so a large group has to ring or enquire rather than book itself into the middle of your roast sitting. Add a minimum notice for online bookings so nobody books a table for twelve guests at eleven in the morning on the day, and a book-ahead limit so a sitting does not quietly take a reservation for next year. Your own team should still be able to book anything, because the phone is where large groups come from.

Some bookings should confirm instantly: a table for two on a quiet Wednesday. Others should arrive as an enquiry you approve: a group of ten on Mother's Day weekend, a table for a wake, or a private room. The useful setting is one you can choose per service, so Sunday roast can ask a question while a weekday supper confirms immediately.

There are two ways to protect a booking, and they are not the same. A deposit takes payment when the guest books. A card guarantee holds the card details and takes nothing unless your team marks the booking a no-show and confirms the charge. For a pub, the sensible shape is usually no deposit for small parties, a card hold or a modest deposit for medium ones, and a per-head deposit on large groups and set menus, where the kitchen's cost is real. A reminder the day before gives a guest an easy moment to cancel, which frees the table for someone else.

Some guests start on Google rather than on your site. A Reserve with Google booking-link connection puts a booking destination next to your listing. It publishes a link to a booking destination. It does not mean every Google booking is automatically written into your diary, so be clear which system you are sending guests to and check where those bookings land.

Booking systems are priced in two ways. Some charge a flat monthly fee, sometimes stepped by volume. Others charge per cover, so the bill rises with exactly the busy Sundays you want to fill. Two traps follow. An entry price rarely covers the plan a busy pub needs, and a plan that includes "unlimited" bookings may only cost less than the cover-based one above a certain volume.

Here is a worked example you can replace with your own numbers. Assume your pub takes 60 bookings a week, of which 40 land on Sunday, with an average party of 3. That is 180 covers a week, and 120 on Sunday. Over a month that is 60 × 52 ÷ 12 = 260 bookings and 260 × 3 = 780 covers.

Now the plan a pub would actually need on three providers whose current pricing pages are verifiable, taken from each page on 8 October 2026. Prices on those pages are quoted as published. Check each page for VAT and contract terms before you rely on a figure here.

• simpleERB lists Starter at "£ 21 /month" for up to 300 covers, Plus at "£ 47 /month" for 1,200 covers and Pro at "£ 80 /month" for unlimited covers. At 780 covers a month, Starter's 300-cover limit is below your volume, so Plus is the plan to price: £47 a month, or £564 over twelve months. The page says yearly billing gives a 10% discount, which would bring that to £507.60.
• Tablein lists Starter at "GPB 60" (the page's own spelling) for 50 reservations with £0.67 for each extra, Growth at "GPB 105" for 150 reservations with £0.37 for each extra, and Success at "GPB 157" for unlimited reservations. Treating one booking as one reservation, 260 bookings a month cost £60 + 210 × £0.67 = £200.70 on Starter, £105 + 110 × £0.37 = £145.70 on Growth, or a flat £157 on Success. The lowest of the three is £145.70 a month, which is £1,748.40 over twelve months. The page also offers an annual option of paying for 10 months and getting 2 free.
• Favouritetable lists FT Free as "£ Free for life" for up to 30 bookings a month with an exclusive partnership, FT Flex at £2 per cover (the page marks the figure with an asterisk), FT Lite at £69.00 per month, FT Pro at "£129 per month" and FT Ultimo at "£199 per month". The page also states "No Commission, No Per-Cover Fees, No Tie-ins" while listing the per-cover Flex plan, so read the terms behind each plan. At 780 covers a month, £2 per cover is 780 × £2 = £1,560 a month, or £18,720 over twelve months. The lowest fixed plan listed, FT Lite, is £69.00 a month, or £828 over twelve months, if its limits and features suit your venue.

The plan you need may not be the plan on the front of the page. Cover-based charges rise with the very Sundays you most want to fill. And every figure above buys you a booking tool. The website your guests book from, the menu, the guest list and the search set-up are separate jobs, separate suppliers and separate invoices.

TableSpark Growth is £39 a month excluding VAT. It includes on-site reservations against live availability and table inventory, floor plans and table assignment, enquiry or instant-confirmation mode configured per service, deposits and reminders, and a Reserve with Google booking-link connection, on top of everything in Starter: the website, a live menu, guest records with CSV export and managed search readiness. If you choose to pay for ten months and use twelve, the yearly cost is £390 excluding VAT. You do not pay until you publish, so you can build the whole thing and look at it first.

To see why the per-cover model grows so quickly, here is the same sum for a plan quoted at £2 per cover, set against a flat monthly fee. It is arithmetic on a quoted rate, not a forecast.

Deposits carry a card fee under any system that uses Stripe. On Stripe's UK pricing page, standard UK cards are "1.5% + 20p" and premium UK cards "2.8% + 20p". An £80 deposit on a table of eight at £10 a head therefore costs £1.40 to take on a standard card (1.5% of £80 is £1.20, plus 20p) and £2.44 on a premium card (2.8% of £80 is £2.24, plus 20p). That is a card fee, not a booking fee, and it belongs in your sums whichever supplier you choose.

A booking widget on its own does not make a pub ready for bookings. The checklist below covers the parts owners usually discover later.

State your policy where the guest books. Keep it short and specific. Template wording, to adapt: "Tables are held for 15 minutes. For parties of six or more, we take a deposit of £10 a head when you book, which is deducted from your bill. If you cancel at least 48 hours before, we refund it in full." Replace the numbers with your own. The point is that the amount, the deadline and the refund rule are all visible before payment.

The sums only work if the policy is fair. The Competition and Markets Authority has said, in guidance to wedding venues reported by Restaurant Online in 2016: "Non-refundable deposits, advance payments and sliding scales of cancellation charges could all be considered 'unfair' to consumers." That guidance covers wedding and event venues, not pubs, so treat it as an analogy and not as a rule for table bookings. In practice, keep deposits proportionate to the cost you would actually suffer, refund them when the guest cancels in good time, and say all of it before the card is taken.

Under regulation 28 of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013, the 14-day cancellation right does not apply to "the supply of accommodation, transport of goods, vehicle rental services, catering or services related to leisure activities, if the contract provides for a specific date or period of performance". A table booked for a given date and time is the sort of dated catering contract that exception describes. That does not remove the fairness rules for consumer terms, which still apply. If you are unsure how your wording lands, take advice before you publish it.

Every booking creates a guest record. Ask where it lives. In TableSpark, every booking, order and enquiry becomes a guest record under the restaurant's own account, visible in the Inbox and the guest list, and exportable as CSV: your records, in your account, exportable. A booking row also shows a guest's prior no-shows, which is useful when a large group asks for a table. A marketplace works differently, because there the diner belongs to the marketplace first.

List your booking page on Google through a Reserve with Google booking-link connection, and put the same link on your own site, your Instagram bio and the menu card on the table. Tell guests where their confirmation will come from, so it does not land in spam.

A website can be live at a working link and still be absent from Google. Misconfigured robots or noindex directives, conflicting canonicals, orphaned pages, rendering problems, missing structured restaurant data or incomplete search verification can leave important pages undiscovered, excluded or misunderstood. For a pub, the consequence is concrete. Someone searching your pub name, your Sunday roast or your town may reach a directory, a commission-charging marketplace or the pub down the road first, and you are left paying for visibility you should be earning for free.

TableSpark packages this search-readiness work into the website instead of leaving you to hire a technician and assemble it separately: crawlable structured menus, titles and descriptions, canonical URLs, sitemaps, robots controls, Restaurant and LocalBusiness schema, internal links, mobile-first output and managed search-verification setup, with the sitemap submitted to Google Search Console on every publish. Indexing and ranking remain decisions for Google, so no promise is made about either. What you get is a site built so that Google can find, read and understand it.

Put special dates in the system once: Christmas Day, Boxing Day, a bank holiday running shorter hours. England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland run different bank-holiday calendars, so check the right one on GOV.UK. Then check your Google Business Profile's own special hours, because Google does not read your booking system's opening hours automatically. For the garden, decide in advance what happens when it rains: block the tables, cap the covers for the day, or close that service for the date.

The choice reduces to two routes. One is a marketplace or a per-cover system, where the booking page lives in someone else's listing and the bill follows your covers. The other is a flat-fee system that lives on your own site, where you carry the fixed monthly fee and the guest relationship stays with you.

If you are still deciding, follow this path.

The route you want depends on three questions. Do you serve food at set times that need planning? Do you want the bar to stay open to walk-ins? Do you want the guest relationship, and the data, to sit in your own account? If the answer to all three is yes, a flat-fee system on your own site is the better fit, and the cost section above shows what it adds up to over a year.

The route below uses the screens named in TableSpark's own tutorials for hours and booking rules and for running your bookings. Reservations, floor plans, deposits and reminders are on the Growth plan and above. The steps take around twenty minutes.

• Run the roast as its own service and leave your weekday services alone, so a change to one never touches the other.
• Put the garden in its own room on the floor plan. On a wet day, use Reservation closures & exceptions on Bookings to close that date or cap covers, and use Block table on a free table in Service to take single tables out.
• Use the Waitlist card for walk-ins who want the dining room: add Name, Party, Phone and Quoted wait, then Notify when a table frees and Seat to turn them into a booking.
• Use the Inbox for group enquiries. Reply, agree a time, then add the confirmed booking yourself with New booking.
• Add Bank holidays & special dates once a year, then check your Google Business Profile's own special hours.
• A booking waiting on a deposit shows Awaiting deposit in the diary. A guest with a deposit or card guarantee is told to call, so large-group changes come to you rather than to a self-service button.

For an independent UK pub that wants bookings for the dining room and Sunday roast while the bar stays open to walk-ins, TableSpark Growth is the best-value and best overall choice. It is £39 a month excluding VAT, and it brings together the things a pub otherwise buys separately: your own website, a live menu, bookings against real tables, a service for the roast with its own party limits and deposit, reminders, a Reserve with Google booking-link connection, guest records in your account with CSV export, and search readiness built into the site. Pay for ten months and use twelve for £390 excluding VAT a year, and build the whole site free until you publish.

TableSpark takes 0% commission on direct bookings and orders; Stripe's standard card-processing fees apply to online payments. If you want direct online ordering as well, Full is £69 a month excluding VAT. Starter, at £19 a month excluding VAT, gets the site and menu online first, and you can move up when you are ready for bookings.