In a small dining room overbooking does worse damage than an empty seat. An empty table costs its takings; two couples showing up for the same table cost the takings, the scene on the floor and two customers who won't come back. With thirty covers there's no recovery margin: no other room to draw from, no time to redo the table map. Airlines practise it because on 180 seats five overbookings get absorbed; in a ten-table dining room two extra covers are chaos. Those who do it on purpose need precise numbers — below 10% cancellations the game stops paying — and a ready waiting list.
Overbooking by mistake — the double booking — is almost always born of a wrong diary: the same table sold on the phone and on the platform, covers counted in your head, the booking written in the notebook and forgotten. The cure is boring and definitive: a single shared diary, where every channel — phone, widget, platforms, waiting list — writes into the same calendar, and a taken table disappears everywhere instantly. When it happens, handling is what counts: no “the system got it wrong”, but an immediate solution — a drink at the bar in the meantime, a guaranteed table within twenty minutes, a lighter bill — and a note on the customer's file. A well-handled mistake is forgotten; a badly handled one never is.
Frequently asked questions
- Is overbooking legal?
- No law forbids it in hospitality, but selling a service you know you can't deliver exposes you to complaints and, in the worst cases, to claims for unfair commercial practice. As for keeping a deposit because the room imposed the overbooking, the argument gets ugly: better not to get there.
- How do you avoid double-booking the same table?
- With a single diary where every channel writes: as soon as one takes the table, it disappears for all the others. The notebook divides, the management system unites. If you use several platforms you need real-time synchronisation, not end-of-day, by which time the damage is done.