Don't Reserve If You Can't Commit: On “Ghosting” Resto Reservations

(SPOT.ph) It’s a Thursday night and work is draining your soul (as per ushe). So you cope the best way possible—i.e., make plans for the weekend. College constants are called; plans of hitting up this new Italian spot are made. And to save your slot, you call to reserve a table for eight for 7 p.m.

But then Saturday night rolls around, and for one reason or another, you and your group decide to drop said plans and go elsewhere… perhaps without telling the establishment at all, because why bother? This might not sound like a big deal for some, but it affects the restaurant side of things, especially over time. And sadly—as has been the talk of industry folks recently—the phenomenon is happening all too frequently today.

Also read: Should You Complain About Restaurants on Social Media?

Local restaurants are increasingly getting cancelled reservations without notice:

“Reservation ghosting,” as restaurateur Elbert Cuenca (of Elbert’s Steak Room, Metronome, and other establishments) refers to these no-shows in an exchange with SPOT.ph, has become a “daily occurrence.” “It didn’t happen regularly before the pandemic. This [2022], we started noticing it, and the frequency of incidence has significantly increased in weeks leading to Christmas.” Note that these no-shows differ from last-minute cancellations. “We accept [the latter] as it is very much part and parcel of the industry,” he clarifies. With no-shows, however, they’d sometimes confirm on the same day—yet don’t show up.

To be clear, there are understandable reasons you wouldn’t push through; emergencies happen, and you’re not expected to drive to a resto or have the time to call if, say, you’re hit with a stroke or get into a car crash (knock on wood). But for casual cancellations, it’s also all too easy to decide on the day (or even hour) itself that you’d rather hit up a burger joint than the Italian spot you’d originally planned to visit. Or that you’d rather stay in just because. Because reservations in the Philippines typically don’t entail much on your part as the customer—apart from you calling or messaging and giving your names and preferred schedule—there also isn’t much of a loss from your end in canceling. Or not showing up without even alerting the establishment, for that matter. It’s not like the resto can track you down, or that can land you in jail.

What “ghosters” might not take into consideration, though, is how this affects the dining spot. To reserve a table is, in a way, to make a commitment. You are in essence, making the request for a seat to be saved in your place—with the premise that you’d be dining and paying so the resto can continue to thrive and be in business. Fail to show up, however, and what becomes of it? A waste of allotted space and time on the part of the restaurant. Seats and tables are reserved for you over somebody else after all—i.e., someone who could instead have taken your place. "We have to turn people down, only to find out we could’ve accommodated them,” Cuenca laments.

“The biggest hassle is in reservations management,” he continues. Given the ghosting risk, they’ve taken to having to “constantly message” the customer just to confirm they’d be pushing through, or even having to “assign or hire people just to take care of reservations” when simple listings sufficed (and folks would surely show up) in the past. “

At my restaurants, we offer a high-value experience, and so we don’t have walk-ins nor do we do turnovers,” Cuenca says, the latter referring to the number of seatings in a day—and in this context, to the transferring of seats from one party to another. “Once a table is an assigned to a guest, it’s theirs for the duration of the evening.

 By the time the reservation is missed, it’s too late for us to call on waitlisted customers.

 We also prepare prepare food based on the number of expected for the evening.”

To cope with the phenomenon, Cuenca’s team has taken to collecting from these potential diners consumable, non-refundable reservation fees. You can expect to see this practice in more establishments moving forward—and rightfully so.

One of those other dining spots now securing reservation fees? Boracay’s Percy Seafood, as owner Nowie Potenciano echoes Cuenca’s sentiments albeit with last-minute cancellations and latecomers as a whole. They’d recently started taking reservations at their Boracay spot Percy Seafood (for folks looking to celebrate special occasions), and immediately experienced the said phenomena. “Being in a tourist location, I [personally] think guests tend to become a little more lax in their schedules,” he shares. “There would always be some reason given, from ‘Hindi [pa] tapos mag-swimming” or “Nakatulog ‘yong anak ko,” and we’d get latecomers or last-minute cancellations around 50% of the time.”

Arriving late might not be uncommon in these parts, given the whole concept of Filipino time so prevalent in our culture (which is another story for another day). But that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable. This comes at the expense of profit; arrivals not on schedule translate to losses from their side, as the table could’ve been given to another customer who’d actually show up. “When a table is reserved for 12 p.m. for example, that means as early as 11 a.m. we already keep that table vacant. So if the customer arrives late, say even 30 minutes later, we lose business because another diner could have occupied that same table until 12:30,” he explains.

“Most restaurants survive not because of a single seating in a day—they rely on a stream of guests filling up tables throughout the day,” Potenciano relays. “When a guest doesn’t arrive on time or not at all, the table is left vacant and that’s a loss the restaurant can’t get back anymore.”

The best course of action, of course, is to push through with your reservation unless an emergency pops up. If you must cancel, giving the restaurant a heads up is key—consider it part of your responsibility by having made the commitment to reserve. “When that happens, we still try to call on waitlisted customers,” Cuenca explains of last-minute cancellations. “The earlier we are notified, the better.”

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