Does your restaurant accept reservations?  Cornell’s Center for Hospitality Research sends me little email updates now and then and yesterday’s headline stood out.  Reservations could be a way to shorten your guests’ wait times and manage the flow of tables so your restaurant's kitchen can keep up.  Below is a brief snippet of the article (and you can find the rest on Cornell’s website:

“During busy times, guests at casual-style restaurants end up waiting for a table, but they don't like it. Given the choice, a Cornell study finds that most of them would prefer to make reservations. The study, ‘Customer Satisfaction with Seating Policies in Casual-Dining Restaurants,’ by Sheryl E. Kimes and Jochen Wirtz, gave respondents the choice of making reservations, calling ahead for a place on the waitlist, or a simple first-come, first-served waitlist. Reservations won hands down.

‘The most impressive finding involved business meals,’ said Kimes, a professor at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. ‘Fifty-seven percent of our respondents would never choose a restaurant that uses waitlist seating for a business dinner. These customers want to be certain that they can be seated when they arrive.’

Participants in the survey had a higher opinion of restaurants that accept reservations, giving those restaurants higher marks for customer service, caring about customers, and respecting their time. Wirtz, who is an associate professor of marketing at the National University of Singapore, pointed out that even allowing guests to call ahead for a table was preferable to the typical waitlist.

‘Based on our study, we recommend that casual restaurants seriously consider taking reservations or, at minimum, offer informal call-ahead arrangements,’ said Kimes. ‘Given these findings, we wonder why so many chains do not accept reservations during busy times. We know that reservations have operational problems, such as no-shows and late shows, but our findings indicate that reservations still might be worth the effort, given this survey.’ Kimes plans a study to further address this issue.”