Survey: How Czech Restaurants Take Reservations in 2026 (We Audited 45 of Them)

2026-07-25 · Data

In July 2026 we audited 45 independent restaurants across five Czech cities — Prague's residential districts (Vinohrady, Žižkov, Vršovice), Kroměříž, Orlová, Uherské Hradiště and Vsetín — checking one thing: how a guest can actually book a table. These were not struggling businesses. Their average Google rating was 4.4 stars, with more than 23,000 reviews between them. These are places people love and return to.

The headline finding: the telephone still rules

• 29 of 45 restaurants (64%) take reservations exclusively by phone — no form, no system, just a number on the website or Facebook page.
• 10 restaurants (22%) have no website of their own at all — guests find them only on Facebook, Instagram, or in directories.
• 2 restaurants use a manual email form where the guest fills in details and waits for a human to reply.
• Only 4 of the 45 (9%) had any booking system on their own website — and even those often did not show live availability.
• In total, 41 of 45 restaurants (91%) offer no real online booking on their own website.

Why it matters: guests have already moved

Guest behaviour has shifted. Aggregated data from Tableo shows 59% of diners now prefer booking online rather than calling, and Toast's 2025 data shows 65% of diners go directly to the restaurant's own website when booking. A guest who finds only a phone number — at 10 p.m., after closing, exactly when most bookings happen — calls into the void and often ends up at a competitor.

We covered how many reservations leak away this way in How Restaurants Lose Reservations Without an Online System.

Context: a shrinking market where every guest counts

According to Pilsner Urquell's data, the Czech Republic had just under 20,000 traditional pubs and restaurants at the end of 2023 — nearly 4,000 fewer than five years earlier. BusinessInfo reports almost 22,000 restaurants, cafés and bistros fighting to stay afloat. In that environment, every reservation that slips through matters.

The surprising detail: quality has nothing to do with it

The most striking finding: 31 of the 45 audited restaurants (69%) are rated 4.3 stars or higher. Missing online booking is not a sign of a bad restaurant — quite the opposite: these are often renowned places where the phone never stops ringing. That is exactly why the loss stays invisible: the room is full, the phone rings, and nobody counts the guests who never got through.

Methodology (and its limits)

We selected the 45 restaurants among independent, mid-sized businesses outside Prague's tourist core — where the typical Czech restaurant actually operates. It is not a representative sample of the whole market, and the nationwide share of restaurants without online booking may differ. For each business we verified publicly available information: their website, social profiles and Google listing. Data collected July 2026.

What to do about it

If your restaurant is among the 91%, fixing it is an afternoon's work, not an IT project. Stolio is a Czech reservation system at a flat 499 CZK per month with zero per-cover commission: online booking from your own website, a visual floor plan, and a mobile app that pushes every new reservation to your phone instantly. A simple website is included — so even restaurants with no website today can take online bookings this week. Try it free for 14 days.