Nearly Seven in Ten Online Guests Choose Where to Sit: What 563 Bookings Show

2026-10-16 · Data

Give guests a choice of where to sit and most of them use it. We looked at every online booking made from 18 July to 16 October 2026 at the three restaurants using Stolio that offer guests at least two seating areas and took at least 30 online bookings in that time: 563 bookings in all. In 386 of them, 68.6%, the guest picked an area (the main room, the terrace, a table by the bar) instead of leaving the choice open.

It is not one restaurant pulling the average up. The two restaurants with the most online bookings sit at 73.6% and 67.4%; the smallest, with 39, at 43.6%. Taking out the 75 bookings that were later cancelled changes nothing: 335 of the remaining 488 named an area, again 68.6%.

The answers move with the season, a good sign they are not just random taps. Of the bookings that named an area for a visit in August, 27.8% asked for the terrace or outdoors. For September visits it was 14.5%, for October 4.7%. Both restaurants with a terrace were still offering it on the booking page in October; guests simply chose it far less often. Many guests seem to be thinking about where they will actually be comfortable.

Not every tap is a strong preference, though. A fourth restaurant offered its guests exactly one area to choose from, and 187 of its 345 online bookings, 54.2%, "chose" it anyway. A choice of one is no choice, so that restaurant is left out of every figure in this article. But it tells you that some guests will tap whatever is put in front of them. Read the 68.6% as "most guests will tell you where they would like to sit if you ask", not as "seven in ten care deeply".

When the restaurant assigned a table, it was usually in the area the guest chose. At the two restaurants without a POS connection, the restaurant assigned a table after the booking came in for 110 of the bookings with an area, and 94 of those, 85.5%, got a table in the area the guest had asked for. The other 16 got a table in a different area. Why, the data cannot tell us; the simplest explanation is that the chosen area was full. (At the third restaurant, which is connected to the Syrve POS, guests pick their table while booking, from the area they chose, so all 17 matched by design. We leave them out of this figure.)

For two thirds of the wishes, no table was ever recorded. 259 of the 386, 67.1%, never had a table recorded in Stolio, all of them at the two restaurants without a POS connection. Those guests may well have sat exactly where they asked; the restaurant simply did not note the table. It does mean that for most requests, keeping the wish depended on someone reading the note rather than on a table set aside in the system beforehand.

The limits, plainly. Three restaurants is a small sample, and the two with the most bookings account for 524 of the 563, 93.1%. These are restaurants that use Stolio, not a sample of restaurants in the Czech Republic or anywhere else, and Stolio's own demo and test accounts are excluded. The window runs from late summer into early autumn, with no winter or spring in it, and the October figures cover only visits booked by 16 October. We did not shuffle the order in which areas appear on the booking page, so some guests may simply have tapped the first one listed. And all three restaurants' booking pages moved to Stolio's new layout on 5 October. Before that, 70.8% of bookings named an area (318 of 449); after it, 59.6% (68 of 114). The second period is short and falls entirely in October, when terrace requests had all but disappeared, so we cannot separate the effect of the new page from the effect of the season.

Name your areas the way a guest would. Terrace, main room, by the window, bar. Not "Section 1", and not a single area that every table belongs to, which only recreates the one-area page from above. Use the language most of your online guests read: the names appear on the booking page exactly as you type them.

Put the wish where the host looks. The 85.5% suggests that when staff assign a table, they usually keep the wish. The likely weak spot is the booking that never gets a table in advance and is decided at the door on a full evening. Whatever your host works from (a floor plan, a list, a printout), the area should sit right next to the guest's name.

Treat it as a wish, not a promise. A guest who asked for the terrace and is told at the door, with an apology, that it is full tonight is fine. A guest who finds out by being walked past an empty terrace is not.

How it works in Stolio. In Stolio you put each table in a section on the Floor Plan: terrace, main room, bar. Guests see those sections as areas on your booking page, which they can use in Czech, English, German or Italian (the area names appear exactly as you type them). They pick one or leave the choice open, and the choice arrives with the reservation: it appears in the reservation's note, both in the reservation list and on the Floor Plan. If you switch on "Auto-assign table" in Settings, each online booking gets the smallest free table that fits the party, in the guest's chosen area if one is free there, otherwise in another area. Without it, online bookings arrive without a table and you assign one when you seat the guest; restaurants connected to the Syrve POS can let guests pick their own table instead. Sections, the Floor Plan and the guest's choice are part of every plan, including Standard (see pricing).

Want your own number? Take your last 50 online bookings and count how many named an area. If your booking page does not ask, the answer is zero, and that is worth knowing too. We publish this kind of thing because we have the data and would rather write down what it actually says.