Restaurant Reservation Tool: What It Must Do — and What It Should Cost

2026-08-08 · Guides

Saturday evening, just before seven. The second seating is being laid up, dockets are stacking in the kitchen — and the phone rings for the fourth time in ten minutes; the third time, nobody got to it. In the reservation book on the pass, a crossed-out entry nobody can decipher sits next to an unconfirmed booking request from this morning. This is where the search for a restaurant reservation tool really begins: not with digitalisation, but with two concrete losses — the call nobody could answer, and the table that got double-booked. Disclosure up front: we build a reservation system ourselves, Stolio. So we name competitors with their published prices, flag every figure we could not verify with the provider itself, and deal with Stolio exactly once, at the end, in a marked section.

What a reservation system actually does

At its core it replaces four things at once. The paper reservation book: the day's plan is digital, and every shift sees the same version. Availability: online booking takes reservations around the clock — including at eleven at night, when a guest on the sofa decides to eat with you on Friday. The floor plan: instead of "four people, 7 pm", the booking is tied to a specific table, plus the question of whether a second seating still fits on it later. And the guest memory: allergies, favourite tables, visit counts, notes on regulars — everything that otherwise lives in the head of the server who just handed in their notice. Most systems also run as a phone app, so you can see tonight's status from the wholesale market.

Three kinds of system — and what each really costs

Portals and marketplaces such as OpenTable or TheFork — and, until it closes, Quandoo — are two things at once: software for the restaurant, and a guest-facing directory with its own app and audience. They bring demand, and that is what they charge for: a fee per sourced guest who actually sits down, on top of a monthly subscription. For OpenTable in Germany, trade press reports around €1.50 per guest sourced from the OpenTable network on a subscription of roughly €99 a month (Pro around €199). OpenTable does not publish those euro figures on its own German pages, so treat the numbers as reported rather than confirmed. The model itself is stated by OpenTable: you pay only for guests actually seated, no-shows and cancellations are not charged, and bookings that reach you through your own website, by phone or as walk-ins are free. TheFork works differently again. Its own pricing page says bookings from TheFork, Tripadvisor and partner channels are billed as a percentage of your average spend per guest — the percentage is negotiated per contract, not published — so a restaurant with a high average cheque pays more for the same booking than a bistro does. TheFork does not publish a subscription price either; bookings from your own website, Instagram and Facebook carry no commission. The trade-off is straightforward, and for some restaurants it is a good one: you are buying reach. A new opening with no search visibility, a venue in a tourist district competing for guests who do not know the local names, or a restaurant trying to fill a dead Tuesday can get more out of a portal than out of any amount of software.

Standalone systems with a booking widget invert that. The reservation runs through your own website, your Google listing and your social profiles; the provider supplies the technology, not the guests. You pay a flat monthly fee per location and no commission per cover — which also means nobody is sending you guests. Published German list prices, net of VAT, as of August 2026: teburio €29 / €59 / €89 / €179 per location; DISH Professional Reservation from METRO at €54 on a three-month term, €49 on twelve months and €39 on 36 months, plus a one-off €69 setup fee; resmio €0 / €69.90 / €129.90; Gastronaut €0 / €89 / €149 / €249. Two well-known providers publish no monthly price at all: aleno states plainly that it works with individual quotes rather than packages or flat rates, and Zenchef — which now also covers Formitable, Resengo and Tablebooker — publishes its €0 per-cover commission and its payment-processing fees but no subscription figure. Quoting on request is a legitimate way to sell configurable software; it simply means you cannot compare those two on price before a sales call.

The third route is the reservation module inside your POS system. The attraction is real: one contract, one contact, table status and revenue in one place. Two caveats. Pricing is usually quoted on request as part of the POS deal rather than published, so you will have to ask; and the feature set varies by provider but is typically narrower than in a dedicated system — a graphical floor plan, waitlist or deposits may be missing or cost extra. If you are replacing the till anyway, price the module properly. If you are not, reservations end up as a footnote to a much bigger decision.

What a restaurant reservation tool should cost

For a single location the realistic range is €30 to €90 net per month, or €130 to €250 with a full feature set or high volume. Three things push the bill up. Tax: all the figures above are net, so add 19% in Germany, 20% in Austria, or your local rate. Contract length: the cheapest headline price usually assumes a long commitment — DISH's €39 applies from a 36-month term, and resmio's list prices assume a twelve-month minimum, with roughly €10 a month extra if you want to stay cancellable monthly. Feature tiers: at resmio the graphical floor plan, deposits and manager app are €19.90 add-ons each on the Premium plan (included in Ultimate), and at teburio the graphical floor plan starts in the €59 tier. "From €29" rarely survives contact with your actual requirements.

The arithmetic that decides the marketplace question is missing from almost every comparison page, so here it is. Take a 60-seat restaurant serving 900 covers a month, of which 300 arrive through a portal. On the reported OpenTable model that is €99 subscription plus 300 × €1.50, so about €549 a month, roughly €6,600 a year. A flat-fee own system handling the same 900 covers costs €29–89 a month, €350–1,070 a year. On cost alone the flat fee therefore wins from the first sourced guest — which is exactly the wrong way to read the number. The real question is how many of those 300 guests would never have found you otherwise. If a third of them are genuinely new and spend €40 each, the portal has bought €4,000 of monthly revenue for €450 of commission and paid for itself several times over. If they are regulars who have known you for years and simply keep booking through the app already on their phone, you are paying for demand you already own — every time, for as long as the habit lasts. Hence the architecture that works for most independents: your own system is the reservation book and the system of record; a marketplace, if you use one, is a paid acquisition channel judged on incremental guests, ideally pointed at the shifts you actually need to fill.

"Free" — where the catch sits

"Free reservation system" covers three completely different things. First, genuine free tiers with a cap: resmio Basic costs €0 with no time limit but includes only the essentials — the graphical floor plan, deposit and no-show charging and the manager app sit in the paid tiers or in €19.90 add-ons. Gastronaut's Freemium plan releases 200 guest placements a month, and the cap counts seated guests rather than bookings: at 2.5 people per table that is roughly 80 reservations, after which it is €0.12 per additional guest or a move up a tier. Second, trials marketed as free — 30 days at teburio, six weeks at Gastronaut. Third, "free" as a sign-up hook that promises unlimited reservations and stays quiet about what is gated. To be fair: for a country pub with 30 reservations a month, a free tier is a perfectly sensible choice. You just want to know in advance which trigger pushes you into the paid plan — guest numbers, the floor plan, or your own sender address on guest emails.

Checklist: 8 questions before you decide

Reserve with Google and your own website

Most guests booking a restaurant today do not start on your website. They start in your Google listing on the map, usually from a phone. If there is a reservation button, they book; if there isn't, they call — and if nobody picks up, they call the next place on the list. Two points rarely appear on provider websites: the button is available only through a Google-certified integration partner, so you cannot set it up on your own, and your business profile has to be verified first. Starting from no system at all, the order is: verify the profile, choose a provider and ask the certified-partner question, embed the widget, activate the Google connection. And don't write off the phone: in many restaurants a large share of reservations still arrives as a call. Good software does not abolish the phone — it makes sure a call lands in the same book as the online booking, in ten seconds.

Stolio: our own product — stated openly

As promised, at the end. Stolio combines three things in one product: your own restaurant website, an online menu with a QR code, and the reservation system with a visual floor plan and reservations assigned to individual tables. Billing is a flat monthly price from €19.90 (Plus €31.90, Pro with API €61.90), with no per-guest commission; see the pricing page, or start a 14-day free trial with no credit card. Included are a guest database that belongs to your restaurant and is exportable at any time, automatic confirmation and reminder emails to your guests, the Reserve with Google integration, an installable mobile app (PWA) with push notifications on Plus and above, and the Syrve POS integration on Pro with API. We help with migration and setup free of charge. What you should know beforehand: the dashboard interface is available in Czech and English, not German; the guest-facing booking flow and the guest emails are English and Czech; and checkout currently bills in Czech koruna. For questions, write to info@stolio.cz — inquiries written in German are answered in German.

Whatever you decide: before you sign, run your own guest numbers against the commission, trigger the data export once during the trial as a test — and choose the system you could walk away from without loss if you had to. That is the one criterion that still holds years later.