It is Saturday, a quarter to nine. Table 6 was booked for four at eight. You have held it for forty-five minutes, turned away two couples at the door, and your server keeps glancing at the empty chairs. At nine you give up and lay the table for whoever walks in next. Most of the evening is gone, and nobody will pay for that table.
If you run a small restaurant, you know this evening. You may also know the other half of the story: you have never done much about it. This article is about why, and about what you can do without buying anything.
Common enough that you are not imagining it. In 2025 DEHOGA NRW, the hotel and restaurant association of North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany, surveyed 250 restaurant and hotel operators. 87% had personally experienced a no-show. Among those affected, about 40% estimated that no-shows cost them more than 5% of their annual turnover. In 2022 the same association found that about three quarters of 270 restaurateurs said no-shows were becoming more frequent.
Other countries report the same trouble, with different numbers. In Italy, a study by Incrementoo, an Italian digital and hospitality observatory, of 212,000 bookings in a selected sample of 300 restaurants, January to August 2025, found an average no-show rate of 12.8%. In the UK, a booking software company surveyed 208 venues in early 2023: one booking in twenty, about 5%, did not turn up, and a venue lost on average £1,325 over two months.
Why do the figures differ so much? Because it depends on who counts and which restaurants they count. A software company sees its own customers, an association reports what its members tell it, and a survey of owners measures impressions. One software company published figures for 2,417 of its client restaurants and found only 2.33% on average. Public numbers for Europe run from about 1% to about 13%. None of them is yours. They agree on one thing: the loss is real and it is not small.
Here is the odd part. In the 2025 survey, only about 10% of restaurateurs asked for a prepayment or a card number. Another 3% had stopped taking bookings altogether. In 2022 the picture was similar: a no-show fee was used by 11.1%, prepayment by 7.1% and a card kept on file by 4.0%.
So nearly everyone suffers the problem, and nearly everyone carries on without a safeguard. That is not laziness. Each of the usual remedies has a real cost, and owners weigh it correctly.
Do nothing, and absorb it. Free, and the cost is invisible because it is spread over many evenings. The empty table does not appear in any report. This is the default for good reason, but see the calculation below before you decide it is cheap.
Phone the guest to confirm. It works, and it is the oldest remedy. The cost is your time, in the hours when you have least of it, and it does nothing about the guest who confirms and still does not come.
Ask for a prepayment or deposit. The strongest signal: a guest who has paid will come or cancel. The cost is on the other side of the booking. A guest comparing two restaurants may simply book the one that asks for nothing. Prepayment also means you hold money you may have to give back, and you must explain your refund rules to every guest.
Keep a card on file, and charge a fee only for a no-show. The guest pays nothing at booking. Those who come pay nothing extra, and those who do not come, or cancel too late, pay the fee you set. This puts the least burden on honest guests. Does it work? Two software companies have published figures from their own clients. The Italian one found that restaurants taking a deposit or a card pre-authorisation had 5.4% no-shows, against 12.8% on average. The other, an international booking software company, found 0.80% no-shows on bookings that required a guarantee and 2.47% on those that did not. Treat both with care: these are client samples, not trials, and the second company itself admits that this is only a correlation, not a measured effect, because restaurants that ask for a guarantee already differ from the others.
The cost, in practice, has often been the tool: public price lists show the protection sold as a paid extra, as a separate deposit module or as card fees that depend on the plan. The protection costs something before it has saved you anything.
Stop taking bookings. 3% of the surveyed restaurateurs have done this. It removes the problem, along with the guests who like to plan ahead.
Take a small restaurant with €200,000 of annual turnover. Each percentage point of no-shows is worth about 1% of the turnover that comes from booked guests. Using the rates above (5% from the UK, 12.8% from the Italian study):
| No-show rate | All turnover comes from booked guests | Half comes from booked guests |
|---|---|---|
| 5% | €10,000 a year | €5,000 a year |
| 12.8% | €25,600 a year | €12,800 a year |
This is a rough calculation: turnover multiplied by a percentage. In reality an empty table is sometimes filled by a walk-in, and you save part of the food you did not prepare, so the true loss may be lower. Swap in your own figures. For comparison, DEHOGA's finding that about 40% of affected restaurants lose more than 5% of turnover means, for a €200,000 restaurant, more than €10,000 a year.
You do not need our statistics, or anyone else's. You need your own. Take a month and do this:
Written as a formula: empty seats per evening × average spend per guest × trading evenings.
Now compare the result with the cost of the remedies above. If the first number is larger than the second, you have your answer, based on your restaurant, not on a survey from another region.
Most resistance comes from surprise, not from the rule itself. A few habits help whichever remedy you choose.
Say it at the moment of booking, in one sentence: what you ask for, when it applies and what happens if plans change. "We keep a card on file for parties of six or more. Nothing is charged if you cancel by 6 p.m. the day before" is clear, short and fair.
Give a deadline you will actually keep. A rule you enforce for strangers and waive for regulars teaches everyone that it is negotiable.
Repeat it in the confirmation and the reminder, because guests book on a phone and forget what they read.
Each remedy above puts a cost on someone: you, your guest or your bank account. The card guarantee puts the cost on the one situation where it is fair, the no-show. The guest who comes pays what they would have paid anyway. There is no money to hold, no refund to process and no prepayment to explain.
It is not free of drawbacks. Some guests do not like giving a card number, and you must state the fee and the cancellation deadline clearly. When card details are involved, the payment provider's own charges apply. These are the reasons many owners hesitate. They are real, and they are why the tool and its price matter.
Bientenu is booking software for small restaurants, and it does this one thing. The card guarantee is part of it: guests put a card on file; those who come on time pay nothing, and you set the fee for those who do not. Automatic reminders go out before the booking. Guests can cancel their booking themselves by clicking a link. If a table frees up, guests on the online waiting list are offered it, automatically or by you, as you choose.
Restaurants that take a deposit or a card guarantee report fewer no-shows: in the Italian report, 5.4% against 12.8% on average. That is a correlation, not proof that the guarantee caused it. As an illustration only: on the €200,000 restaurant above, if all turnover came from bookings, 12.8% would be about €25,600 a year and 5.4% about €10,800.
But what does it cost? The next article works that out.
Want to see how it works? See the demo or try it with your restaurant.
