Customer not Present

The problem of restaurant no-shows

Consider this. You’re lucky enough to score tickets to a hot West-End play, or a new cinema release. Nine times out of ten, it’ll be an online transaction, so at that at the moment of booking you’re not actually putting your hand into your pocket. Nevertheless, the ping on your phone alerting you to the money departing your account means that when the date of your event rolls around you’ll think twice about not showing up. If a real emergency means you can’t attend, you can try and ring the theatre and hope that a sympathetic human answers, but most people don’t bother. The likelihood of getting to talk to an actual person is slim, while the Ts and Cs on the website will have highlighted that tickets are non-refundable.

Contrast this with the cavalier attitude many diners have towards reneging on a restaurant booking. Even before bots were a thing, we at Ida had a sneaky suspicion that people were making multiple reservations in a scenario that went something like this. A loose plan is hatched among a group of friends to meet up on a Friday or Saturday night. Different venues and cuisines are mooted amongst the gang, not all of whom can even guarantee they will be be free. A Whatsapp group is created, and one person is tasked with organising the dinner. The problem is that no-one can make up their mind where they want to eat, let alone whether they will even be attending. So the admin of the group covers all bases by making speculative bookings at a variety of establishments.

In the best case scenario, that person remembers to cancel the reservations which are no longer needed, while also informing the chosen venue of final numbers. The worst case scenario is that it slips their mind, and a clutch of restaurateurs all over town start phoning the number attached to the booking (assuming that it isn’t fake,) in the forlorn hope that the group might still be on its way. Even if the contact details aren’t fake, and someone actually picks up and apologises for forgetting to cancel, the chances at that point of a walk-in are slim so the restaurant invariably loses out.

During the recession, when Ida was really struggling, a polite-sounding gentleman rang one night to say that he wanted to offer a slap-up dinner to his son and his wife. Assuming that the couple ordered the works - multiple courses accompanied by the most expensive wine on the menu - what might the cost of that be? I came up with the figure of £80, which back in 2010 was a lot for a half-empty restaurant on Kilburn Lane, but the man wasn’t having it. In the end, we added on steaks, cocktails, plus a bottle of prosecco, digestivi and coffee, and managed to bump it up to £120 which still seemed like a small fortune. The man paid by card over the phone, and told us that the couple would be arriving by 830. At 845, he called back and said that unfortunately there had been an emergency, and his son and his wife had had to leave for the airport. I was disappointed, but I agreed to refund him the £120. As he read me back his card number, I entered the transaction into our terminal as CNP, i.e “customer not present” . It was only the next day that we realised we had been scammed; we had transferred the money onto a different card, effectively paying him out of our own meagre takings.

There’s no doubt that Covid made restaurateurs toughen up. Having (just about) survived two years of stop-start lockdowns, staff losses and rent hikes, no-shows were the final straw. It wasn’t just loss of earnings; the insult cut deeper than that. A laid table awaiting a customer is a beautiful sight: starched cloth, a pool of candlelight illuminating polished cutlery, flowers, a folded napkin. There is a tangible expectation of something special about to happen as you wait for a party to arrive; if you are a restaurateur who cares about your restaurant, you really do see diners as guests. It’s a horrible feeling when a booking doesn’t show up; that pretty table now looks foolish and try-hard, while behind the pass, chefs are gloomily surveying the food they have prepared in vain.

Photo: Alessia Filippetti

We had always been resistant to the idea of charging no-show fees, but in the end I’m glad we did. The mere act of entering card details on to a website appears to concentrate people’s mind marvellously, even though a £15 per person penalty doesn’t come close to mitigating what a restaurant really loses for each absent diner.

The shift in behaviour that no-show fees engenders reminds me of when the 5p carrier bag levy was introduced in 2015. For years, environmentalists had been urging us to reuse our wrinkly old carrier bags from home, but most people found it difficult to resist the lure of brand-new ones for each shop. Astonishingly, since that modest 5p charge was introduced, GOV.UK reports that “usage at the main retailers – Asda, Marks and Spencer, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, The Co-operative Group, Tesco and Waitrose – has dropped by more than 98%. The average person in England now buys just two single-use carrier bags a year from these businesses, compared with around 140 in 2014 before the charge was introduced.”

At Ida, we often override the no-show fee; we are not monsters. If someone rings or emails at the last minute, saying that they are sick or their partner or their child is sick, or that trains have been cancelled, or that there has been a death in the family, of course we are not going to take money from them. Not only that, but if we get a sheepish call saying that a reservation has slipped a customer’s mind, we won’t charge them if we manage to replace their table with a last-minute walk-in or someone from the waiting list.

Finally, unlike places like Dorian in Notting Hill, we don’t have a secret booking system where the starriest guests will be the first to know about a free table via a private WhatsApp group. We’d be lying if we said we didn’t have our favourite customers; of course we do, but they are not the ones you’d expect. People don’t have our personal contact details because they are big spenders or they have famous acquaintances. The ones who will always get a table in the end are the ones who show up, even if it’s just once a year on their birthday, the ones who address their servers by their names, and from whom we would never dream of taking card details. We don’t need to.

This blossom tree appeared one spring outside Ida. It has just flowered again!