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Guest engagement

See how often guests book, who your regulars are, whether they turn up, and each guest's booking history.

Guest engagement is the first page you see when you open Bookings. It shows how your guests book with you, rather than what they spend — a quick read on whether the booking page you've built is bringing people back.

The screens you use during service don't wait in the menu for you: Floor map, Diary, New booking and — if the waitlist is switched on for you — Walk-ins sit as tiles across the top of this page. See Bookings — start here for what each one does.

Until your venue has taken its first booking, Bookings opens on Get started with bookings instead — there is nothing for this page to show yet. It hands over here the first time a guest books, and stays here from then on.

Because it's the section's front page rather than one of its screens, no menu item is highlighted when you arrive — Bookings itself is. Click any row to go to that screen and it highlights as usual.

Why the top of this page says "Bookings"

If your venue is on Bookings Pro, this page is what Bookings opens on. So the title at the top of the screen says Bookings: it's your Bookings home, with the entry tiles sitting above the sections below.

You can still come here deliberately from Guest engagement in the menu — it's the same page, and the sections below all name themselves.

What's on the page

Every figure on this page is shown as a chart or a bar as well as a number, so you can read a proportion at a glance instead of doing the division yourself.

  • Returning vs first-time — the split between guests booking with you for the first time and guests who have booked before, over the last 90 days. It answers whether you're building regulars or filling the room with strangers each week.
  • Your most frequent guests — who has booked most often, and the date they last came in. A guest who has booked but never made it in yet says so in words rather than showing a date.
  • A guest's booking history — pick one of your most frequent guests and see every booking they've made: when, how many covers, and how it ended.
  • Reliability — for each of your most frequent guests, how many bookings they kept, cancelled and no-showed. A guest who has booked but whose bookings haven't happened yet says so in words, rather than showing three noughts beside their name.

How the three reliability numbers are counted

  • Kept — they turned up. It counts every visit they finished, not just tonight's table.
  • Cancelled — the booking was cancelled, by them or by you. We don't separate the two.
  • No-showed — they booked and never turned up.

A booking in the future counts in none of the three. Nobody has kept or broken a booking that hasn't happened yet.

Note

The diary can show a different count for the same guest. The two screens count over different sets of bookings, in three ways:

  • Who counts as the same person. This page treats a guest as the same person only when the name, email and phone all match. The diary matches on one of those at a time.
  • Bookings with no name. This page leaves them out. The diary counts them.
  • How far back it reads. The diary reads at most 500 bookings for one guest. This page has no limit, so for a guest with a very long history the diary can show fewer.

Both are counting real bookings — they disagree about which bookings belong to the same person. We haven't merged the two yet, so if the numbers differ, neither is broken.

Still on the way

  • How they book — the party size, days and times a guest usually goes for.
  • How late a cancellation came isn't shown yet either, only that it was cancelled.

That area shows "Not showing yet" until it's built.

A quick way to tell the two apart. Next to the title at the top of the page there's a small badge. Green and reading Live means the page is reading your booking data normally — including on a quiet week, when the honest answer is zero. If it turns red and reads Not live, we couldn't read your data just now and every section below will be blank at once. That's temporary — try again shortly, and nothing on the screen in that state is a figure about your guests.

Good to know

  • A guest is counted again as "first-time" if their details were entered differently between bookings (for example, a phone number on one booking and not the next). We're aware of this and it errs on the side of counting more first-timers, never fewer regulars.
  • Cancelled bookings and checkouts that were never completed don't count towards the guest counts, the returning split or "most frequent". A no-show still counts as a booking made. Cancellations do appear in the Reliability area — that's the one place they're counted.
  • A guest whose bookings were all cancelled doesn't appear on this page at all, so their cancellations aren't counted anywhere here. We know; whether they should count as a guest is a decision still to be made.

What won't appear here

Spend, loyalty points and marketing consent aren't part of this page. Those belong to the customer record under CRM, and they stay there — this page is about booking behaviour. To check whether you're allowed to email a guest, open their customer record: see View a customer's profile and history.

Don't see it?

It needs Bookings Pro. Ask your account manager if you'd like it switched on.

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