There are lots of tricks you can do with your Schedule Tool to make it more effective. This blog posts focuses on table turning by configuring your schedule so that the available times are staggered and your traffic comes in waves. This helps you move traffic through super busy nights in a timely fashion.
Staggered Schedule
Using Your Regular Schedule
The idea behind table turning is to change your schedule during restaurant week (works great on Valentines, Mother’s Day, and New Year’s Eve too!) so that you only accept reservations every 30 or 45 minutes and boost capacity during those times to accommodate the higher volume. How much time to make available between availability will vary based on long it takes your restaurant to get from seating a customer to delivering the man course. The idea being that if you get a waive of tables at 5pm, how long will it take the kitchen to be ready for the next waive of entrees? Try to set your schedule so that the waves come in the appropriate periods to help the kitchen manage the flow. From a server perspective, it will help spread out their seating and help minimize getting sat four tables at once which can lead to bad service regardless how well they manage “the weeds”. Using your schedule to bring traffic in waves can help both the kitchen and the front of the house do a better job which leads to happier customers and more word of mouth advertising. Depending on your traffic patterns, you may wish to use this strategy on weekend nights as well. View the full image above.
Schedule Override Tool
Using your Schedule Override
You can do this with your regular schedule or your Schedule over-ride (available from your Reservation Screen, see image to the right). If you set it up in your regular schedule it will stay that way from week to week, so make sure you change it back after the high traffic period. If its just a holiday, definitely use your Schedule Over ride tool so it’s just for that date in question. It may be wise to simply configure all your restaurant week days using the Schedule Over-ride so that you don’t have switch things back to normal later.
