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Technology Buying Guide 2025: booking tools to manage table plans and hotel packages
Automate your reservations and let your software take the strain of complex bookings
Whether you run a hotel or a restaurant, booking tables, spa sessions or party packages can be a complicated and time-consuming business, especially when cancellations and last-minute requests are thrown into the mix. The best booking tools on the market not only take care of that, but throw in marketing expertise too, translating the mass of data from reservations and requests into an easy to interpret set of figures, enabling operators to see where demand lies, or even taking the problem out of your hands altogether, automating the process and freeing up staff for when real human contact matters.
Read on for a selection of the best booking tools on the market.
Create an extra sitting with Zonal
What is it? Zonal Bookings is a centralised platform for restaurant reservations. Restaurants pay a monthly fee with no commission for each booking made through the system.
What does it do? It provides real-time table availability for events and party bookings, as well as managing guest communication, pre-orders, deposits and table management. Zonal Bookings integrates into the wider Zonal ecosystem, sharing data with electronic point of sale (EPoS) systems, loyalty programmes, pre-ordering systems and customer relationship management. This ensures real-time updates across all parts, improving efficiency and reducing the risk of manual errors.
What the industry says Adam Pearce, co-founder of seafood restaurant and steakhouse Butcher & Catch in Sheffield, says: “Through Zonal analytics we have been able to see data for busy times, such as Friday and Saturday nights, and identify when most customers are requesting a table. By tweaking available booking times we are now able to fit in an extra sitting, significantly increasing yield and revenue.”
Contact
Call 0800 131 3400
Visit www.zonal.co.uk/products/bookings/
Tabology matches bookings with tills on busy nights
What is it? Tabology’s table booking system is built into a restaurant’s EPoS, meaning there is no need for a second system. Support staff can help customers through the onboarding process, with support hours running from 8am to midnight, 365 days per year, via chat, phone and email.
What does it do? Staff can view bookings directly on an EPoS as a list, or overlaid onto a table plan alongside guest arrival and departure times. Booking alerts flash up directly on the EPoS, enabling service staff to accept last-minute enquiries and free up tables if there are cancellations. Guest purchasing history is stored and can be married with Tabology loyalty features, enabling venues to create targeted marketing campaigns and offers.
What the industry says Using one system to manage multiple areas of the business means cocktail and music bar Mojo has been able to maximise covers from bookings and set up pre-orders across its six branches in the Midlands and Yorkshire. Bar manager PJ Williams says: “We’ve now got a booking system integrated in real-time with our till system, which is what we were hoping for.”
Contact
Email sales@tabology.com
Access Collins partners with DesignMyNight for table management
What is it? Access Collins is a restaurant reservation solution from Access Hospitality that organises and manages enquiries for group bookings, party bookings and private dining. The system costs from £135 per month per site.
What does it do? It manages reservation emails via a single central system and uses a space-optimisation algorithm to organise table management. Larger group bookings can be sent online menus and allergen tools to complete to arrange pre-orders with a restaurant.
Access Collins integrates with DesignMyNight, which has 3.9 million monthly unique visitors, 13 million monthly page views and 450,000 newsletter subscribers. Access Collins customers can benefit from marketing expertise at DesignMyNight, as well as its ticketing and reservation capabilities.
What the industry says Access Collins is used by more than 8,000 restaurants, bars, pubs and clubs, including Big Table, Nightjar, Fuller’s, Brewdog, Young’s and the Alchemist. A spokesperson at nine-location cocktail chain Dirty Martini says: “This technology has revolutionised how we manage all bookings and enquiries. Bookings are up and conversion rates are up across the business.”
Contact
Visit www.theaccessgroup.com/en-gb/hospitality/software/booking-reservations/
Take the pressure off reception staff with Journey
What is it? Journey is an ecommerce platform designed for hotels, spas and resorts. It offers two plans: a premium licence, which is a one-time purchase that unlocks all paid features, or a monthly, annual or lifetime subscription service.
What does it do? Journey’s ecommerce is headless, which means it can be tailored to a business’s individual needs. It can enhance a hotel’s online presence and allow guests to book rooms, experiences and services all in one system. For example, Journey’s golf module integrates tee sheet management, membership management, retail inventory, sales and online tee time bookings into one system.
What the industry says Clients include Beaverbrook, PoB Hotels, the Landmark, London, Chewton Glen, Luxury Family Hotels and Corinthia Hotels. Rafi Bejerano, director of AB Hotels, says: “The Journey team was a pleasure to work with. The platform takes pressure away from phones at the hotel and within minutes of going live we had bookings being made.”
Contact
Visit journey.travel
Net Affinity taps into Google advertising expertise
What is it? Net Affinity is a booking engine optimised for mobile with cloud infrastructure and API-driven architecture, allowing seamless integration with existing systems. It also offers products and services aimed at independent hotels, including digital marketing.
What does it do? As a Google premier partner, Net Affinity is ranked among the top 3% of digital marketing agencies. Premier partners build Google Ads campaigns (a way of moving your business up the list in a search result) that convert at a high rate, meaning more money for businesses. The Net Affinity team comprises hoteliers, marketers, designers and developers who have worked with independent hotels. Among Net Affinity clients, 61% of revenue comes via mobile channels.
What the industry says The family-run Mespil hotel in Dublin has achieved a 42% increase in revenue compared to 2019 using Net Affinity’s booking engine. Dukes hotel in London is another customer.
Contact
Visit www.netaffinity.com
A tailored hotel booking with Profitroom
What is it? Profitroom’s Booking Engine 360 is designed to increase direct hotel bookings and improve guest experiences.
What does it do? Hotels can tailor the booking process to their brand and include customised packages and offers. The platform is optimised for mobile and includes a feature to recover lost bookings by reminding guests of incomplete reservations. The booking engine complies with the General Data Protection Regulation, the Protection of Personal Information Act 2013, and PCI-DSS Level 1 certification (the highest level of compliance for merchants that process more than six million credit or debit card transactions annually), ensuring guest data is secure. The engine also offers upsell options at the point of sale, such as room upgrades and special packages.
What the industry says Glasgow Grosvenor hotel increased its online booking engine revenue by 124%, room nights booked by 104% and average daily rate by 10% in one year using the Profitroom Booking Engine 360 and marketing automation.
Visit www.profitroom.com/solutions/booking-engine
The Technology Buyer’s Guide 2025
Food safety Tracking and recording software that takes the pain out of food safety legislation compliance
EPoS Why your electronic point of sale is at the centre of your profitability
Property management Control everything from one point: from room bookings to spa days
Guestline – more than a PMS How to tackle ’zombie’ hotel tasks
Workforce management Organise shift, take care of HR and look after your staff
Revenue management Software to forecast guest room booking and uplift revenue
Main photo: Anton Vierietin/Shutterstock
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