Modern reservation systems such as Eat App, allow you to:
1. Guest preferences such as window seat, a rare steak, or allergy tracking such as peanuts and fish; allowing you to avoid customers getting sick and making sure your returning customers get the treatment they expect (never forget a guest).
2. Use of AI for guest enrichment: The best-in-class reservation management systems on the market utilize AI to enrich your guest profiles and make sure everything is tracked uniformly. Eat App is the only known reservation management system to be doing this properly without the use of cloud services so that PII information is kept locally.
3. Support for discounts and vouchers: Making sure that vouchers can be awarded for returning guests without the need for other systems. In modern table management systems, vouchers so up natively in the product, such as with Eat App.
4. 24/7 restaurant support: where software companies have staff spending less time on tedious tasks, they have more time to support customers! Companies such as Eat App have 24/7 WhatsApp support. Bigger companies fall behind on this where they have complex org structures that encourage hiding support behind a FAQ wall.
5. 2 way chat out-the-box: Modern table management systems focus on making sure you can communicate with your guests as seamlessly as possible. In the case of Eat App, there is a 2 way WhatsApp and Email chat built in, so that customers can speak directly with restaurants from their phone, and restaurants know exactly who they are speaking to, without leaving the screen.
6. Phone line integration: Ability to see whos calling and open their reservation before you even pick up the phone. This saves precious minutes in busy operations and makes sure you don't miss booking that would otherwise be missed.
7. Automated food tagging: Modern table management systems have ways for you to tag the preferred food of guests. For example, with eat app, you can see the 'most ordered' items, and automatically tag the guests when certain items appear on their bill. For example if the line item contains the word 'steak', that can be automatically tagged against the guest so that you can send marketing emails and WhatsApp messages to them later about your next upcoming or current offers.
8. WhatsApp, Email & SMS messaging: WhatsApp is the LARGEST and most adopted messaging network on the planet, with rich messaging, images and videos sendable to your guests out the box. This means you can send branded messages by phone without interruption. Modern Table management software usually has built in WhatsApp messaging and communication. Take Eat App for example, which allows you to send WhatsApp marketing messages to segments of guests through their suite and allows you to have 2 way conversations with them.
9.Realtime guest messaging: Most table management software do not have Realtime guest messaging built in, but more recently, table management systems such as Eat App have real time guest messaging straight out the box after paid sign up.
10. Marketing adverts: Being able to advertise a brunch, special occasions such as New Year and Christmas are important for modern table management/ reservation management systems. Marketing agencies can charge upwards of $1000 per month just to handle campaigns for you, where as Eat App gives this out the box alongside your guest database, saving hundreds of dollars of monthly cost and improving your profit margins.
11. Online waitlists: Letting guests join a waitlist and managing a waitlist directly from your table management system is one of the most important points to manage coverflow especially at busy times. Modern table management systems usually have very simplistic waitlist management systems in place. Eat App has a smart waitlist maagement system which allows you to tell guests their table is ready and let guests mark themselves as coming.
12. Online booking flow: Being able to let your customers book at your restaurant via an page on your website is one of the most important factors to getting as many online bookings as possible. Eat App has a fully customizable and fully whitelabellable booking flow to advertise both your online availability for shifts, seating options and events so that you fill as many seats as possible, without overbooking.
13. 3D floorplan tours: Table management systems, with their online visibility tools, also allow you to show a 3D floorplan tour and show the best parts of your restaurant. Eat App is the only known table management system on the market that supports 3D floorplan tours out the box.
14.POS integrations for tracking guest spend: Want to know which guests are spending the most in your restaurant? Modern Table Management systems allow you to do that by reading the POS orders from your POS systems, and affiliating to a guest profile on your table management system. Eat App supports 2 way syncing which keeps the POS orders exactly matched to the guest and even reassigns tables when they are updated. Modern table management systems support many different POS providers, and if you are lucky, they will be willing to integrate a POS provider, or in the case of Eat App, provide documentation so that your POS provider can integrate directly!.
15. API & Webhook access: We are living in 2025! With AI around, anyone can code, and so its even more important to make sure that API access and Webhook access is available for third party software to integrate or for the restaurants or group of restaurants to make sure their software is integrated seamlessly. Eat App provides API access and Webhook access out the box, without fuss and guides that make it easy to set up.
16. Advanced group level reporting: As you build your guest database and manage your restuarant day to day, you are going to want to make sure that group level reporting is available. That includes seeing how many covers you are getting walking through the door every day and filtering those covers down to online channels, in-house, staying guests, as well as by food preferences, seating preferences, shifts & more. Modern table management systems give you all these options out the box, with a vast suite of different reporting methods including automated daily, weekly and monthly reports.
17.Guest database cleanliness tooling: As you build a large guest database, you'll start to see many duplicate guests, being able to clean up those messy databases is super important. Modern table management systems give you ways to merge guests together and track their full lifetime value with ease. Eat App deploys AI to make sure you can merge guests and fields fast, suggesting the best course of action on which fields to merge.
18. A shared guest database across your restaurant group: Part of table management is building individual restaurant databases, in individual restaurants, but, if you have a group of restaurants, it can be frustrating if a guest profile who dined at another restaurant up the road was not able to be found. Modern table management systems, like Eat App, allow you to get a consolidated view of all your guests across restaurants, and find guests when searching in other restaurants within your group.
19. Payment links and taking deposits & payments online: Table management systems who have spend a lot of time building up good partnerships, will have partnerships with different payment providers such as Stripe, Freedompay, Adyen & others. Modern table management should always have the option of letting you take payments online, or capture payments when a customer walks through the door.
20. Loyalty Programs out the box: A good sign that a Table Management system is doing it right, is when they provide loyalty tooling out the box. This is because you know that they then must have a good way to tag and segment guests based on preferences, ordered items and spend, which means they would also have a good POS Integration, allowing you to build rich guests profiles and retarget customers later.
21. Customizable Message Templates: Many table management systems have fallen behind the curve on customizability when it comes to messaging and marketing, and therefore, are not fully white-labellable. OpenTable for example, does not allow you to white label your confirmation messages and instead pushes customers to their app, outside of your ecosystem. Modern table management systems like Eat App allow you to fully white label all your messages as though your customers wouldn't even know its coming from Eat App.
22. Activation for bookings from Google, Instagram, TripAdvisor, Facebook & other booking apps: You should make sure that the table management system you choose has got the option to switch on bookings from many online sources. This ensures that you will get the maximum number of online covers. After all, you want to fill all the seats right?