Tapping strategies long-used in the travel industry, SevenRooms debuts a new product that aims to help restaurants generate more sales.
The hospitality guest experience and retention platform launched Revenue Management, a tool that uses data science to recommend how to optimize and increase table utilization.
Similar to airline or hotel booking, where prices sometimes change depending on when you search or how one might see varying prices for different room types, Revenue Management configures ways to fill restaurant seats more often and as profitably as possible.
Joel Montaniel, SevenRooms CEO, co-founder
“These [travel] industries have been doing revenue management for quite some time, and what we recognize is restaurants also have a revenue management opportunity because they have a set number of seats, and depending on who and how often they fill those seats, will determine the amount of revenue they can make in a night,” said Joel Montaniel SevenRooms CEO and co-founder.
The management tool tracks data, including cover counts and guest spend to provide ready-to-use suggestions for operators that can be automatically applied across a restaurant’s system.
Sample actions include recommendations on party size. For example, if the tool tracks an uptick of searches for parties of six on a Friday night, it will recommend opening up more table availability for those party sizes.
It also provides suggestions on when to institute cancellation policies such as a credit card policy to decrease last-minute cancellations, as well as dining duration configurations, floor plan adjustments and more.
Revenue Management also gives insight into how much demand was missed across booking channels by summarizing data on recent reservation attempts. This will help operators better manage these channels and optimize their books to offer more reservations across their most profitable channels—according to the company.
“That’s the approach we’re taking…how do we GPS the restaurant to the right destination,” said Montaniel. “Informing them based on all the data we have, what they should be doing to maximize the amount of revenue they can make and maximize the number of guests they can service.”
In addition to its latest product launch, SevenRooms offers a full suite of products, including waitlist, online ordering, mobile order & pay, review aggregation, email marketing and marketing automation. Founded in 2011, the company works in dining, hotel F&B, nightlife and entertainment clients globally, including Marriot International, MGM Resorts International, Wynn Resorts, Hard Rock Hotels & Resorts, Union Square Hospitality Group and more.
