Take bookings on your own website and Instagram

Most restaurants take bookings in at least three places: the phone, Instagram DMs, and whatever is on their website. The diary is one of those, and the other two are somebody remembering to write things down.

That is where double-bookings come from, and it is why Saturday at eight is either overbooked or has a table nobody knew was free.

Who can add a booking form to their website?

Any venue that takes bookings and has a presence somewhere other than Mosey, which is essentially all of them. It is most useful if you are currently taking bookings through Instagram messages, because that is the version that costs the most staff time and loses the most bookings.

How to add a booking form to your website

A small snippet of code goes wherever you want the form to appear. It works on Wix, Squarespace, WordPress and anything else that lets you paste an embed, and it does not need anybody technical.

What appears is a booking form that knows your actual availability: your opening hours, your services, your tables, and anything you have closed. A customer picks a date and a time from what is genuinely available, and the booking lands in the same diary as everything else.

The important part is that last clause. It is not a form that emails you. It is the same diary.

Instagram, and the DM problem

If you take bookings through Instagram messages, you already know the failure: somebody asks for a table on Friday, you are in service, you reply at eleven at night, and they have gone somewhere else.

A booking link in your bio, or in a story, turns that into a self-service transaction. The customer books at the moment they are thinking about it, which is the only moment that reliably converts, and nobody has to check messages between covers.

The link works on its own (no website required), so it is equally useful in a Google listing, on a printed card, or as a QR code on the door for somebody standing outside a full restaurant.

Can website and Mosey bookings share one diary?

Bookings from your site, from Instagram, from the Mosey app, and from a member of staff typing one in all land in the same place.

That sounds obvious and it is the entire feature. The alternative (a widget that sends an email, a separate booking system, a paper book) is how a venue ends up with two sources of truth and no way to tell which is right at seven on a Saturday.

Close a date and it closes everywhere. Fill a service and it stops being offered everywhere. There is nothing to keep in sync because there is only one of it.

When should a restaurant ask for a deposit?

You can require a deposit, and it is worth being selective about which bookings do.

A deposit on every table is a barrier to booking. A deposit on a table of ten at eight on a Saturday is insurance against the single most expensive no-show you can have. Most venues who get this right apply it to large parties and peak times and leave everything else open.

Deposits are passed to you in full: 0% commission, because a deposit is your money held against a risk rather than a sale.

Reminders, and the no-show problem

A booking taken three weeks out is a booking somebody has forgotten about.

Confirmations and reminders go out without you doing anything, which is the single cheapest intervention against no-shows there is. Most people who do not turn up did not decide not to come; they lost track of the date, and a message the day before is enough.

For the ones who genuinely do not show, the diary keeps a record. A customer with a history of not turning up is visible when they book again, so you can decide whether that Saturday twelve-top needs a deposit. That is a judgement you make, not one made for you.

How much does taking bookings on your site cost?

• Nothing to take a booking. No commission, no per-cover fee.
• 0% on deposits. Passed to you in full.

You can run bookings on Mosey, on your own website and through Instagram without ever paying anything.

Can you take restaurant bookings from Instagram?

A restaurant taking roughly 60 bookings a week, of which about 15 come through Instagram DMs.

Those 15 currently cost somewhere around two hours of somebody's week in back-and-forth, and an unknown number of lost bookings from people who asked at nine and got an answer at midnight. Moving them to a link costs nothing, recovers the two hours, and converts the ones that were previously lost to silence.

The bookings themselves cost the same as they did before, which is nothing.

The second-order effect is the one that compounds: a booking taken on your own website is a customer who now knows your website takes bookings. The next time they want a table they go there directly rather than to a search result, which is the whole argument for owning the door rather than renting it.

Related guides on reservations

• Reservations and deposits: the diary itself, trust scores and no-shows
• Restaurant waitlist: what happens when the date is full
• Private hire and large group bookings: when somebody wants the room
• Get discovered on Mosey: the other door people arrive through
• What Mosey costs: every rate on one page