Design My Night (Collins) Alternative

The Design My Night
Alternative
For Late Nights.

Big group bookings, packages and deposits on a system you own outright. Keep DesignMyNight for discovery if it earns its keep, and still run your Friday and Saturday guest list yourself.

Start For Free

No credit card required. No contracts. Cancel anytime.

No Per-Cover Fees
Flat pricing, even on your busiest nights
Free Forever Plan
All features, no card needed
Family-Run Support
Real people, not a call centre
Why Switch

Own the Guest List Behind the Big Nights

DesignMyNight sends real traffic and Collins runs tables and private-hire enquiries properly. What you give up is a marketplace sitting on the guest relationship, and a price you have to ask a salesperson for.

The Party Books With You

Collins comes bundled with the DesignMyNight consumer marketplace. BookingNinja has no marketplace at all, so a 20-person birthday books on your page, in your branding, with nobody else's venue listed underneath.

A Price Without a Sales Call

Access publishes Collins Evo "from £149 per month, per site" and hides the full number behind a lead-capture form, describing it as tailored. Our plans are on the pricing page. Read them at 2am if you like.

Nothing Bolted Onto the Guest's Bill

Tonic, the sister ticketing product, adds a per-ticket booking fee your customer pays at checkout. On a paid BookingNinja plan there is no admin fee on top of what the guest agreed to pay.

Packages Priced Per Head

Set a bottomless brunch at one price, an under-18 at another, add a drinks package and take the pre-order and the deposit in the same checkout. It is one flow, not a booking tool plus a ticketing product plus an integration.

Side by Side

BookingNinja vs Design My Night (Collins)

Both handle a busy Saturday. The differences are the marketplace, who ends up with the guest, and whether you can see the price.

Flat monthly subscription, no per-cover fees

BookingNinja
Design My Night (Collins)

Full pricing visible without a form

BookingNinja
Design My Night (Collins)

Direct-only: every guest record is yours

BookingNinja
Design My Night (Collins)

Consumer discovery marketplace

BookingNinja
Design My Night (Collins)

Reserve with Google

BookingNinja
Design My Night (Collins)

Drag-and-drop floor plan, live during service

BookingNinja
Design My Night (Collins)

Deposits, card holds and pre-orders at booking

BookingNinja
Design My Night (Collins)

Booking fee added to the guest's payment

BookingNinja
No on paid plans
Design My Night (Collins)
Yes on Tonic tickets

Per-guest-type pricing for packages

BookingNinja
Design My Night (Collins)
Not advertised

Order at table from a QR code

BookingNinja
Native
Design My Night (Collins)
Via integration

Access Collins Evo pricing is quote-gated, so the only public figures are the "from £149 per month, per site" entry point and Capterra's Core £149 / Pro £199 listing. We do not treat those as your price. Where Collins' public sources do not evidence a feature we say "Not advertised" rather than claim it is missing. Accurate to the best of our knowledge; check Access Collins for the current position.

Guest choosing a table on their phone on the venue's own branded booking page
Off the Marketplace

Your Bar,
Your Guest List.

When a group books through your own BookingNinja page, the organiser's name, email, marketing consent and spend history land in your database. No consumer marketplace holds a copy of the relationship or decides which venue the guest sees next.

A list you can actually use
Every organiser who has ever booked a booth or a party, with the dates and the spend, ready for your own mailshot.
Nobody advertising next to you
Marketplace listings put the bar down the road in the same scroll. Your page has one venue on it.
Looks like your venue
Your colours, your wording, your domain, so a late-night crowd never feels handed off mid-booking.
Get them back in
Fire the Thursday reminder, the review request and the "same time next month?" nudge off your own list.
Live floor plan during service showing seated tables, upcoming bookings and tonight's booking list
Live Space Visibility

The Whole Room,
On One Screen.

Collins gives you drag-and-drop floor plans and live space visibility, and so do we. Your plan doubles as the run sheet for the night: who is sat down, which booth is due at nine, which table is finishing and about to turn.

Draw the actual venue
Booths, high tables, the terrace, the mezzanine. Guests can pick where they want to sit when they book.
Big groups placed for you
Best fit by party size and area priority, with joins for the fourteen-cover birthday. Drag it somewhere else if you disagree.
Walk-ins and the queue
Seat a walk-in off the plan and keep a waitlist running while the door is busy.
Look ahead to Saturday
Open next weekend and see the room as it stands, so you know what is left to sell before you post about it.
Membership plans and gift card sales history side by side in the BookingNinja admin
Deposits & Pre-Orders

Take the Money
Before They Arrive.

Collins does deposits, pre-orders and private hire well through Collins Pay and its enquiry stack, with Tonic alongside it for ticketed nights. We built the same jobs into one place, priced per head, so a big group books and pays in a single checkout.

Deposits your way
Ten pounds a head, the full package price up front, or a card held against a no-show. Set it per session, per guest type or per day of the week.
Packages and pre-orders
Bottomless brunch, a bottle on the table, a set menu per person. Guests choose per head at booking and the kitchen and bar get the numbers early.
Memberships
Recurring plans with member perks and booking discounts, billed automatically, for the regulars who are in every week.
Order at table, built in
Guests scan, order and pay from the table without a third-party app, which keeps the bar queue down on a full Saturday.

When Collins Is the Better Call

Collins is a good product and we would rather you picked the right one. Three situations where it beats us outright.

  • Private hire and large-group enquiries are your business. Enquiry management is what Collins is genuinely best at, with inbound and outbound feeds and AI tooling that can pick up bookings while you are closed. If most of your revenue arrives as an email asking about the function room, look hard at that depth before you move.
  • You need the discovery traffic. The DesignMyNight marketplace claims up to 3.9 million monthly visitors across major UK and Australian cities, and for a new bar that exposure is worth paying for. We have no marketplace to point at. BookingNinja runs the bookings on the channels you already have.
  • You want Reserve with Google and one big vendor. Collins includes Reserve with Google and sits inside The Access Group's hospitality stack alongside EPOS, payments and reporting, which suits multi-site groups that would rather have one contract than five.

A fair number of venues run both: the marketplace listing for people who have never heard of them, BookingNinja for the regulars and the parties they want to keep. That combination is fine by us.

FAQ

Design My Night (Collins) Alternative Questions, Answered

What does Access Collins actually cost?
It is a per-site monthly subscription rather than a charge per cover on standard table bookings. Access lists Collins Evo "from £149 per month, per site" and puts the full figure behind a lead-capture form, calling it tailored; Capterra lists Core at £149 and Pro at £199 a month, flat rate, with no free trial. Your quote could be none of those. Our plans are published, so you can put both numbers against your own volume before anyone rings you.
Do my guests pay a booking fee?
On a paid BookingNinja plan, no. What the guest agrees to pay is what leaves their card. Tonic, the DesignMyNight ticketing product, adds a per-ticket booking fee at checkout on ticketed events and does not publish the amount, which is common enough for late-night events but it is money coming out of your customer's pocket. The one exception on our side is the Free Forever plan, which adds a small checkout fee once you go past its 50 free bookings a month.
Can I stay listed on DesignMyNight and use BookingNinja too?
Yes, and plenty of bars do exactly that. The marketplace keeps doing discovery for people who have never been in, while your website, Instagram link and QR codes point at your BookingNinja page. Anything booked there is yours outright, so over time the share of your covers that you actually own goes up.
Does it cope with a 30-person party on a Saturday?
That is the case we built for. Join tables into one booking, price adults, under-18s and package upgrades separately, collect a per-head deposit or the whole package cost up front, take drink and food pre-orders at the same time, and hold a card against the ones who do not show. It arrives as one booking on the floor plan with the pre-order attached.
What happens to my guest list if I leave Collins?
Export your guest data out of Collins and we will import your regulars. You can be taking bookings on your own page the same week; building the venue out, floor plan and sessions included, usually takes us about a day and we do that part for you. We are a small UK company and you deal with the people who write the software, not an account manager inside a large PE-owned group.
Is there a free plan?
There is. Free Forever costs nothing per month and includes every feature, with up to 50 bookings a month that do not collect a payment. After 50, a booking has to take money, and the guest pays a small fee at checkout of 2% or 50p, whichever is the larger. Paid plans are a flat monthly price with no per-cover charge and no contract.
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Ready to Own
Your Saturday Night?

Set up in about a day. One flat monthly price, nothing charged per cover, nothing to sign, and no card needed to start.

Start For Free

Free Forever plan: 50 no-payment bookings a month. Upgrade anytime.