Stop Reading Top 10 Booking Software Lists - They Lie.

Looking for the best restaurant reservation system? Be warned, you'll likely find lots of sites giving you lists breaking down the choices, sites which just so happen to have their own booking software. These top 10 lists often rank highly but give a biased and often incomplete picture about the best restaurant booking software. So we're not going to give you a generic list which places us at the top while pretending to be 'neutral'; our whole thing is we want to make the industry more transparent. What we will say though is here are some points you should be looking at when trying to find the best booking platform for you.

1. Be aware of hidden fees.

It's common for booking platforms to either hide their pricing between multiple sales calls (call is pesismistic, but this seems to be a mixture of trying to get you down the sales pipeline before hitting you with extodinary high costs, and also trying to see how much they can milk you for. If your comparing services try to find ones that are open about their pricing.

Be careful though - ones which tell you their price often find use in the handy asterisk. One of the more popular booking providers in the space is ResDiary - and they use our good friend * to let you know that on top of their already high fees, you'll be paying 1% commission on every deposit and payment you receive; that quickly adds up.

You'll also find booking platforms like Booked.it which claim to offer their service 'free' with just a small 'fee' on each booking. How much is this fee? Go try to find out and you'll see it once again is hidden behind several calls; though based on some of their reviews (the fact we have to use their reviews to get a sense of their pricing speaks for itself), it can be as high as 10-14% per a booking. Suddenly free doesn't seem so free anymore.

Or what about OpenTable? On top of their monthly fee (which is high by even our competitors standards) they will charge you for any booking made using their platform. Great that means your only paying for customers they send you right? Well... no. You see OpenTables page for your restaurant will likely rank higher in search engines than your site itself, so someone searching for "My Wonderful Restaurant" will end up on OpenTable, dispite their clear intention of already booking with you; and then bang - your paying £5 or more for a booking you already would have secured.

That said there are services like BookingNinja which do offer their pricing upfront; and we applaud these competitors of ours. Running a hospitality business is hard, and frankly your customers wouldn't take it if you told them they'd need to speak to you every time they wanted to find out a price of a drink, so why should you accept that? When you start a relationship with trying to be secretive it isn't exactly one built on trust and transparency right out the door.

2. Ensure the feature set matches your requirements

An obvious one perhaps, but equally at BookingNinja we often see businesses such as soft plays who come to us after using another provider which they've spent the last year trying to morph to do something it just wasn't designed to do. If your a very basic restaurant with no requirements on things like gift-cards, session areas, vouchers, discount codes or Apple & Google Pay support then frankly most booking platforms will suit you well enough - but make sure the platform you choose will be able to adapt to any future requirements you might have.

Think you might open up a Quiz night? Make sure it has full support for events and custom ticket prices (yeah, obviously we do, once again, we're biased). Don't try to make your customers jump through hops to collect information you need - so often have we had customers come to us where their booking form is trying to collect guest type information in a way that would confuse even the smartest of customer.

The likes of ResDiary, OpenTable and others aren't designed around the needs of venues like soft plays, activity centres and board game cafes; so don't try to work around that. Find a platform, whatever it may be (*cough us?*) that has a full range of features to support your business.

3. Don't get locked in.

To be frank our industry is competitive. There are many booking platforms all vying for your custom and it takes a lot of effort to get someone signed up; especially if like us you do a completely free guided setup. So naturally contracts get involved - sometimes for years or more. This is only fair right?... well no.

You should only be using software if it's meeting your needs, and when your needs change or the software hasn't delivered what it promised to do then you should be free to move right away. Make sure when you sign up to a booking platform that your not starting a long term contract - we see customers coming to us still locked into contracts with their existing platform but being so frustrated with it they end up paying for Us AND their original contract.

Even if they don't force you into a contract, be aware what moves make it harder for you to move. We've had multiple customers come from a platform where their site was kept hostage and they were told they can't have their site if they move to a different platform. (If you use BookingNinja's site builder function and move off platform, we'll provide you the entire site in HTML format in a tidy zip - no questions asked).

There are booking platforms are contract free, we're one - ultimately we want our customers to be happy because our marketing is entirely based on word of mouth and positive feedback. If our customers aren't happy and they think they'd be happier elsewhere then we work with them to ensure they get their data in an export fashion that helps them, and clear them of any subscription going forward. Zero contract.

4. Own Your Data

Many of the larger platforms collect your customers’ information to market to them—not to promote your venue, but to push other businesses in their network. OpenTable, ResDiary, and others do this, and frankly, we find it a bit ick.

When someone books at your venue, that’s a sale you worked to secure. You built your brand, attracted the customer, and provided the experience—so why should a third-party platform get to claim that relationship? If your booking provider is using your data to send marketing emails that direct your customers elsewhere, they’re not really on your side.

It’s also about control. You should have full access to your customer list, booking history, and marketing preferences without jumping through hoops. Some platforms make exporting your data nearly impossible, keeping you tied to their service. Others might even claim ownership over customer details, limiting how you can contact guests outside their system.

At BookingNinja, we believe your data is exactly that—yours. You can export it anytime, use it however you like, and rest easy knowing we’re not using it to drive business away from you. Your customers, your bookings, your rules.

5. Get Independent Advice.

After all this advice this is the most important - we're a booking platform, a small family run one, but still a company that benefits if you sign up to us over our competitors. That of course is basic business, but also it taints any advice we give about what booking platform to use.

We don't think our competitors should be making artificial "top booking software" lists that place themselves at the top, but we think it's important to get feedback from real people.

BookingNinja has 97% Positive rating on Trustpilot - these are real customers real reviews. Use Trustpilot and other independent review platforms to get an understanding of each platform from their customers. Picking booking software can be a bit dull, but it's also the gateway to your business for your customers so making the right choice now can have a huge impact on your business going forward.