Every restaurant owner wants to see a steady flow of customers walking into their venue at different times of the day.
While this is an aim, reality isn’t so smooth. Restaurants need to exert efforts to keep guests coming back, reduce waiting time on busy days and weekends, and ensure a great guest experience. Every time.
To achieve this high flow of guests, dining concepts often turn to third-party applications to increase restaurant reservations and sales.
Despite their popularity, some booking channels can end up eating into your restaurants’ revenues.
In this article, we’ll be looking at the differences between direct and third-party bookings, and how you can boost direct reservations and revenue.
Direct bookings vs. third-party bookings: Similarities & differences
When it comes to restaurant reservations, there are two primary booking channels: direct bookings and third-party bookings.
While both play a role in driving guests to your venue, there are key differences that impact revenue, guest relationships, and long-term business growth.
Direct bookings: These come through a restaurant’s own channels, such as its website, reservation widget, walk-ins, or phone calls. They can also come from social media channels.
With direct bookings, restaurants keep 100% of the revenue, avoid commission fees, and maintain full control over the guest experience from start to finish.
Additionally, direct reservations allow restaurants to build guest relationships, personalize interactions, and use guest data to drive repeat visits. This is
Third-party bookings: These are made through external platforms, such as restaurant marketplaces and booking apps.
While these platforms offer visibility and convenience for diners comparing multiple venues, they typically charge a cover fee or commission per reservation, cutting into restaurant profits.
Pros and cons of direct and indirect bookings
Unfortunately, the benefits aren’t stacked against each other. The benefits you get from collecting direct reservations may or may not outweigh the cons.
With direct bookings, you don’t have to charge cover fees and all the revenue goes to your restaurant. You can still collect restaurant reservation deposits.
However, setting up and maintaining direct booking channels, such as a website or mobile app, can require time, effort, and financial investment, which may not be feasible for every restaurant.
Third-party platforms, on the other hand, provide guests with a variety of dining options, increasing a restaurant’s visibility and potentially bringing in more reservations than direct channels. However, these platforms charge cover fees per guest or reservation, reducing the restaurant’s earnings per booking.
Common Challenges of direct restaurant reservations
As mentioned, there are some downsides to direct bookings. Here are the top ones:
Lower visibility
Restaurants and bars often struggle with low visibility when attempting to make their mark their way. On the other hand, third-party platforms offer wider visibility because guests can search based on location, cuisine type, or pricing.
Limited marketing budget
Another challenge to direct reservations is that they require a larger marketing budget. Many dining concepts, especially new and single-location restaurants, don’t have that kind of budget.
Higher trust among third-party platforms
One advantage third-party booking platforms have over restaurants is the high customer trust. Many guests trust platforms like OpenTable to make reservations, pay deposits or reservation fees, over a restaurant’s website.
Frequent offers
Another reason many guests turn to booking channels is the availability of special offers. Zomato is one popular channel that guests use to find special offers for various dining concepts. Offers vary from ‘buy 1 and get 1 50% off’ to getting free beverages with certain meals, among others.
Similar booking channels that provide offers to guests include The Entertainer and Careem Dine Out.
Benefits of generating direct reservations
If third-party platforms are so good, why should restaurants care about direct revenues?
Here’s why.
Higher profit margins
By far the biggest benefit of relying on direct revenue sources is the higher revenue and profit margin for your business.
Higher restaurant revenues can mean a bigger marketing budget, more stability for restaurant staff, and an opportunity to grow.
Further reading: 10 Money-Making Revenue Management Strategies for Restaurants in 2025
Removing the middle man
Besides increasing your revenue and profits, you no longer have third-parties charging large commissions or cover fees.
Better data-backed guest experiences
Another major benefit of getting direct reservations is that your concept owns the data. With third-party booking platforms, guest information is often logged and saved with the third-party platform.
Some platforms may share this information, although with privacy regulations, this is proving harder every day.
On the other hand, with direct bookings, guests make the reservation via your website or reservation widget. This means you own all the information they willingly provide, which you can use to create restaurant marketing campaigns.
You can tailor the campaigns based on guest preferences like sending email, SMS marketing, or WhatsApp marketing campaigns.
You can also use the information to personalize guest experiences inside your venue, which can boost loyalty and repeat business.
Further reading: The Starter’s Guide to WhatsApp Business for Restaurants
How to boost direct revenue and profitability
Now, let’s look at ways you can increase direct reservations and accordingly boost your revenue and profits.
Add a Google My Business listing
Start by creating a Google My Business Profile and optimizing it. This means ensuring all relevant information about your restaurant, location(s), phone number(s),…etc. is there.
Google My Business helps curious guests find you on Google Maps. It shows any restaurant images you include, directions, and guest reviews.
Bonus tip: After guests enjoy a meal, ask them to leave a review on Google. The more positive reviews you get, the more guests are likely to come. Plus, happy guests will likely come back.
Turn your website into a booking machine
If you’re looking to boost direct restaurant revenue, then your website is your right-hand man. You need to make the most of it to generate revenue and increase your restaurant sales.
This means launching a website to begin with, if you don’t have one.
Then, you need to focus on these elements:
SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO) is crucial for any business that wants to generate web traffic. SEO involves optimizing your website and pages for Google, and other search engines, so searchers can find you and get more information about your offerings.
SEO for restaurants includes conducting keyword research, doing local SEO, and ensuring pages meet certain criteria to rank.
Basic SEO involves optimizing your H1 (main header), Page title, URL, and meta description so the search engine understands what your website and each page is about.
Here’s an example of what one of our clients is doing and how they are optimizing for SEO. As you can see, they’re not just optimizing their website, but also their social media links like Instagram.
Content marketing
Research suggests 80% of individuals follow at least one business on Instagram, particularly in the food sector.
Content marketing for restaurants involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content. The aim is to attract and engage your target audience, your guests to achieve your goals, including traffic, bookings, and sales.
Content marketing usually includes helpful blog posts, social media content, email marketing and videos.
Creating a strong social media strategy, especially on platforms like Instagram, can help you gain followers and boost engagement and bookings.
Add your digital menus
Make sure to add your menus to your website. If you have different menus like breakfast, lunch, dessert, and beverages. etc. add them all to your website. Create a tab for menus and note any specifics.
This will not only build awareness about your brand and dishes but it can help guests make faster decisions about what they want to order.
Digital menus are also an opportunity if you offer food delivery.
Special offers when ordering from your website
One of the ways restaurants can increase reservations via their website, especially if they’ve just launched or want to get customers used to their site, is to offer special discounts via the website only.
Some restaurants also do this when they launch their mobile app. Guests can only get these offers if they make a booking, or order, via the website or mobile app.
Get bookings from social sites
Another major source of direct restaurant reservations is social media.
Nearly 50% of diners claim social media influences their restaurant choices. Meanwhile, 22% say they “are inspired to revisit a restaurant” based on its social media presence.
Many restaurants don’t know this but guests can make direct reservations via platforms like Facebook and Instagram. They don’t cost anything or charge cover fees.
However, you will need to make sure your Facebook or Instagram (or both) are impressive so guests are tempted to book.
Use Reserve with Google
Reserve with Google is a 100% free booking channel offered by Google. It allows businesses to list their location(s) on Google to get online bookings.
While not limited to restaurants, Google Reserve can help increase footfall and revenues.
When a customer searches for a restaurant by name in Google search or Google Maps, the Reserve with Google booking widget appears on the side.
This also applies to searching for certain types of cuisine like ‘Italian restaurant near me’ or ‘Italian restaurant in Dubai.’
However, this service from Google is only available through Reserve with Google Partners like Servme and in select countries.
Use a no-cover-fee guest experience platform
As its name suggests, a guest experience management platform helps you create memorable dining experiences for guests.
This involves collecting guest data into your restaurant CRM, creating and managing automated restaurant guest surveys, and using data for marketing campaigns.
Besides guest experiences, these platforms help you collect reservations along with reservation fees or deposits. While some platforms have cover fees, you can use a no-cover-fee platform like Servme that does the hard for you.
Create your own unique dining events
One way to diversify your income and boost direct revenue is through special events. These could be anything like Tuesday Tea Time, Halloween menus, Dinner Dress-up, Valentine’s Day celebrations, or something else.
Also, consider making special offers for days like Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Halloween. This is an opportunity to improve brand awareness, attract new guests, and increase seasonal sales.
Make sure you offer special menus on those days to create fear of missing out (FOMO) and new dining experience. For example, you can do a Halloween menu for the month of October or for the week leading up to Halloween.
Further reading: How to Prepare Your Restaurant for Mother’s Day
One way to expand your restaurant is to add more venues. Managing multiple restaurant locations can mean more revenues. But with bigger venues, you can also cater to big clientele like hosting corporate lunches or dinners. During Ramadan, this can include corporate Iftars or Sohoors.
You can also let guests know that they can host their birthdays, engagement parties, among other events like workshops.
Further reading: 15 Reasons to Use Restaurant Event Management Software
Wrapping it up
Restaurants that rely heavily on third-party bookings often face higher costs and limited access to guest data, making it harder to build loyalty and personalize marketing efforts.
In contrast, a strong direct booking strategy helps restaurants maximize revenue, own guest relationships, and reduce dependency on external platforms.
That said, a balanced approach—leveraging third-party platforms for exposure while actively encouraging direct reservations—is the key to sustainable growth and profitability.
That’s why increasing your brand’s direct revenue means a profit boost. However, it may take some time to figure out what you need.
Make sure you have a marketing strategy for your food business in place and track your revenue sources. You can do this using a platform like Servme, where you can generate sales reports, booking sources, among others.
Want to know how Servme can help you increase reservations, sales, and guest retention? Book a quick personalized demo to learn more.
Mohammed Rafy
Operations
