Enter Duration Rules—a smart feature within Advanced Scheduling Rules designed to automate and optimize your table management.

Here is a breakdown of what Duration Rules are, how they work, and how they help your business.

What Are Duration Rules?

At their core, Duration Rules allow businesses to automatically control exactly how long a table is reserved based on the size of the party or the time of day.

Working seamlessly with your Table Management and Capacity Utilization tools, these rules calculate availability and assign tables automatically. This means your system can make reliable, split-second decisions during customer self-scheduling without any manual math or intervention from your staff.

The Magic Behind the Scenes: How They Work

When a customer attempts to book a table through your self-scheduling portal, the system follows a precise, automated logic:

1. Identifies the party size: The system notes how many guests are arriving.
2. Applies the rule: It looks at your predefined settings to find the correct duration for that party size.
3. Blocks the table: The specific table is reserved for that exact calculated time limit.
4. Checks availability: It instantly ensures no other reservations can overlap with this block.
5. Updates the customer: If no suitable table is available for the full duration of their requested time, that time slot is hidden or marked unavailable to prevent double-booking.

Customizing for the Rush: Time-Based Duration Rules

Not all service periods are created equal. Customers might want a quick bite during their lunch hour, but prefer to linger over a multi-course meal at dinner. Duration Rules can be customized to reflect these different dining habits.

By creating separate rules and applying them to specific blocks in your Business Hours settings, you can maximize efficiency.

Why Duration Rules Matter

By implementing Duration Rules, you ensure that the availability your customers see online perfectly matches the real capacity of your dining room, even during the Friday night rush.

The immediate benefits for your business include:

• Preventing double bookings: No more apologizing for a table not being ready.
• Reflecting realistic dining times: Tailoring your turnover expectations to the actual time of day.
• Improving the guest experience: Customers are seated promptly, and dining rooms feel well-managed.
• Reducing staff workload: Hosts can focus on greeting guests rather than playing calendar tetris.
• Enabling reliable self-scheduling: You can trust the system to run on autopilot.

Control Your Online Bookings

Not every table needs to be available for online booking. With the Availability setting, you decide which tables the system can auto-assign to self-service customers and which ones you want to hold back for walk-ins or special manual assignments. It’s the easiest way to protect your “power tables” or manage capacity during peak shifts.

Smart Auto-Assignment

When a reservation comes in, who gets the best seat? With Priority, you set the rules.

• Priority 1 tables are filled first.
• Higher numbers act as a fallback.
• Priority 0 keeps tables hidden until every other option is exhausted.

Strategies That Work

Whether you want to fill your most popular window seats first, keep a section clear for a private event, or spread guests evenly across the room to balance the workload for your servers, this feature handles the logic for you.

Getting Started

Ready to optimize your seating? Just head to Account → Settings → Availability and Scheduling → Advanced Scheduling Rules to start setting your priorities.

Here is a breakdown of how this feature helps businesses optimize their seating automatically.

What is Capacity Utilization?

At its core, this feature is an automated gatekeeper for your table assignments. It allows you to set “minimum party size” rules for specific tables. When a customer schedules a reservation online, the system checks these rules in real-time to ensure that small parties don’t block large tables.

Key Benefits:

1. Prevent Inefficient Seating: Stops a party of two from booking an eight-top, saving that inventory for larger, more profitable groups.
2. Reduce Manual Work: Hosts no longer need to play “table Tetris” or manually intervene to move reservations around; the system assigns the best-fit table automatically.
3. Smart Self-Scheduling: If the only tables available are too large for a requested party size (based on your rules), the system will simply hide that time slot from the customer, preventing a bad booking before it happens.

How It Works in Practice

Imagine a busy Friday night between 7:00 PM and 9:00 PM. You have two large tables (Table 1 and Table 2) that fit up to 8 people, but you’ve set a rule that they require a minimum of 5 guests.

1. Scenario A: A customer tries to book for 5 people. The system sees Table 1 is free and fits the criteria, so it instantly confirms the booking and assigns them to Table 1.
2. Scenario B: A second customer tries to book for 2 people. The system checks the inventory. While a large table is free, the customer does not meet the “minimum party size” rule. The system shows no availability for that time slot, preserving your large tables for big groups.
3. Scenario C: A third customer tries to book for 8 people. The system sees Table 1 is taken but Table 2 is free, so it assigns them to Table 2.

Why You Should Use It

This feature is ideal for restaurants with predictable table layouts who want to “set it and forget it.” By automating these decisions, you protect your revenue-generating large tables, stabilize kitchen flow, and ensure your staff can focus on service rather than reservation management.

OpenTable’s Concierge: Summarizing User Reviews

OpenTable, the go-to for reservations, has introduced its AI-powered Concierge. This assistant is integrated directly into the OpenTable app and website and is designed to answer a diner’s questions about a restaurant, like “What are popular dishes?” or “Can I get a vegetarian meal here?” It’s a handy tool that saves diners from having to call the restaurant or dig through different websites.

However, a key point here is where the Concierge currently gets much if not all of its information from customer reviews. The big advantage of this approach is it works with data that OpenTable already has for the restaurants using its platform, but it can be a bit of a double-edged sword for a restaurant. The AI might provide details based on a past review that may not be entirely accurate or up-to-date. A restaurant has less direct control over how this information is presented, and the AI’s response might not always perfectly align with what the business wants to communicate. Still the simplicity of just turning on this feature for existing customers with many reviews is key, and OpenTable can allow restaurants to refine or better control the feature over time.

Perklist’s AI Assistant: Utilizing Restaurant Menus and Other Information

On the other side, Perklist offers an AI Assistant that’s all about empowering the restaurant. This tool is a chatbot that a business can add to its own website and gives more control to the restaurant in the menu and other information it uses for its interactions with customers.

To set it up, you simply upload your own official menu, product list, or other business information. The AI assistant then uses this exact information—and only this information—to answer customer questions. A restaurant can also add custom details about their policies, FAQs, and hours. This means that a customer’s question about a specific menu item will be answered with the restaurant’s own description, not with an interpretation from an online review. Perklist puts the business directly in the driver’s seat, ensuring the message is always accurate and on-brand, and makes it easy to update and keep the information accurate and aligned with the business goals.

Now, an integration with the Perklist AI Assistant makes it possible for these waiting customers to explore your menu and ask questions directly from that public waitlist page.

When enabled, a simple message and link will appear above their wait time information. Clicking this link opens a chat with an AI Assistant capable of answering questions about your menu and business in real time. You can find more details and an overview video here of how the Perklist AI Assistant works.

Setting up the AI Assistant involves providing it with your menu and other relevant details, a process that generally takes a few minutes. There are also options to customize the text of the message and link shown on your public waitlist page. Additionally, you can choose whether customers see only the AI Assistant chat or both your menu and the chat window when they click the link.

Perklist is a service developed by Waitlist Me, aimed at helping businesses improve their digital interaction with customers, and includes features beyond just the AI Assistant.

We’ve all been there: scrolling through a restaurant’s website, searching for specific menu details, or trying to decipher ingredient lists. This process can be frustrating and time-consuming, potentially deterring customers from placing orders or even visiting your establishment. Similarly, there are times when customers are on site where they may have to wait or delay your staff to get questions answered.

Perklist’s AI Assistant can help with these challenges by improving the accessibility and interactivity of menu and business information. Users can obtain immediate answers to menu-related inquiries in two main ways. First, a conversational chat interface can be integrated directly into a restaurant’s website, enabling customers to ask questions about ingredients, dietary considerations, or dish specifics and receive prompt, accurate responses. Second, for in-restaurant use, QR codes can be placed at tables, providing customers with direct access to the AI assistant via their smartphones. This allows for real-time menu exploration and question-answering during their dining experience.

Perklist AI Assistant offers practical advantages for both customers and restaurants. For customers, it provides immediate access to menu details, reducing the need for lengthy searches or waiting for staff assistance. It facilitates easier menu exploration and informed decision-making, which can contribute to a more efficient and satisfying dining experience.

For restaurants, the AI assistant ensures consistent and up-to-date information is delivered to all customers when they want it. It also reduces the workload on service staff by handling routine menu inquiries, allowing them to focus on more complex customer interactions and providing better overall service. Additionally, the system can promote increased customer interaction with the menu and improve the overall efficiency of handling menu questions.

Getting started is simple and just takes a few minutes. You can sign up for a Perklist account and upload a PDF or image of your menu. Then just embed a few lines of code or print out some QR codes. There are settings for adding more business information and customizing the look and feel if you like, and you can keep track of customer questions in the logs area.

For more information, read more about the Perklist AI Assistant.

Better Manage Your Online Reputation with Review Public Tracking

In today’s digital landscape, online reviews can make or break a business. Perklist empowers you to take control of your online reputation by streamlining review management from Google and Yelp.

With Perklist, you can:

Increase Personalized Engagement with Customer Profiles

In today’s competitive market, building strong customer relationships is vital. Perklist’s customer profiles empower you to do just that, offering a centralized area for tracking interactions and preferences.

From feedback and perks to visit history and private messages, these profiles provide a multi-dimensional view of customers. This information allows you to tailor your engagement strategies, anticipate their needs, and create personalized experiences that keep them coming back for more.

With easy onboarding and seamless integration into your existing workflow, Perklist makes it simple to unlock the power of data-driven insights. Embrace the future of customer engagement and help your business thrive.

Waitlist Me Premium Monthly will change from $29.99 to $34.99 and Waitlist Me Premium Annual will go from $287.88 to $335.88 (equivalent to $27.99 a month). Waitlist Me Pro Monthly will change from $49.99 to $59.99 and Waitlist Me Pro Annual will go from $479.88 to $575.88 (equivalent to $47.99 a month). The subscription prices for Waitlist Me Platinum will not change.

We are still committed to providing the best value to our customers and even with the price increase will still have lower prices than other comparable offerings. We also add value to the Waitlist Me service on an ongoing basis through new features and improved performance, and we are rolling out new sets of capabilities in our Perklist service to provide simple and cost effective loyalty software for small businesses.

As we have continued to improve our waitlist, reservation, and table management features over the years, we have worked closely with a wide variety of small and medium-sized businesses across several industries and developed a deep understanding of the needs of those businesses. Recently, we noticed several challenges businesses faced in delivering consistent customer service quality in ways that were simple and efficient.

Over the past year, we have focused more of our efforts on solving some of these problems. Starting with a deep dive into discovery initiatives that involved talking to hundreds of customers and businesses, we then moved through multiple design and feature iterations to develop a whole new set of solutions that we are launching under the name Perklist.

So what is Perklist? On a high level, it is a simple set of perks, or special benefits, that businesses can provide to their customers. As each business is unique, Perklist is designed to be flexible in allowing businesses to choose what perks they offer and how they use them to better serve customers in ways that fit their brands and processes. Basically, it is a versatile toolkit that businesses can use to understand, engage, and interact with their customers in more authentic ways.

To give a few examples, some key areas that Perklist can help businesses include:

– Better service – Providing better service through seamless seating and personalized benefits and experiences

– More visits – Driving more guest visits through targeted specials, timely messaging, and fun reminders

– Stronger relationships – Building stronger relationships through honest listening, consistent recognition, and genuine interactions

Perklist provides several types of perks that businesses can utilize based on their needs and goals. Some of the main feature areas include:

– Scheduling – Priority seating options through Waitlist Me integration

– Promotional – Customizable benefits that can be delivered effectively in novel ways

– Menus – Simple options to display menus, specials, and exclusive items

– Feedback – Private surveys for encouraging customer feedback and gaining valuable insights

– Messaging – Engaging group updates, question clarifications, and interactive conversations with select customers

Our journey in developing Perklist has just begun, and we see many opportunities to extend the functionality and value the service can provide to businesses and their customers. Some of these ideas are complimentary to Waitlist Me, like how Perklist can provide more choices, interactivity, and even exclusivity in scheduling visits. However, there are many other features that we didn’t feel fit neatly into Waitlist Me and could better evolve as a separate service. That said, our core product goals in developing Perklist are the same as those of Waitlist Me in our focus on simplicity, flexibility and providing exceptional value, and we hope people will enjoy this new service as much as they do Waitlist Me.

We are excited to see where things go with Perklist. Check it out!

Google released a couple new settings for further improving the guest experience, and these are now available for Waitlist Me users in the “Add From Google” area of the settings when logged into the Waitlist Me website.

Waitlist Policy – Often businesses want to set the right expectations for what to expect after joining the waitlist from Google or give some simple instructions about how to use the feature. For example, they may want to let people know not to use the feature to make reservations or let them know to look for a confirmation after joining. Now there is a setting that can be used to display some simple text to customers when they join the waitlist from Google.

Max party size – The ability to set a maximum party size has been a feature to help avoid cases where a business might not be able to accommodate a larger party or set the right expectations. Previously though the customer wouldn’t be given any additional instructions on what to do in those cases. Now there is a setting where businesses can display a message to give them a call for party sizes over the maximum.