If you run a restaurant and want to take bookings online, the path of least resistance is one of the major third-party booking platforms. There are several well-established ones in the UK market, and most restaurants end up on at least one of them.
They work. The question is whether they're working for you - or whether you're carrying costs and trade-offs you haven't fully examined.
What third-party platforms actually offer
The main argument for these platforms is discovery. People browse them looking for places to eat. If you're listed, you appear in front of those people without any additional marketing effort on your part.
For newer restaurants without an established audience, or venues in tourist areas where walk-in discovery matters, that's genuinely valuable. The platform does real work.
They also handle the technical side without any effort from you. The booking flow works, confirmations go out, reminders get sent. You're paying for something that mostly just runs.
What most restaurants don't add up
The obvious cost is per-cover fees. The major platforms typically charge a fee for each diner who books through them - the exact amount varies by platform and plan, but at volume it becomes a meaningful monthly expense. The awkward part is that this cost grows proportionally with your success, which is an unusual dynamic.
But there are less visible costs worth thinking about.
You don't own the guest relationship. When a diner books through a third-party platform, their data - email address, booking history, preferences - belongs to the platform. If you stop using it, you don't take those relationships with you. You're building their database as much as you're filling your tables.
The brand experience breaks. A guest visits your carefully designed website, clicks "Book a table", and lands on a generic platform interface. It's a small thing, but it creates a moment of disconnection. They're no longer in your world.
You're paying commission on guests who were already coming to you. This is the one that tends to sting when restaurants actually calculate it. A guest who found you on Google, visited your website, and then clicked through to a booking platform - you paid a fee for that booking. They weren't discovered through the platform. They just happened to book through it because it was the only option on your site.
When third-party platforms make sense
There's no universal right answer. A third-party platform makes genuine sense when:
You're a new restaurant trying to build an audience and you want the discovery benefit
You're in a location where tourists actively browse platforms looking for options
The per-cover cost is small relative to your average table spend
You don't want to manage any booking technology yourself
When it's worth thinking differently
The calculus changes when:
You have an established audience who come to your website directly
A meaningful portion of your bookings are coming through your own marketing channels
You're paying significant monthly fees and the discovery benefit is marginal compared to your own channels
You want to build direct relationships with your guests over time
The middle ground most restaurants end up at
A lot of venues do both - and there's nothing wrong with that. They maintain a presence on one or more third-party platforms for discovery, while also offering a direct booking option for guests who come through their own website, Google, or social media.
The key question to ask yourself is: where are my bookings actually coming from? Most booking platforms will show you this data. If a significant portion are coming from guests who found you independently - not through the platform's discovery features - that's the portion where you're paying a fee you might not need to.
That's not a reason to abandon third-party platforms entirely. It's just a reason to understand what you're getting from them and what you're paying for - so the decision is deliberate rather than default.