Your host stand should not be juggling a paper book, a third-party widget, and a ringing phone at 6:47 PM on a Saturday. The Reservation Management automation pulls every booking — phone, web form, OpenTable, Resy, Tock — into one GHL pipeline, applies a deposit hold when the party warrants it, and routes the cover to the correct daypart and section before the diner has finished typing their name.
What it ships with
- GHL workflows:
Reservation – Intake,Reservation – Deposit Hold,Reservation – Confirm 24h,Reservation – Confirm 2h - Tablet-friendly intake form (host stand mode) with party size, daypart, allergen field, occasion dropdown
- Webhook receivers for OpenTable, Resy, and Tock booking events
- Stripe deposit hold logic: $25 for parties of 4-6, $50 for parties of 7+ and prime-time Friday/Saturday
- Custom fields:
party_size,daypart,allergen_flag,vip_tier,seating_pref,occasion - SMS templates: confirmation, deposit receipt, 24h reminder, 2h “we’re holding your table” nudge
The flow (step-by-step)
1. Intake from any channel
Phone bookings get keyed in at the host stand on the tablet form. Web and third-party bookings hit the webhook endpoint and write directly to the contact record with the same field mapping.
2. Party-size routing
Parties of 1-3 go straight to confirmation. Parties of 4+ trigger the deposit-hold branch. Parties of 8+ get flagged for FOH manager review before the seat is held.
3. Deposit hold (when applicable)
A Stripe hold (not a charge) is placed against the card. The diner gets an SMS receipt within 30 seconds: deposit amount, cancellation policy (24h), and the exact phrase that protects you under no-show recovery.
4. VIP tag detection
Before confirmation fires, the contact is checked against the visit-count field. If the diner has 8+ recorded covers, the vip_tier field flips to gold or platinum, and the GM gets a Slack/SMS ping with the reservation time and seating preference.
5. Reminder cadence
24 hours out: SMS with a one-tap confirm/cancel/modify link. 2 hours out: a short “your table for [party_size] is held for [time]” message. This single touch is what drops your no-show rate from the industry-typical 15-20% into single digits.
6. Day-of sync
At opening, the day’s confirmed reservations are pushed back to OpenTable/Resy/Tock as a sanity check so the BOH prep sheet and the FOH floor plan agree on the cover count.
What you can expect
Operators typically see deposit holds eliminate roughly 60-80% of large-party no-shows within the first 30 days. Allergen capture at intake (rather than at the table) gives the BOH a 4-hour head start on prep for gluten-free, nut-free, and shellfish-allergic guests. Hosts get back the 90 seconds per booking they were losing to manual confirmation calls.
Setup & customization
Pre-built: every workflow, every message template, the Stripe deposit logic, and the three booking-platform webhooks. You will not write a line of code.
What you tweak in 10 minutes: the deposit dollar amount, your cancellation-window language, the party-size threshold that triggers the hold, the daypart definitions (lunch / dinner / late-night), and which staff phone numbers receive the VIP ping.
Compliance notes
All SMS goes out on a 10DLC-registered campaign. Confirmation messages include the required opt-out language (“Reply STOP to opt out”) on the first touch only, per CTIA guidance. The deposit-receipt SMS is transactional (TCPA-exempt from prior-express-consent requirements) because it follows a booking the diner initiated. Stripe handles the card hold under PCI scope — your GHL account never stores raw PAN data.
Stop losing covers to a broken booking flow. Get the full snapshot installed for $997, or start with the lite build at $997 — both backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee. Buy the snapshot or book a 15-minute walkthrough to see the reservation automation running on a live restaurant account.