Restaurant table booking is a feature of a food delivery app that lets you reserve a table at a restaurant and then pay the bill through the app, usually with a discount. It is the delivery app's offer for eating out, often called dining out. You choose the restaurant, the date, the time and the number of people, and the app sends the booking to the restaurant.
The booking has two halves.
The first half is the reservation. The restaurant tells the app how many tables it will offer in each time slot, and what discount each slot carries. The booking then appears on the restaurant's restaurant POS, or on a tablet at the entrance. So the staff know that a table for four is expected at 8 p.m.
The second half is the bill. At the end of the meal, you do not pay the waiter. You open the app, which shows the bill amount sent by the restaurant, and you pay with UPI or a card. The app applies the discount, keeps its fee and pays the restaurant later.
Consider four friends in Chandigarh who are celebrating a birthday on a Saturday night. They book a table for four at 8 p.m. at a restaurant whose offer is 15% off the bill. The restaurant has offered six tables in that slot, and theirs is the fifth to be booked. Their bill comes to ₹2,400. They pay through the app, so they pay ₹2,040, a discount of ₹360.
Who pays the ₹360? It depends on the restaurant's agreement with the app. Often the restaurant pays most of it, because the app brought it a full table on a busy night. The app may pay part of it, to win customers from rival apps.
Discounts also vary by time. A restaurant may offer 25% off at 4 p.m. on a Tuesday, when its tables are empty, and only 10% on a Saturday night. Changing the price with demand in this way is a form of dynamic pricing.
How does this differ from food delivery? There is no rider and no packaging. The restaurant cooks for its own tables, and the app only fills them and collects the payment. So for a food delivery app, table booking is a way to earn from a restaurant's customers even when they eat out. Discounts that reward people for coming back are also the job of loyalty programme software.