A restaurant booking system with no per-cover fees

Take reservations from your own website, work the service from a live diary that paces itself, protect the covers you cannot afford to lose, and keep a guest list that is yours to export whenever you want.

14-day free trial, no credit card. ZynBookings is a £29 per site per month add-on. Nothing per cover, on any channel, ever.

You are paying a fee on guests you already had

The uncomfortable part of a per-cover booking platform is not the headline rate. It is that a regular who has eaten with you forty times, found your restaurant by name, and clicked a link on your own website still arrives with a fee attached. Multiply a couple of pounds by a full Saturday and the marketplace is earning more from your loyal covers than from the ones it genuinely introduced.

The second cost is quieter. Your guest list lives on someone else's platform, under their terms, and getting it out is a negotiation rather than a button. ZynBookings inverts both: a flat £29 per site per month whatever your volume, and a guest list that an org admin can export to a spreadsheet in one click, unconditionally, because your organisation is the data controller and Zynthio is only the processor.

What you stop paying for

• Commission on a regular who booked through your own site
• A bill that goes up because you had a good December
• Re-typing a booking into the till, then into a spend report
• Asking permission to get your own guest list back
• Arguing about a no-show fee with no record of what was agreed

From the widget to the guest record

A booking widget on your own website

Your public booking page is a link you put wherever you like, and the guest needs no account to use it. It collects the date, party size, children, contact details, occasion and requests, and it collects allergens per person with a severity and a note, which is the level of detail Natasha's Law expects rather than a free-text box somebody skims. Marketing and offers consent are two separate boxes, both unticked, recorded with the date, source and IP. Availability checks and bookings are rate limited and a honeypot field catches bots, so there is no CAPTCHA standing between a hungry guest and a table.

A live service diary the team actually works from

The diary carries a booking through nine honest states — unconfirmed, confirmed, waiting in bar, partially seated, seated, bill dropped, finished, no-show and cancelled — because "seated" and "waiting in the bar with a drink" are not the same problem. Anyone with the module can read the diary for their sites, while taking, changing, seating and cancelling a booking is manager level, as are the waitlist and close-outs. Every change is written to an append-only trail in plain English, so "who moved the eight at seven" has an answer.

Pacing and automatic table allocation

Pacing caps covers per slot, bookings per slot, or both, optionally by party size and per room, and a slot that has hit its cap stops being offered online even when tables are still free — which is the whole point, because the kitchen is the constraint, not the furniture. Turn times default per service and can be overridden by party size and time of day. Allocation runs off your floor plan: it takes single tables first and only reaches for a join when no single table fits, then prefers the fewest wasted seats and the tightest gap to the next booking. Joins carry their own capacity rather than the sum of the two tables, because pushing two fours together does not seat eight comfortably.

Deposits, card capture and fair no-show charging

Two separate protections: a card on file, where the card is checked at the time of booking and nothing is taken, and a deposit, where money is taken up front. Policies are matched by site, service, party size, day, time and specific dates, so a Tuesday two-top and a Christmas twelve-top are not governed by the same rule. The policy wording is compulsory and the entire policy is frozen onto the booking at the moment it is made, so a guest is only ever held to the words they were shown. A nightly job charges no-shows and late cancellations where a card was captured, with two guards: if the table was re-let the fee is waived, and if a deposit was already paid the deposit is the fee. Payments run through Stripe.

A guest CRM that builds itself from the till

Guest records accumulate visits, covers, spend, no-shows, standing dietary notes, free-text notes, tags and a blacklist flag without anybody maintaining them. Lifetime spend comes from the till, so it is what the guest actually spent rather than what somebody guessed. Export the whole list to a spreadsheet in one click, or erase a guest so their name, email and phone are blanked from every booking and the rows left behind are depersonalised. Seven guest emails — confirmation, request received, reminder, changed, cancelled, deposit receipt and a morning-after "how was it?" — are each switchable, and the feedback email offers a Google review link to every guest whatever they scored, because steering only the happy ones is review gating.

Bookings are not a silo here

A booking is only useful if it reaches the kitchen, the floor plan and the takings. Because those live in the same platform, they do.

EPOS & Till

Your ZynthioEPOS floor plan is already the booking floor plan. A dine-in bill matches its booking and seats it, and closing the bill posts the spend to the guest record.

Recipes & Allergens

Allergens captured per person at booking meet a recipe book where every dish carries a declared allergen assessment against the fourteen.

ZynHR & Rotas

The diary tells you what Saturday actually looks like. The rota is built in the same platform, against the same sites and the same labour budget.

Pricing. ZynBookings is a paid add-on at £29 per site per month, on either plan, alongside Core at £59 or Professional at £149 per site per month. Unlimited users on every site, nothing per cover on any channel, and annual billing gives you two months free. Ten or more sites and 15% comes off automatically. See the full pricing page.

Booking system questions

What does Zynthio charge per cover?

Nothing, on any channel, ever. ZynBookings is a flat add-on at £29 per site per month on top of your plan, and a table booked through your own website costs exactly the same as one that does not: nothing. There is no commission, no cover fee and no marketplace taking a cut of the guests you already had.

Do I own the guest data?

Yes. Your organisation is the data controller and Zynthio is the processor. An org admin can export the entire guest list to a spreadsheet in one click, unconditionally, at any time, and can erase an individual guest so their booking history is depersonalised rather than merely hidden. The booking widget records marketing and offers consent as two separate, unticked boxes with the date, source and IP.

How does no-show charging work without being unfair?

You choose between taking a card on file, where nothing is charged at the time of booking, and taking a deposit up front. Either way the policy wording is compulsory and the whole policy, including the amount, the cancellation window and the exact words, is frozen onto the booking at the moment the guest makes it. Two guards then apply automatically: if the table was re-let, the fee is waived, and if a deposit was already paid, the deposit is the fee. A cancellation by the venue is never late.

Does it work with the till?

Yes, if you run ZynthioEPOS. Your existing floor plan is already there, so you mark which tables are bookable rather than drawing them again. Opening a dine-in bill on a table matches it to a booking from 45 minutes before its start until the end of its turn and marks it seated, creating a walk-in record if there was no booking, and closing the bill posts the spend to the guest record. That is a data link rather than a screen: bookings are worked in the diary, not on the till.

Can I stop the diary being overwhelmed at 8pm?

That is what pacing is for. Cap covers per slot, bookings per slot, or both, optionally by party size and per room, and a slot that has hit its cap stops being offered online even when tables are still free. A rule can also be set as an outright block to close a slot. Turn times default per service and can be overridden by party size and time of day.

One login, one bill, one set of sites

Every Zynthio module shares the same sites, the same people and the same reporting. Turn on what you need.

Martyn’s Law Readiness

Procedure templates, a per-site capacity and tier view, a quarterly drill record and a staff briefing.

Zero-Hours Readiness

Guaranteed hours, shift notice and cancellation payment policies, plus the rota record that evidences them.

Food Safety & HACCP

Digital daily checks, temperature logs, HACCP plans, allergen charts and EHO-ready PDF records.

Rotas, Clock-In & HR

Build rotas against a live labour budget, clock staff in with geofencing, approve timesheets.

Stock & Cashing Up

Stocktakes, purchase orders, delivery scanning, GP tracking and daily cashups with weekly rollups.

Connect your existing till for live sales into stock and rotas, plus the ZynthioEPOS till in build.

HACCP Plans

Build a full Codex HACCP plan online, link CCPs to daily checks and export EHO-ready PDFs.

COSHH & Risk Assessments

Substance register with data sheets and PPE, plus scored venue risk assessments with sign-off.

Audits & Mock EHO

Ten UK templates, 400+ inspector-style questions, weighted scoring and a site league table.

Staff Training

Assign courses, track completion by person and site, and issue certificates into the HR file.

Review Management

Google, TripAdvisor and your FSA rating in one dashboard with a reputation score per site.

Refusals Register

A digital refusals book filled from the till, ready for the licensing officer.

Cash Management

Safes, floats, banking and an append-only ledger with daily cash-up reconciliation.

Accounting Export

The daily sales journal, supplier bills and payroll journal in Xero’s own import layouts.

KPIs & Reporting

Clock-in accuracy, labour budget, salary utilisation and reputation, per site and per group.

Recipe Costing

Cost dishes from live stock prices, track GP ex-VAT and tag all 14 UK allergens.

Free GP Calculator

Cost a dish, cost a keg by the pint, or price to a target GP. No account needed, VAT handled properly.

Or start at the beginning on the Zynthio homepage, try it with sample data on the live demo, or read practical operator guides on the blog.

Stop paying for your own regulars

Start a 14-day free trial with no card, or book a call and we will walk through the diary, pacing and deposit policies with your service in mind.