Cancel protection for phone reservations

TableCheck

Nov 2, 2018 - 1 min read

Cancel protection for phone reservations

TableCheck announced the release of an upgrade of their most prominent feature, Cancel Protection.

Cancel Protection was first introduced as an add-on feature in June 2017 to minimize no-shows and sudden cancellations by making credit card information a mandatory requirement when making online reservations. Currently, there are over 800 shops registered with this feature. The new Cancel Protection feature will be available for both online and phone reservations, and restaurants are able to apply for this new feature from 5th November 2018,

TableCheck sampled 906 people in Japan to find out consumers’ reservation habits, and discovered that despite the heavy usage of online technology, the predominant way for customers to make reservations is still via phone, with 60% of respondents replying that they call restaurants to make a booking. Given that the previous Cancel Protection only covers online reservations, TableSolution has extended Cancel Protection’s coverage to phone reservations to ensure that all reservations are guarded and secured.

Cancel Protection requires customers to provide their credit card details at the time they make a reservation, so if they cancel unexpectedly, it allows restaurants to charge a cancellation fee from their pre-registered credit card. Cancel Protection for Phone Reservations works similarly to online reservations; when a customer calls the restaurant to make a booking, the restaurant will create a reservation on TableCheck. The system will then send the customer an SMS or email with a link for them to fill in their credit card details: meanwhile, the reservation will be displayed as ‘pending’ on the reservation list. Upon receiving the customer's credit card information, the reservation status will automatically be updated to ‘confirmed.’ However, if TableCheck does not receive the credit card details within the allocated time, the ‘pending’ reservation would be void and automatically be removed from the reservation list.

This upgraded feature requires no extra procedures, devices, or applications: restaurants would only need to create the reservations in TableCheck like how they normally would and the rest will be automated by the system.