A pound or two per cover feels like nothing. It is the price of a moment's thought at the host stand, a rounding error against the value of the table. That is exactly why per-cover fees are so easy to sign up to and so easy to ignore, and it is exactly why they quietly become one of the larger cheques an independent writes each year.
This is a short piece about the arithmetic, because once you have seen it written down you cannot unsee it. For the full picture of how to choose a booking system, the booking systems guide is the place to start. This is the part of that argument that deserves its own page.
The fee that grows with your success
Most booking platforms that charge per cover pair the fee with a monthly subscription. The subscription you notice, because it is one line on a statement. The per-cover fee you do not, because it is spread across hundreds of small bookings and never arrives as a single shocking number.
Here is the uncomfortable shape of it. The better your venue does, the more covers you take, and the more covers you take, the more you pay. The fee is a percentage of your success, dressed as a convenience. A flat subscription has the opposite shape: as you get busier, the cost per booking falls, because you are spreading the same fixed fee across more covers. One model rewards you for filling the room. The other charges you for it.
A worked example, with made-up but honest numbers
I will not quote a specific platform's current rate, because rates change and I would rather you check the live figure yourself. So treat the following as illustration, not a claim about any one company.
Say the fee is a pound a cover, and you run a few hundred network covers a month. At three hundred covers, that is three hundred pounds a month, three and a half thousand a year, on top of subscription. At a thousand covers, you are at twelve thousand a year before subscription. Add a percentage on any prepaid deposits and the figure climbs again.
Now ask the question that matters. How many of those covers were genuinely new people the platform found for you, and how many were your own regulars, who would have booked direct if your own booking page had been in front of them? Because you are paying the same fee on both. The new diner the marketplace introduced might be worth the pound. Your fortnightly regular, booking through the platform out of habit, is costing you a pound to walk through a door they already know.
When the fee earns its keep
To be fair to the model, there are venues for which per-cover pricing is a sensible deal. If you are a brand-new opening with no audience, a tourist-spot restaurant where most covers come from people passing through, or a venue whose entire marketing problem is discovery rather than retention, a marketplace that puts you in front of searching diners can be worth its fee. You are buying covers you could not get otherwise, and paying for them by the cover is a reasonable way to do that.
The test is simple and honest. Strip out the covers that came from your own regulars and your own marketing. Of what is left, how many would you genuinely never have reached without the platform? If that number is large, the fee is buying you something. If it is small, you are paying a tax on relationships you already built. We go through that trade-off in detail in the OpenTable comparison.
The quiet second cost
There is a cost beyond the money, and it is worth naming. When a guest books through a marketplace, the relationship is, in their mind, partly with the marketplace. The confirmation carries someone else's brand. The next time they want to eat out, they open that app, not your site. You have paid a fee and, in the process, reinforced the habit of going through the middleman rather than coming to you.
A booking page on your own brand, on your own address, does the opposite. It costs you nothing per cover and it trains the guest to come back to you directly. Over a few years that compounds in your favour rather than the platform's.
What to do about it
You do not need to make a dramatic decision. You need to do the sum. Pull your last twelve months of covers that went through any per-cover platform, multiply by the real fee, add the prepayment percentage, and look at the annual figure. Then look at what a flat-fee booking system would cost at that same volume. Our pricing is published in full so you can do exactly that comparison without booking a call.
If the marketplace is genuinely earning its fee in new covers, keep it. If it is mostly charging you to serve your own regulars, you have just found money.
FAQ
What is a per-cover booking fee?
It is a charge a booking platform applies for every diner who books through it, usually on top of a monthly subscription. The fee per cover sounds small, often a pound or two, but it scales with how busy you are, so the more successful your venue becomes, the more you pay. - q: "Are per-cover fees ever worth paying?" a: >- Yes, when the platform is genuinely bringing you covers you would not otherwise have had. If a marketplace introduces new diners who become regulars, the fee on those bookings can pay for itself. The problem is paying the same fee on guests who already know you and would have booked direct. - q: "How do I work out what per-cover fees actually cost me?" a: >- Take your average monthly covers that go through the platform, multiply by the per-cover fee, and add any percentage charged on prepayments or deposits. Compare that annual figure against a flat-fee alternative at the same volume. Do it with your real numbers, not the example on the sales page. - q: "What is the alternative to per-cover pricing?" a: >- A flat monthly fee per venue, where the hundredth booking costs the same as the first. This suits venues whose covers mostly come from people who already know them. We explain where each model fits in our OpenTable comparison.