Across Eatsy's restaurant partners, no-shows have dropped from 25% to 8%, 20% to 5%, 30% to 4% — not by luck, but with a systematic four-layer defense.

Pause first, though: not every restaurant needs all four layers. Cafés, bistros, yakiniku spots, and private kitchens all have very different customer bases, ticket sizes, and service rhythms. Assess your business type and current no-show pain before deciding which layers to enable and how aggressively. Each layer below calls out "good fit" and "side effects of overuse" so you can make the call.

Layer 1: Automatic reminders (on by default)

Eatsy enables this out of the box, zero setup:

Booking confirmed → SMS + Email immediately to the customer
3 days before the meal → Reminder SMS (gives the customer time to actively reschedule or cancel — easier to absorb than a same-day surprise)
1 day before → Final reminder

This layer alone typically drops no-shows from 20%+ down to around 12%. Reason: half of all no-shows aren't malicious — they're "I forgot." A 3-day reminder gives anyone with a conflict time to cancel so the seat can be re-released; the 1-day reminder is the safety net.

Don't turn off reminders. SMS has a per-message cost (carrier fee), but the revenue lost on each no-show massively outweighs the SMS cost: roughly NT$ 1 per SMS vs. NT$ 800–2,000 lost per no-show.

SMS tone and customer age tier

Customizing SMS by age tier is currently a manual strategy — assess your regulars and adjust. Common considerations:

Customers skewing 50+: more formal wording, avoid abbreviations, include the full restaurant name and phone so they can call back easily
Customers skewing 25–40: more casual tone is fine; consider adding a follow-up reminder via your LINE Official Account (younger people often miss SMS)
Mixed ages: lead with the formal version; keep the message short — focus on "date + time + party size + cancellation link"
High proportion of older guests: the 3-day reminder is especially important — schedule changes are more disruptive for them, so they need earlier notice

Layer 2: Deposits (for high-risk slots)

Deposits aren't a silver bullet, but they're the most direct lever to suppress no-shows. Key principle: collect surgically, not broadly.

Deposits are the most effective tool — and also the easiest way to push customers away. Think hard about whether your business type fits: high-ticket dinner, special occasions, and private kitchens make sense; relaxed cafés, casual eats, and family restaurants may lose 30% of customers to a deposit requirement.

Decision matrix:

Slots with no-show < 5%: don't collect
Slots with no-show 5%–15%: selectively collect (large parties / weekend dinner)
Slots with no-show > 15%: collect across the slot

Detailed setup: see Deposit Setup & Refund Policy.

Real-world effect: slots with deposits enabled typically see no-shows drop from 15% to under 3%. Even with a 10% conversion-rate dip, total revenue still goes up.

Layer 3: Booking "needs confirmation" mode

A more advanced setting — after the customer fills out the booking, the booking enters "pending confirmation" and the restaurant decides whether to accept it from the back office.

When to enable needs-confirmation

Special periods (Lunar New Year, NYE, Mother's Day): manual table assignment needed
First-time customers: verify the phone number is real (a 30-second call does it)
Large parties (8–10+ people) — recommend always requiring confirmation: large-party no-shows are the most damaging (one party = the whole evening's table turnover lost), and one manual call costs almost nothing — best ROI

You can scope this locally — e.g., "auto-accept weekday lunch, require confirmation for weekend dinner." Customers see "Currently pending confirmation, the restaurant will text you once confirmed" on the booking-success screen.

Note: needs-confirmation reduces booking conversion (some customers won't wait), so only use it for slots where it really matters.

Public notice: not confirmed = auto-cancelled

Once needs-confirmation is on, make sure to write this clearly on the booking page, IG bio, Google Business description, and in-store signage:

"After submission, your booking is pending. The restaurant will SMS you to confirm. If you don't reply to the confirmation link within X hours, your booking is automatically released."

This notice is the necessary companion — without it, customers assume the booking is locked in, relax, and don't show up. The needs-confirmation mode then becomes a source of complaints instead of protection.

Should you proactively contact unconfirmed customers?

Don't always notify, don't never notify — let booking status decide:

Hot slot / fully booked: customer didn't confirm in time → release the seat, don't reach out (the auto-cancel handles it; the public notice covered expectations)
Cold slot / open seats: customer didn't reply → proactively LINE/call to save it, flip the booking to confirmed — the seat would otherwise sit empty
Large party (8+): regardless of slot, make one outreach attempt — the loss is too big; one phone call saves a whole table

Layer 4: Customer segmentation and blacklist

A long-term asset that compounds. Eatsy's back office tracks per customer:

Past booking count
Arrivals / no-show count
First visit date

You can use this to:

Automated rules

2+ no-shows → next booking requires a deposit
3+ no-shows → blacklisted (system rejects future bookings from that phone number)
5+ perfect arrivals + zero no-shows → VIP, priority seating / proactive invitations on special days

Manual recognition

Each morning when reviewing "Today's bookings," the system flags high-risk customers in red. For these:

Proactively call to confirm they'll come
For large parties, don't leave only one "emergency" table
Mental prep: if this booking no-shows, have a backup plan to fill the seat fast

Companion: announcements & social cross-posting

No-show prevention isn't only a back-office setup — expectation management is half the battle. Sync your rules across:

In-store signage: booking policy, deposit policy, auto-cancel rule
Google Business: in the "booking info" or description field, write "Reservation required / deposit policy"
IG / FB profiles: link "booking guide" in bio + a Story Highlight; post a Story when new rules go live so regulars know
Booking confirmation page: state the rules one more time (the last reminder before they leave the site)

Reason: most no-shows aren't malicious — they're caused by not knowing the rules. Normalizing the rules across every touchpoint is more reliable than relying purely on deposits, and far less likely to bruise the relationship.

Real-world cases

"Wine Bistro (Taichung, 40 seats): no-show 25% → 8%, weekend revenue NT$120K → NT$138K"

All four layers on, results visible in month two. The key: the manager reviewed data every two weeks and tuned deposit slots.

"Yakitori Izakaya (Taipei, 28 seats): table turnover 1.6 → 1.92, no-show 20% → 5%"

Heavily reliant on customer segmentation — promoted frequent regulars to VIP, sent IG Story invites for repeat visits, no-show rate fell into a positive cycle.

"Independent Café (Taipei, 20 seats): show-up rate 70% → 88%, repeat-visit rate 22% → 40%"

Only Layer 1 + Layer 4 enabled (no deposit — afraid of scaring off the artsy café crowd). Mostly relied on data tracking + warm interactions with regulars; significant improvement in three months.

Don't do this

Treat no-shows as a life-or-death war and gate every table — dining should be relaxing. If your no-show is already < 8% with reasonable ticket size, there's no need to squeeze another 1–2% by making the experience feel like airport security. Assess your business type and current pain first; calibrate severity accordingly.
Open deposits on every slot before you have a month of data — without seeing the distribution, you're handing customers to competitors
Blacklist customers after a single no-show — too strict; they may have had a real emergency; give 2–3 chances
Rely on a single mechanism — reminders alone (too soft), deposits alone (drives customers away), segmentation alone (no live effect) — combine them
Set rules but never look at the report — without review you can't tell which slots are improving and which are getting worse

Execution plan: two-week checkpoints

A single week's data is too easily distorted by weather, holidays, and one-off events; two weeks is more stable, and avoids exhausting staff with weekly rule changes.

Week 0 (Day 1): launch; confirm automatic reminders (3 days + 1 day before) are on; sync the booking guide across in-store signage, IG bio, and Google Business
Week 2 (Day 14) — first checkpoint: review two weeks of no-show data and slot distribution; identify high-no-show slots; consider enabling deposits or needs-confirmation for them
Week 4 (Day 28) — second checkpoint: check whether conversion dropped sharply after enabling deposits/confirmation; whether no-show hit your target (by business type: < 5% for high-ticket, < 12% for casual eats / cafés is reasonable); maintain if on-target, otherwise tune
Week 6 onward: review every two weeks, adjust gradually month over month

Want to run the numbers for your own restaurant? Tools handy:

No-Show Loss Calculator — see your annual no-show loss
Table Turnover Revenue Calculator — extra monthly revenue from +0.5 turnover
Restaurant Health Check — one scan of your top-priority metrics