Are reservations recommended?

摘要

Reservations in restaurants offers operational benefits such as regulated flow of work, demand estimation and improved staffing and sourcing decisions especially when variable costs are high. Reservations are valuable to the restaurant when business is slow, but costly when demand is high. In customer perspective, reservations are valued if they knew the market were small, but would prize them highly on busy nights. The paper has tried to examine whether a restaurant should offer reservations with an emphasis on the ability of reservations to shape customer behavior using a model with uncertain demand. It has also analyzed the trade-off between reservations and relying on walk-in traffic and has proposed strategies for mitigating no-shows. (30 refs.)