How to Develop Restaurant Booking App: Complete Guide

Planning a team event or family and friends’ dinner can be one of the most difficult tasks. You need to start with making a list of the number of attendees, their food preferences, list of different restaurants, and get all necessary information. Further, you will need to compare this information and then make a final list. This entire process of restaurant booking is difficult and time-consuming.

Over time, with everything going digital, even the restaurant industry has leveraged technology to serve its customers. Today we can easily order food from the comfort of our home and get it delivered timely. In restaurants, there are robot-waiters, menus have gone digital, and so much more. There is also a change in restaurant table booking!

If you want to build a restaurant reservation app, you are at the right place. Herein, I will walk you through a step-by-step guide on how to make a restaurant booking application. You can follow the steps to get started with your own restaurant booking app.

Furthermore, if you need any technical assistance, you can also hire mobile app developers and share your requirements with them. In any case, this guide should help you learn about the various types of restaurant booking apps you can develop, associated cost, and steps to get started.

Hashtag Structure:

• Types of Restaurant Booking App
• Benefits of Restaurant Booking App
• How to Start with Restaurant Table Booking App Development
• Cost to Develop Restaurant Booking App

Types of Restaurant Booking App:

When you develop restaurant reservation app, one of the major things one needs to consider in deciding the business model is that you can choose from two types of business models according to your business logic when you want to develop a restaurant reservation app. Let’s discuss them in brief:

Aggregator Model:

This model works like a marketplace, and restaurants can register themselves with various restaurant booking apps like yours. For each transaction or table booked, you can charge a fixed amount of money from the restaurants. This model is widely used by companies like Yelp, OpenTable, and more to provide users with recommendations and services.

Advantage:

You can connect with many restaurants and increase your business reach and increase your ROI.

Disadvantage:

Service providers will need to initially invest in developing an application and resources to teach restaurant employees ways to use the software.

Self-owned App:

In this type of model, restaurant owners have a restaurant table app to reserve tables. Herein, restaurants don’t have to pay any money to aggregators per booking.

Advantages:

Restaurant owners can offer customers special discounts, therefore increasing app downloads and customer loyalty.

Disadvantages:

It will be difficult for restaurant owners to increase their customer base and business.

Benefits of Restaurant Booking App:

The major question is how restaurant booking apps will help you and restaurants run their business successfully. So, let’s look at the benefits of restaurant booking system development for customers and restaurant owners:

Customers:

Avoid Long Queues:

One of the major benefits is that users don’t need to stand in long queues outside the restaurant. Using your restaurant booking app, they can easily select their meal slot, book a table, and even pre-order their food. This also provides restaurants with insights into the estimated number of customers for the day to manage staff and food accordingly. It also minimizes food wastage.

Read Reviews and Feedback:

Customers can check reviews and feedback from other visitors, which gives them an insight into hygiene, food quality, serving manners, and more, helping them make quick decisions.

Pre-Order your Food:

If customers have already decided what they are going to eat, they can easily pre-order their food. There is no need to wait for someone to come and take their order, and it even helps the kitchen staff make necessary preparations. In this matter, restaurant businesses should implement text message marketing for restaurants and provide a positive experience to the customers.

Avoid the Hassle of Calling:

Customers don’t need to call the restaurant to book a table, know the menu, give any special instructions if needed, etc. With the help of restaurant table booking apps, they can easily do all the tasks independently as all information will be available in the app. This reduces unnecessary hassle and provides an overall great user experience.

Restaurant Owners:

Good Customer Service:

Providing all the necessary information in the app helps restaurants to provide users with a smooth experience. They can provide users with all the necessary things they might have mentioned while making a reservation. Moreover, the pre-order feature works as a boon for restaurants as it saves plenty of time of ordering after entering the restaurant and helps businesses to work in the best possible way. So, when you develop a restaurant reservation app, don’t miss out on this feature.

Take Reservations Around the Clock:

With the help of the mobile app, you can easily take reservations 24/7. Customers can make reservations when they plan, and you can accept or reject them according to your availability. No need for direct interaction with customers and less back and forth communication.

Provide Menu Online:

You can provide a complete menu in the app that helps users view and pre-order if needed while making reservations. This helps restaurant staff to prepare necessary things beforehand and even avoids food wastage.

Promote Loyalty Programs:

Run special campaigns and provide necessary discounts, which boost your restaurant business. Moreover, you can provide your users with offers, discounts, notify first premium users, etc. these things will help you to keep your customers engaged and keep coming back to you.

There is no limit to the benefits which restaurant booking apps can provide to customers and restaurant owners. When developing an application, you need a technical partner who helps you complete the custom development of restaurant booking applications. Going further, let’s see how to develop a restaurant reservation app that is user-friendly.

How to Start with Restaurant Table Booking App Development

 

Market Research:

This is the first step when starting with table reservation app development. First, you need to carry out necessary market research and understand the target audience. With this data, you can decide the scale and business model of your app. Once the market research ends, you will have answers like demand of your application, major needed features, target audience, potential marketing strategies, etc.

Decide Business Model:

Next step is to decide the business model. As discussed above, there are two types of business models, depending on your business logic and market needs. We prefer to go with an Aggregator model.

Why?

This model works as a marketplace and will help you to connect with more restaurants and provide better service. Moreover, your users can easily view multiple restaurants, compare their costs, menu, and check reviews. This, in turn, helps them to make quick decisions and reserve their tables—all in all, a win-win situation for everyone.

Design Appealing UI/UX:

When starting out with restaurant table booking app development, UI/UX is one of the major factors to retain customers, you need to make sure to have an appealing, intuitive, and interactive user interface. Just think of any banking app you abandoned because you could not understand what was happening; I did it. It’s just the same for your end-users as well; they too might abandon your application.

Provide your customers ease when it comes to using your application. You need to make sure that your application is loading fast, so users are not likely to go to another app, they are easy to understand and use your application, etc.

Make sure the UI/UX of your application is perfect as it will help you increase your ROI, increase customer retention rate, Boost SEO rankings, increase customer loyalty, and help you expand your business. Overall, UX plays a major role in providing a good user experience and customer service. According to research done by intechnic, when UX improves the customer experience, it increases the company’s KPIs by 83% in conversion lift.

Hire Technical Partner:

It is difficult to start with restaurant table booking app development from scratch without the support of an IT company. Reach out to restaurant booking app development companies like us, who will help you develop your application. At Biztech, we have skilled developers who will help you with the complete development of your application. Having been in the industry for more than a decade, we have served 1000+ clients and helped them increase their business. Reach out to us, and we will help you with everything related to app development. We can also provide you with a demo of our prototype restaurant booking application.

Design Features:

Let’s discuss some of the major features you should consider while developing a restaurant booking app. Herein, I’ve highlighted features needed according to your different user-base:

Admin:

• Secure Sign-In: This is the basic feature and must be needed when you start to develop restaurant reservation app. Admin can login into their account by entering their credentials and authorizing them. Once done, they can access their entire account to see the list of their visitors and restaurants and do more in it.
• Approve or Reject Vendors: Upon login, admin can see a complete detailed list of registered vendors/ restaurants. Further, they can verify and authenticate restaurants and, based on it accept or reject the restaurant from listing.
• Manage Vendors: Admin can efficiently manage all the vendors. They can view the complete menu, feedback received from each restaurant, and other confidential information.
• Manage Customers: Admin can view the customers’ first and last names, manage them efficiently, and attend to any concerns.
• Approve or Reject Restaurant Request: Herein, once restaurant owners are authenticated and approved, they can register their restaurant. Further, upon authentication, the admin can approve or reject the restaurant request.

Restaurant Owners:

• Signup/ Login: Restaurant owners can login or sign up for your application to use it further. After login they can view their entire dashboard, where they can add, update, and delete their restaurant details, menu, can view feedback from their users, and more.
• Register Restaurant: Upon signup, restaurant owners can register their restaurants, add all necessary details, upload menus, add all required legal documents, etc., for admin to cross-check and accept or reject restaurants.
• Manage Restaurant Owner Profile: Once the restaurant owner has logged in, they can view the dashboard, view all table bookings, payment status, time of arrival of each customer, and more. They can easily manage their entire profile.
• Configure Restaurant Timings:From their dashboard, vendors can enter their day-wise working hours from their dashboard, special timing for festive seasons, or special events. These changes will reflect in the front-end to their users.
• Instant Booking: If the restaurant owners enable this feature, they don’t need to accept or reject the booking upon getting a customer reservation. It will be accepted automatically and will notify the restaurant owner.
• Offers and Packages for Customers: Vendors can carry out varied marketing activities, run campaigns, provide discounts and offers to their customers. They can promote this on your app and send users SMS when needed.
• View Reviews and Feedback: Restaurant owners can view and approve the reviews and feedback from their customers. In turn, it helps other customers to know their customer service and food quality.

Customers:

• Login: Customers can login to their account and view a list of restaurants, feedback, cost of booking the table, select the number of diners, and more.
• User Profile: Upon login, users can search restaurants, view lists, create a wish list of restaurants they want to visit, manage their entire profile, add and update their details.
• Secure Payment: Once the user has selected the restaurant, they can select the number of diners, make in-app payments, and book a table. You should have a secure payment gateway.
• Wallet Management: Users can also debit and credit money from their bank account in the in-app wallet. This helps to make quick and easy payments without needing to add a card or bank details every time.
• GPS Based Navigation: Users can hassle-free navigate to their desired restaurant.
• Reservation Confirmation: Once users have reserved a table and made a payment, they will get confirmation via SMS, providing full transparency and necessary information to users.

Decide Technical Stack:

This is the most important section of restaurant booking software development as the technology stack determines how robust and scalable your application will be and how many users it can handle. All these things play an important role in making your application successful and retaining your customers.

When you start to develop a restaurant reservation app, you are going to develop your application for Android and iOS. To do so, you have two approaches: Native development and Cross-platform development. Both have their pros and cons.

For native development, you need dedicated developers for each Android and iOS platform. Whereas in cross-platform development, you can hire a resource to make one application that works for Android and iOS. Going further, let’s look at the pros and cons of both and which one to choose.

Native App Development:

Pros:

• Dedicated development will help you to build scalable and robust applications which are dedicated to each operating system.
• Safe and secure

Cons:

• Needs heavy investment
• Fewer chances of code reusability

Cross-Platform App Development:

Pros:

• Faster development
• Lower Cost
• Consistency between platforms
• Easy to reuse code

Cons:

• Lower performance

When it comes to choosing between native and cross-platform app development, we recommend choosing cross-platform development. It is easier to code in it and reach out to a wider audience.

Marketing:

This is the most essential part of making your business successful and expanding your reach. There are multiple ways to market your product and gain more customers.

There are various ways of marketing your application like social media marketing, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), and content marketing. Depending on your business logic, you can start with either of these. We recommend starting with SEO and PPC marketing to rank your website on various search engines like Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. Ranking on these search engines will help you get started.

Next, we recommend you start with social media marketing, post creative content, increase your social media followers and attract the right target audience.

Overwhelmed with all this information? Don’t worry, we have got you covered. You can reach out to us and our strong marketing team will help you with everything. We can help you strategize your marketing plan upon understanding your requirements.

Request a demo with us, and our team will show you the prototype demo and all the necessary features. Giving you insights as to how the app will work.

Cost to Develop Restaurant Booking App:

There are many factors in making a restaurant booking app. Following are factors affecting cost of` restaurant booking app development:

• Google Maps API integration
• Rate of developers
• Location and infrastructure of app development company
• Technical stack
• Time required for restaurant booking app development
• Functionalities and features of the app
• SMS (not integrated yet)

Only a technical person can provide you with all the necessary information for estimated restaurant booking app development costs. Reach out to us, and we will provide you with the right cost estimation.

Wrapping Up

Time to start your own business and tap into the fastest-growing market. Start with restaurant booking app development and provide your users with the ease to book their tables and connect with their loved ones over food. If you still need guidance about how to develop a restaurant reservation app, reach out to us to help you build an intuitive, interactive, and scalable application. We have skilled developers who will help you with custom development from scratch.

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