Capitalise on Reservation Demand with Availability Scanning in Distil

Guest demand is a precious thing – it’s the ultimate return on investment for your careful attention and hard work creating exceptional experiences, memorable food and a vibe that’s unforgettable.

When a guest chooses you for their next reservation, you’ve won! But what if something unexpected derails their online reservation flow and they don’t complete the booking? Disaster! Because they’ll probably try somewhere else and that’s revenue you’re missing out on.

These unintended blockers can seriously impact a restaurant’s online booking availability – and every lost cover is lost revenue, which can mean the difference between surviving and thriving.

Introducing Availability Scanning, part of Distil Diagnostics – the tool that makes it quicker and easier for restaurants to maximise reservations by spotting online availability blockers and fix the issues in minutes.

Let’s get into it

• From Chasing Down Blockers to Fixing Them
• Capitalise on Diner Demand
• Weekly Visibility, Granular Insights
• Smarter Filters, Sharper Focus
• More Time, More Reservations

From Chasing Down Blockers to Fixing Them

For central support teams, tracking down the root cause of missed reservations and blocked availability is often slow and manual: diving into individual restaurant profiles, checking a whole host of settings and making changes. It’s detective work that requires a skilled eye from team members who also need to focus on the bigger business challenges.

Instead of chasing problems for hours, Availability Scanning in Distil Diagnostics gives you instant visibility of availability blockers, and crucially, explains why they are happening – so your team can spend their time capitalising on demand, not hunting for answers.

Capitalise on Diner Demand

You’ve got diners searching for times and tables and if your restaurant isn’t shown in the search results, you’d want to know why – right?

We think so, and together with our partners at OpenTable, we’ve done the hard work in the background to bring new visibility to this data. It’s now quicker and easier for anyone to see why online reservations are blocked at certain times and for certain party sizes in Distil.

Behind the scenes, Distil is scanning every OpenTable restaurant profile in your group every 15 minutes to 1 hour, checking for blocked availability.

The result: a near real-time picture of what’s really happening with your booking slots each week for the next 5 weeks.

Weekly Visibility, Granular Insights

See instantly at a group level exactly where the availability blockers are – broken down by every restaurant, every day, in 15-minute increments.

Hover-over reasons make it clear why a slot isn’t available and drill-down views let you zoom in on specific restaurants and times.

Sometimes, being fully booked is the best problem to have, but if there are blockers holding back reservations unnecessarily, Availability Scanning doesn’t just show you when, it shows you why:

• No times exist
• Blocked
• Above max party size
• Too far in advance
• Not far enough in advance

Delve further into which settings might need adjusting with the Capacity Report feature. Explore how the different settings are impacting your online reservation availability.

In the example below, you’ll notice that at 6:30 pm no tables are available to book, yet the total covers show 0.

This usually indicates that a large party is scheduled at that time. After confirming the party, take a closer look at the report: you’ll see flow control at 180%, meaning the party size has been fully counted toward your pacing.

If you were to switch on “Exclude party from pacing count” in OpenTable, the system will free up some smaller booking slots without increasing the actual pace.

Large parties rarely arrive all at once or exactly on time, so while the kitchen prepares for them – often with pre-ordered items – the FOH team can still comfortably manage a few smaller tables.

It’s proactive insight, so you can stay one step ahead and stop issues before they cost you reservations.

Smarter Filters, Sharper Focus

Not all availability issues are equal. Some are simple fixes, while others compound to create hours of missed covers. Availability Scanning and Capacity Analysis helps you cut through the noise and focus on what matters most:

• Filter by party size to highlight where high-value bookings are being lost
• Filter by length of unavailability to bring the biggest blockers to the top of the list
• Drill down by 15-minute increments, per shift, per restaurant
• Identify individual settings so you know where to act to resolve the issue.

This ensures your team’s attention is always on the issues that will have the biggest impact on revenue.

More Time, More Reservations

Availability Scanning turns detective work into decisive action.

Central support leaders, reservation managers and operators can spend less time trawling through settings and more time doing what matters: resolving issues, supporting restaurants, and keeping guests booking.

It’s about giving your whole team the same data, the same clarity, and the same focus – so you can maximise reservations and turn lost bookings into revenue growth.