Bookings best bits: Top 7 new Bookings features in 2023

Every month the Zonal Product teams release new and innovative features to our full suite of hospitality technology solutions, all aimed at helping our customers achieve their business goals, and ensuring everything in-venue runs as smoothly as possible.

For those who haven’t had the time to explore some of the great new functionality we’ve added to Zonal Bookings this year, we’ve summarised our top seven features released during 2023

1. Central reservations  

If you manage multiple sites within an organisation and would benefit from central sales, then this one is for you. You can view and manage all your sites within the Events Host app without having to log in and out of each site. Views can be filtered by site, as well as all the usual handy options, in addition to allowing you to keep tabs on all your properties and their bookings in one space. Along with Central Res came the convenient feature of Labels. This allows users to assign labels to bookings internally. As opposed to Tags, Labels allows users to define the labels themselves – for example, by department or booking feature. What’s more, our invoicing functionality automatically creates an invoice for each reservation with the ability to link the invoice to all requirements including pre-orders and payments, decreasing the time spent manually inputting invoice requirements.

2. Tasks

Along with the “Central Reservations” feature, you can also assign tasks to bookings.  You can add a To Do, email or to call prompt or a deadline to a booking.  The task will pop up in your notifications tab at the top of your Host screen to remind you to complete at the set time. Perfect for chasing Christmas bookings, menus, or deposits.

3. User audit details in Tables 

In addition to the current history button shown on a booking, you can now see details of which user has made changes to availability settings within Tables Host.  If you use the pin lock option, then it will still show the name of the user who made the changes using their pin lock. No more questioning who or when a change to availability was made, with admin access, businesses can now view a complete audit trail to clear up any confusion.

4. Pre-order choices 

For those using our pre-order functionality, a great addition to the guest place cards had been made, giving the site the option to print the guests’ choices onto their place card.  A lifesaver for busy events – sites no longer need to worry about people forgetting their orders!

5. Menu and occasion exclusions

For any occasion you have created, you can also select up to 10 dates that you do not want that occasion to be available to book.  So, for example if you have a standard restaurant occasion set up running every day but you have a special event coming up where you don’t want restaurant bookings to show online at the same time as your event you can add an exclusion for that day.  A good example would be Christmas party nights – you would have a Christmas occasion running on specific dates in December and you wouldn’t want guests booking on a regular restaurant booking at the same time. This allows for increased flexibility and control over your occasions.

6. Table shuffle  

The Shuffle feature within our Table Management solution has been further refined to enhance capacity optimisation and assist hosts in maximizing revenue while simplifying the process for staff. The latest updates to this functionality both ensured that shuffled tables remained within their designated areas, as well as taking this further to provide venues with the ability to shuffle tables per bookable area, granting hosts greater flexibility in managing their spaces and boosting overall capacity utilisation.

7. Improved guest portal  

The Guest Portal in Group Bookings has seen notable updates this year to enhance the user experience. Hosts now can log in and manage guest activities, streamlining attendee additions by allowing bulk actions instead of individual entries. Venues can configure pre-ordering journeys in a booking by menu type by either requiring the organising guest to pre-order all items, or if they need to add each attendee who can then action this themselves, simplifying what can be a complex process. Moreover, the integration of our EPoS significantly benefits support teams, addressing issues related to deposit synchronisation. Additional improvements include extended email timing and enhanced management of time slots and events within the portal. These updates aim to provide more comprehensive functionality and ease of use for customers, creating a more efficient booking experience.

Find out more about Zonal Bookings, or get in touch today and our team of hospitality technology experts will be happy to talk you through what’s possible.