Resources
What we have learned about guest data, written down.
Working notes for the people who actually run the book, the floor, and the email list. No gated PDFs, no forms in the way — read what is useful and take it with you.
Playbooks & guides
The operator craft. Examples you can copy, templates you can hand to a manager, and the specific words to use when something has gone wrong.
Review response examples for restaurants
Replies you can adapt for one-star, three-star, and five-star reviews — plus why the obvious ones make things worse.
Win-back emails that don’t lead with a discount
The guest didn’t leave over price. Stop opening as though they did.
What actually counts as a regular
Everyone uses the word. Almost nobody can tell you where the line is.
The guest data audit: what’s already in your systems
You have more than you think and less than you hope. Here is how to find out which.
Service recovery after a bad review
The reply is the smallest part of this. Here is the rest of it.
The pre-service briefing template
What a host actually needs before service, in a form a manager can fill in ninety seconds.
How to segment guests when nobody’s job is marketing
Start from the four audiences worth having, rather than from whatever the tool can filter on.
Anniversary and birthday outreach that isn’t a coupon
Timing is most of the job. Three to four weeks out, not on the day.
How to write a guest note your whole team can use
Describe what the guest wants. Never what the guest is like.
Onboarding a new location into your guest data
What breaks, in what order, and which of it is still cheap to fix.
What to ask a guest-data vendor in a demo
Including the questions that are awkward for us to answer. Those are the point.
Recognising a guest across your concepts
The group knows exactly who she is. The host at the door has never seen her. That gap is the whole problem.
Measurement
How to work out your own numbers. We do not publish industry averages we cannot source — your lapse rate matters and the industry’s does not.
How to calculate your own lapse rate
We are not going to tell you the industry average. It would not help you, and we would be making it up.
Did the campaign actually produce covers?
Opens are close to meaningless. Here is what to count instead.
A guest data health score you can calculate yourself
Four measures, one number, computed from an export you already have.
What average check tells you, and what it hides
A room with a bar and a tasting menu averages to a number that describes nobody sitting in it.
Reading review sentiment without a tool
An afternoon, a spreadsheet, and a quarter of reviews will tell you more than a dashboard will.
Glossary
Plain definitions for the terms that get used loosely in guest-data conversations, including by vendors who should know better.
What is a restaurant CDP?
A definition, and an honest note on when the answer is that you do not need one.
Guest identity resolution, explained
The least glamorous part of guest data, and the part that decides whether any of it works.
What is a guest profile?
A mailing-list row with extra columns is not a profile. Here is the difference.
What is a system of record?
The distinction that determines whether adopting something means retraining your hosts.
Consent and opt-in: the difference
They handed over an email so you could hold a table. That is not permission to send them a newsletter.
Cover, turn, and covers per hour
A cover is not a guest, and confusing the two quietly breaks half of your reporting.
The fastest way to decide is your own data.
Bring an export from the system you already run. We will show you what is in it — including if the answer is “not much yet”.
Request a walkthroughCompliments of the house.