Restaurant charge $235 for cancellations or no-shows
Sydney restaurants have had enough of diners who cancel at the last minute or fail to show up at all.
They are now slugging them as much as $235 which basically covers the full cost of the missed meal.
And it seems this is now becoming the standard at an increasing number of both low and high-end venues.
The strategy is simple: hit the diner where it hurts, on their credit card.
Celebrity chef Matt Moran, who runs a few high-end venues including his Sydney Harbour flagship Aria, doesn’t do it every time but says he does slug last-minute cancellations for groups of 10 and over.
He charges $50 per person per last-minute cancellation for groups.
“If we get a cancellation 24 or 48 hours out ... that’s fine. No problem. But 30 minutes before a booking on a Saturday night? You can’t do that,” Moran told the Daily Telegraph.
“And if your profit margins are only five or 10 per cent, it ends up costing you a fortune.
“That’s the cream at the end of the night. So I can understand why restaurants do it.”
Other highly-regarded eateries Cirrus ($100 per person), Rockpool ($50) and the newly-opened Chin Chin ($20),Tetsuya’s ($230), Momofuku Seibo ($180) or Quay ($175) now enforce a fee if bookings are cancelled within 24 or even 48 hours.
Sepia co-owner Vikki Wild has been enforcing the $235-a-head fee for years and is sticking to the tough policy.
“It’s the same as buying a ticket to a show, for example. If you can’t go you don’t necessarily get a refund,” Wild told the Daily Telegraph.
Double Bay’s Pink Salt’s operator Evan Hansimikali charges fees only for large groups who pull out of bookings.
The big frustration, he says, is that group of diners who use reservations to “shop around”.
by Leon Gettler, November 21st 2017
image - AFR
