How your request reaches the restaurant — and what happens if it doesn’t

At a place that does not use Bitebooker you do not book: you request a table. What happens after you press is the part nobody describes, and it is worth describing because it has three different outcomes.

The two channels

We pass the request on ourselves, to whatever contact is publicly listed, and your page says which one:

• «The restaurant was notified on WhatsApp.»
• «The restaurant was notified by email.»

That is not an internal detail: knowing which channel it went out on also tells you how likely it is that somebody looks at it tonight.

The third case, the one we say immediately

«We could not notify the restaurant.» It happens, and not rarely: that place has left us no way to write to it — the public contact is missing, or is no longer theirs.

We say so the moment you send the request, in a red box, not three hours later. The difference between a wait and a pointless wait is exactly that: the first is how a request normally works, the second is an evening lost in front of a page that will not change.

What we do anyway: the request is recorded and a person works on it. What is worth doing: if you need the table tonight, phone.

By when

When you send it we tell you by when to expect an answer — a day and a time, not «we’ll let you know». Past that, the request counts as expired, and it says so in precise words: *«Time ran out without an answer. It does not mean the place is full: it means they did not answer us.»*

Those are two different things, and confusing them makes people think badly of a restaurant that may well have had the table.

The possible answers

Besides waiting and expiring there are three:

• table confirmed — it is there, nothing else to do;
• they cannot — no room at that time;
• they propose another time — the only answer that leaves a decision to you, which is why it stays at the top of «My bookings» until you make it.

If the restaurant writes a line or two, you will find it underneath: it is theirs, and we do not touch it.

One thing that cannot be done from here

Withdrawing a request once it has gone out. There is no button, and the page does not pretend there is: you phone, or you let it expire. How to cancel an actual booking instead — that one does have a button — is in another article.