What do booking commissions really cost a restaurant?

How does a per-cover commission compound over a year?

Because the fee is charged per cover or per booking, the annual cost is a direct function of volume: weekly covers booked through the platform, multiplied by the fee per cover, multiplied by 52 weeks. A venue that increases its covers through the platform — the outcome the platform is meant to help with — sees its commission bill grow in step. Rates and fee structures vary by contract and by platform, so this is arithmetic to run with your own numbers rather than a published table.

As a purely illustrative example, with figures the reader should replace with their own contract terms: a venue booking 60 covers a week through a platform, at an example rate of two euros per cover, is looking at roughly 120 euros a week, or around 6,000 euros over a year. Doubling either the covers or the rate roughly doubles the total. The exercise is only useful once run with the actual rate on the venue's own invoice, not an example figure.

Which bookings are you actually paying for?

Not every booking made through a platform required the platform. Some guests are regulars who searched for the venue by name and happened to book through its interface; others genuinely discovered the venue through the platform and would not have found it otherwise. The commission is charged the same way for both, but only the second group represents value the venue could not have captured on its own.

This distinction is easy to overlook because the invoice does not make it for you: a platform bills every booking at the same rate, whether it originated from a search for the venue by name or from a search for restaurants in the area. Separating the two, even roughly, is what turns a single commission total into a decision-useful number.

• Ask guests, or check booking notes, for how they found the venue.
• Compare the share of bookings from first-time guests against regulars over a few months.
• A high share of repeat guests booked through a platform is a strong signal that a direct channel would capture most of that volume for less.

How do you work out the break-even point?

The comparison is between the annual commission total and the annual cost of a fixed-price alternative — a subscription-based booking tool or a booking option bundled with an existing digital menu. Below a certain volume of platform-driven bookings, the commission model can cost less than a flat subscription; above it, the fixed cost becomes cheaper. That crossover point depends entirely on each venue's covers, average commission and the price of the alternative, so it needs calculating per venue rather than assumed.

A useful check is to recompute the comparison twice a year rather than once: a venue's covers, its share of platform-driven discovery and the platform's own fee structure can all change, and a break-even point calculated at opening may no longer hold two seasons later.

• Total the last twelve months of commission actually paid, from invoices.
• Estimate what share of those bookings needed platform discovery.
• Compare that adjusted figure with the annual cost of a fixed subscription.

Is there a tool to run these numbers?

The French version of this guide includes an interactive calculator that takes monthly covers, the commission per cover and the average ticket, and returns the monthly and annual cost along with its share of revenue. It is a useful starting point even for an English-speaking venue, since the arithmetic behind it is provider-agnostic — only the labels are in French.

None of its default values are a published platform rate: they are placeholders the reader replaces with the figures on their own contract and their own covers. The result is only as accurate as the numbers entered, which is precisely the point — a generic average would hide the differences that matter between one venue and the next.

What should you do with the result?

The result is a starting point for a conversation with the team, not an instruction to cancel a platform contract the same week. Front-of-house staff, who see how guests actually book day to day, often have a better sense of the real discovery-versus-repeat split than the invoice alone can show.

• If platform-driven discovery is a small share of bookings, test moving regulars to a direct or menu-embedded booking link.
• If discovery is a large share, keep the platform for now and revisit the calculation after a season.
• Re-run the comparison whenever covers, the commission rate or the venue's own channels change materially.
• Treat the break-even point as a decision aid, not a one-off verdict — recheck it as the venue's mix of guests changes.

Frequently asked questions