Archives for all posts by Ronnie Somerville

Coronavirus

COVID-19 UK Diners Survey

5pm.co.uk and simpleERB.com surveyed 3689 restaurant goers, (all users of 5pm.co.uk), to find out about their attitudes to dining out when restaurants re-open.
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Coronavirus

What will restaurants have to do to survive and succeed in a Covid19 world?

The ubiquitous presence of Covid19 in our society, until and if, a successful vaccine is discovered, tested, manufactured and administered to the majority of the population is going to demand substantial changes in social behaviour. This article attempts to discuss the practical measures that restaurateurs...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Hotels

How to clean a hotel (or restaurant) in a CoVid19 world

If you want to see how to clean a restaurant or hotel in a CoVid19 world, have a look at what Singapore has done. It has launched a scheme to audit hotels and give them a clean bill of health if they meet 7 criteria.
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Coronavirus

Coronavirus infection at neighbouring tables in restaurant due to direction of air conditioning

Chinese academic paper linking #Coronavirus infection at neighbouring tables in #restaurant due to direction of air conditioning airflow. “During January 26–February 10, 2020, an outbreak of 2019 novel coronavirus disease in an air-conditioned restaurant in Guangzhou, China, involved 3 family clusters...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Facebook group for restaurant success after Covid19

We have launched a Facebook Group for restaurants to get and share tips and advice about how to plan for success after CoVid19. You can join here To date, users have indicated that creating a marketing plan is their top priority. So we will be posting daily advice on that. We have also looked at how...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Foodie

James Bond dines - from Casino Royale

James Bond dines – from Casino Royale Casino Royale book cover “But it was only an infinitesimal clink of foils and as the bowing maitre d’hotel led them through the crowded room, it was forgotten as Bond in her wake watched the heads of the diners turn to look at her. The fashionable part of the restaurant...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

simpleERB Release 15.5

simpleERB Update – Release 15.5 We have added a few new things to make life easier and fixed a few things, Merry Christmas! Problem putting walk-in on a table with compromised stay time from bookings page You can now select compromised tables from the booking dropdown – compromised tables are listed...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

simpleERB features

Forward bookings and restaurant business planning

Forward bookings in simpleERB In our latest release (15.5.1) we have one feature that we would like to talk about in more depth. This is “Forward Bookings”. It is a simple report but we think it could be very useful to you in your planning. It allows you to compare your forward bookings for a period...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

GDPR and data protection self assessment guide

If you are a simpleERB restaurant, under the GDPR regulations you are the “Data Controller” and we are a “Data Processor” for you. (If you use an email programme like MailChimp to send marketing emails to your customers, then MailChimp is a “Data Processor” for you as well.) The ICO (@ICOnews) have ...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

simpleERB – an introduction

Hi, this is the blog for simpleERB. We mostly blog about restaurant reservations and restaurant “customer relationship management” but we like to do foodie stuff as well. simpleERB solves lots of problems for restaurateurs, probably more than you imagined! Like “How to get a better price for your restaurant...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Fun stuff

What is a restaurant uniform? HMRC get their cake and eat it too.

black jeans are uniform but not tax deductible 43 businesses in the hospitality industry featured in the Minimum Wage Blacklist, including names like TGI Friday’s and Marriott Hotels. Around 9,200 workers will receive £1.1m in unpaid wages, and the employers were slapped with £1.3m in penalties. UK...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Payments

Bank of Amazon could woo 70 million US customers within five years

We read this interesting article about Amazon creating a ” Bank of Amazon “. Here is our take on it. Amazon has 80m+ Prime members, rising. Amazon gets 50% of revenue from 3rd party resellers. Amazon and the 3rd party resellers all pay the Visa/MC interchange fee “tax” Visa/MC can only keep charging...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Can I use 4g for my restaurant reservation software?

Is 4g a viable alternative to broadband for restaurants using simpleERB for restaurant reservations? It is a common situation now for people to find that the 4g data speeds are better than the landline broadband speeds available to them. 4g routers are now commonly available. We often get asked: is ...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Restaurant noshow - take deposits or hold creditcard numbers? Which best?

In our last blog post we looked at the question of whether having taken a deposit from a customer or taken a credit card number from a customer, who was a noshow it made sense to “enforce“ it. We said that that question could be answered objectively by looking at the lifetime value of the customer....
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Should I enforce a deposit or cancellation fee for restaurant noshows ? The maths!

In the vexed question of how to deal with restaurant noshows there are two arguments. One of them goes like this: theatres, cinemas, airlines, holiday companies…. none of them give consumers a refund if the customer can’t make it. Why should restaurants be different? Why should they not charge at least...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

simpleERB features

Alternative to ResDiary to reduce restaurant no shows

If you’re looking for an alternative to ResDiary to reduce restaurant no shows, a curse for restaurateurs, here’s how to reduce them to near zero. If a restaurant is working on a small profit margin, a few no shows on a busy night can be the difference between working for nothing and turning a profit...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

Restaurant wants BAD Yelp reviews!

Restaurant wants BAD Yelp reviews! “Botto Bistro in Richmond is not very concerned about its Yelp rating. In fact, in an effort to undermine the reliability of its Yelp page, the five-year-old Italian restaurant is on a mission to be the worst-rated restaurant in the Bay Area.” See the full article ...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Foodie

Restaurant manners and playing with food

Restaurant manners and playing with food This is from PJ O’Rourke’s “Modern Manners”, which is thoroughly recommended by the team at simpleERB. The table manners you have in a restaurant are very different from those you have in the home of a friend because, in a restaurant, you’re allowed to play with...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Fun stuff

How do you deal with email on vacation?

How do you deal with email on vacation? Thanks to the most excellent PHDcomics.com Original here
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

Mobile payments being looked at seriously by the restaurant industry.

Mobile payments being looked at seriously by the restaurant industry. “Restaurants of all types are looking seriously at implementing electronic payments, and customers in all restaurant types will increasingly see and use payment technology. Although the restaurant industry has been cautious in adopting...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Reviews

"Yelp drives the chefs crazy" - John Favreau

Catherine Hanly of the most estimable “Hot Dinners” blog tells us that when asked about how chefs view critics, John Favreau, director of the movie “Chef” said: “I think the frustration they’re railing against isn’t critics – it’s really the internet/blogosphere – the Yelp people who write about the...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Restaurant CRM, (and the best home page video ever)

This is a video for a CRM company. It’s lovely. I think it is possibly the best homepage video that I have ever seen. Big companies have CRM systems. That stands for Customer Relationship Management. The best at it are people like Amazon; they know what you like, they send you tailored recommendations...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Is your restaurant discoverable?

Useful infographic from GoDaddy. Is your restaurant discoverable? Some time taken on making sure that your restaurant is correctly listed will be time well spent! Don’t forget to include your booking widget from simpleERB to convert those views into bookings! (click to make infographic full screen) ...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Hotels

Hotels' admin.bookings missing out on restaurant reservations

Attention admin.bookings administrators! “Hotels are missing out on restaurant booking revenue” Micros. According to a Micros study few hotels offer online booking for their restaurants when customers are booking their rooms. (See below for excerpt*.) This is a missed opportunity. simpleERB gives hotels...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

The perfect burger AND the perfect pizza?

(Heston Blumenthal is a British chef with 3 Michelin stars and a perfect 10/10 from The Good Food Guide for his restaurant The Fat Duck.) When he announced plans to open a restaurant in Heathrow’s new Terminal 2, it was widely reported to be a casual cafe serving British fast food favourites. Which...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

Restaurants "Missing 85% of feedback posted about them", say Gartner

How much customer feedback are you aware of? According to the Location Based Marketing Association: “Historically, merchants have been primarily concerned with structured feedback (online reviews) from review sites like Yelp and CitySearch. In fact, unstructured data is growing at a faster pace and ...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

simpleERB features

6 dynamite reasons why Deal Seekers mean you need an ERB

Experian did a great piece of research and came up with 6 categories of “deal seeking consumers”. Deal-Seeker Influentials —always seeking the best deal and the next hot thing. Offline Deal-Seekers —best deals, traditional media. Deal Thrillers — love their deals, but are brand loyalists too. Deal ...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Fun stuff

The best Easter bunny is a dead one. Right?

New Zealand pizza chain Hell Pizza, (yes, “Hell Pizza”) are promoting themselves for Easter with a special rabbit pizza on a billboard made from rabbit skins. The display features the tagline “Made from real rabbit. Like this billboard.” After a bit of Twitter storm, Hell Pizza posted a note on its...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Fun stuff

The new rules of modern restaurant etiquette, do you agree?

The Independent ran a piece today about modern restaurant etiquette , (for diners and restaurateurs.) e.g. for Diners 4. Thou Shalt Not Do a Stupid Squiggle in the Air Once, to ask for the bill, you snapped your fingers and yelled, “Garçon! LaddEESHee-on!” Now you sketch a rudimentary signature in the...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Do you Google your customers before they arrive? This restaurant does.

“At 3:30 p.m., in the back office of Eleven Madison Park, maître d’ Justin Roller is Googling the names of every guest who will come in that night. It’s a well-known tactic of the restaurant, an effort to be as familiar as possible with the diners.” An article in New York magazine describes the lengths...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

Octopus head gear for chefs

Taste of London got a fancy toque for Duck and Waffle chef Daniel Doherty.
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Fun stuff

New cure for hangover? Don't try this at home

I came across this in the letters page of New Scientist magazine “Shocking Discovery From (name with held) When I was an apprentice electrician many years ago, my fingers strayed across live positive and negative terminals, and I cursed myself for being so careless. However, I suddenly realized that...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Reviews

Is Yelp actually better than traditional restaurant critics?

I found this interesting article in The Restaurant Manifesto called Critics Under Review – quote below – is this fair? “But new restaurants are like toddlers that need time to shed their baby fat; they must learn to crawl before they can walk or—in the most hyped cases—learn to fly up to their lofty...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

Customers reject instore tracking

Survey shows that customers aren’t keen on instore tracking. Of course restaurateurs know where their customers are 🙂
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Fun stuff

Is it legal to tattoo waitpersons' hands?

Is it legal to tattoo waitpersons’ hands? I recently put a blog post up about how to get important messages across to staff. In it I joked that a restaurateur might put “tattoos on waiters’ hands”, but that that probably wasn’t legal. Today I got an email from a waitress , (I will call her Avril), who...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Do you capture the contact details of EVERYONE in a big party?

You know that you can make your restaurant more profitable if you can capture your customers’ emails and market to them. That’s why you are using simpleERB or considering using it. simpleERB makes that stuff easy. However, there is one type of situation where you may still be missing a trick. The “Big...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Foodie

The apotheosis of toasted cheese?

Not a technical post today, but, IMHO, one of the finest pieces of food writing in the English language. To my knowledge it has never been anthologised. (Let me know if I am wrong!) It comes from Samuel Beckett’s novel, “More pricks than kicks” and is set in Dublin. Below is an extract. I’ve taken out...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Foodie

Quite a lunch!

“….. the lunch described by George Musgrave seventy years earlier in a travel book about Normandy. He watched a couple (on their honeymoon, he thought) on board the river steamer at Rouen consuming a midday meal of soup, fried mackerel, beefsteak, French beans and fried potatoes, an omelette fines herbs...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Should a restaurant have a website or is a Facebook page ok?

Nowadays it’s tempting for a restaurant just to stick up a Facebook page and think, “I won’t bother about a proper website”. Yes, Facebook is a quick solution and you should have one (and you can take online bookings from there via simpleERB!) but you shouldn’t go without a proper website for too long...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

simpleERB features

Dealing with coupon & daily deal companies made easy

Used properly, coupon companies can bring you useful additional business but it can also be a complete pain to manage the flood of bookings they produce. You are working on a very reduced margin with these customers and everything spent on additional admin comes straight off your profit. We’ve created...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

simpleERB features

Gordon Ramsay sabotage: why a paper restaurant diary is risky

The Guardian: “For almost a decade, the mysterious theft of a reservation book from the top London restaurant where Gordon Ramsay made his name has baffled the culinary world. An unidentified man pulled up outside the Aubergine restaurant on a scooter, dived in, snatched the book – in the days before...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

simpleERB features

Why every restaurant should have a Manager’s Day Book

It has always been good practice to use a Day Book or Manager’s Log so that shifts can communicate with each other. The restaurant advice site restaurantowner.com has “Using a Manager’s Log” as its priority number one when setting out routines for the day-to-day running of your restaurant. Manager’s...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

What makes a good restaurant guest survey?

A la carte food service consulting have a good post about what makes a good restaurant survey. Export customer data screen We would certainly agree with the benefits of conducting restaurant surveys; you’ve gone to the effort of attracting customers to your restaurant, you want to keep them coming back...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

Apple apply for “restaurant patent”, what does this mean?

According to Patently Apple ,”the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals a new ordering and reservation system that could work with various Apple iDevices. Although the system can be modified to be apply to movie theatres, repair services, museums and the...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

78% of mobile restaurant searches result in booking

https://mobilemarketingmagazine.com/infographic-78-per-cent-of-mobile-restaurant-searches-result-in-booking/ Make it easy for them with a simpleERB widget!
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Tips & advice

Hotels missing out on restaurant reservations, Micros says

A recent Micros study of the independent hotel market found that: “….only 6% of the hotels allowed us to make a restaurant reservation during the online booking process. Not all of the hotels had a restaurant and many others that did suggested that the guest could e-mail or phone up to book a table....
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

RezBook and OpenTable alternatives from simpleERB.com

There has been a buzz around industry blogs and forums recently about what restaurateurs who had signed up for UrbanSpoon’s RezBook should do now that OpenTable own RezBook and Urbanspoon and their contracts are coming to an end. Given that restaurants who used Rezbook probably used it to escape the...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

Update, hotels , customisation and more

You can now customise the tick boxes that describe consumers, (VIP etc.), do this in “Booking Info Options” in Advanced Settings. If you are a hotel you can get a field for “Room number” to appear in the booking page, do this in “Restaurant Info” in Simple Settings. You can now set periods where your...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

Grid view

By popular demand, “grid view”,
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

simpleERB versus SeatMe versus RezBook

The guys at SeatMe posted a useful blog about the benefits of SeatMe against RezBook. We would like to point out that we think that simpleERB stacks up pretty well against both of them. If you have a small restaurant , less than 20k covers per annum then simpleERB is totally free. SeatMe say that: “...
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

Our widget blends into your website

Unlike some other companies’ widgets you can use a css style sheet to make our widget fit your website look.
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

Example of simpleERB widget on Facebook page

Let your customers book from your Facebook page
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

New Diary view

We have revamped our diary view so that you can quickly mark off a booking as “Arrived” , “Seated” or “Left” . As you can have as many users as you like this is ideal for your greeting station.
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

Yes it is multi multi user

People keep asking , “Is it really multi user in the free version?” Yes it is. You can have simpleERB open on your PC in the office , on all your Windows tills, on your manager’s iPad, and your doorman’s iPhone.
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

Uncategorized

5pm bookings go straight into simpleERB

Your 5pm bookings now go straight into your simpleERB diary
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

Smartphone view

Just a reminder that you can log in to the list view of bookings that is ideal for your smartphone at https://simpleerb-app-m.5pm.co.uk Some people haven’t noticed that. It’s ideal if you are a manager walking around the floor, (or an owner sipping a cocktail on the beach 🙂 )
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville

News

Chicago

simpleERB and 5pm are going to be at the National Restaurant Show in Chicago. Looking forward to meeting you there.
Ronnie Somerville
Ronnie Somerville