Restaurant Christmas Checklist: 7 Things to do Before December
Christmas is just three months away. For restaurants, it starts now.September might feel early to start talking about the festive season. Your guests probably aren’t thinking about where they’ll have their office dinner yet. They haven’t agreed on the family Christmas lunch or New Year’s Eve dinner. And that group chat about the annual get-together probably won’t appear for another few weeks. But inside a restaurant, the festive season starts much earlier. Menus need to be planned. Large groups need to be accounted for. Staffing needs to be considered. Deposits, cancellation policies and opening hours need to be decided. And somewhere along the way, you need to actually tell people what you’re offering. Our restaurant Christmas checklist below will help you do exactly that. The restaurants that handle the festive rush best tend to be the ones that made their important decisions before December arrived. So, with around three months to go, now is definitely a good time to start.
1. Decide your festive menu and offer first
Before opening the diary for the festive season, the first item on your restaurant Christmas checklist is to decide what your festive menu and offer is going to look like. Will you keep your regular menu throughout December? Introduce a festive set menu? Offer a Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve experience? Run special Sunday lunches? Create packages for company dinners? Open a private dining area for larger groups? These decisions affect almost everything that comes afterwards, from pricing and staffing to how many bookings you can comfortably accept. With our new Events & Experiences setup, you can create dedicated festive events in Tableo, rather than trying to manage everything around your normal reservation flow. An event can have its own dates, description, images, capacity, and booking page. You can attach a set menu, experience, or optional add-ons and decide whether guests need to pay in advance or leave a deposit. That means your Christmas Eve dinner doesn’t have to behave like an ordinary Thursday-night reservation, because it isn’t one.Tip – Design your festive offer: Use a Menu when every guest needs to book the same festive menu, an Experience for a bookable experience, and Add-ons for optional extras. This keeps your team aligned with what guests book.
2. Set your rules for group bookings early
The Christmas period has a habit of turning a straightforward reservation diary into something considerably more interesting. A table for four becomes twelve. Twelve becomes eighteen. Someone wants to know whether three more people can join. Someone else drops out. Two guests are vegan, one is gluten intolerant, and somebody needs to know whether the restaurant can accommodate a nut allergy. Then there’s the company dinner that needs a set menu, an invoice, and confirmation that the deposit has been paid. None of these requests are unusual. The problem is trying to organise all of them when your team is already in the middle of the busiest weeks of the year. Think through your rules now. Decide the largest group you will accept online, which bookings need deposits or prepayment, what information you need from larger parties, and how far in advance final numbers should be confirmed. Tableo helps keep important booking information organised within the reservation itself. Group booking requests can be managed through the system, while menus, contracts and other PDFs can be attached directly to a reservation for your team to access during service. The less information living across notebooks, inboxes and WhatsApp conversations in December, the better.Tip – Welcome bigger groups: If you want to handle enquiries from groups that are too large to book online, you can enable Group Requests under Settings → Account Settings → Booking Settings. This allows larger parties to submit a request instead of being unable to book online.
3. Protect your festive bookings from cancellations
A booking for six people cancelling on a normal Wednesday is frustrating but a table of twelve cancelling a New Year’s Eve dinner a few hours before service is something else entirely. Festive bookings often involve larger parties, extended seating times, special menus and food ordered specifically for the occasion. A late cancellation or no-show therefore carries considerably more weight. This is the time to review your deposit and cancellation strategy, rather than waiting until the diary fills up. You might decide that regular bookings continue as normal while larger Christmas groups require a deposit. For a fixed Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve menu, you might prefer full prepayment. Tableo lets you connect payment strategies to events and special services, including deposits and paid products such as set menus and experiences. Whatever you decide, make the conditions clear when guests book. The Christmas season is busy enough without arguments about policies at the door.Tip – Get deposits right: If you want to collect a fixed deposit for the whole booking rather than an amount per guest, enable the option to charge the deposit per reservation when configuring the Event’s Payment Strategy.
4. Build the diary around the restaurant you can actually run
The temptation in December is to squeeze in one more table. And then another. And perhaps one more because “it’s only two people”. December is also the month when an overbooked room shows up as late food, a stressed team and reviews you’ll be reading in January. Look back at last Christmas if you have the data. Which services were under the most pressure? Which types of bookings were the hardest to manage? Which sittings ran late? Were there areas that worked particularly well for groups? Then build this year’s availability accordingly. You can use Tableo’s Services & Events Hub to manage your regular and seasonal opening hours, as well as create events with their own schedules. If your festive event runs at different times from your usual service, you can set up Seasonal Hours for those dates and link them to the event. And don’t forget the days you aren’t opening. If you’re closing for certain dates over Christmas or New Year, block them early. Tableo now lets you close multiple dates at once, including specific services, dining areas, or time slots. Your online availability should reflect the Christmas period you intend to operate, not the schedule you normally run throughout the rest of the year.Tip – Space out your sittings: If you’re running fixed dinner sittings, such as 19:00 and 21:30, you can set them up as separate services and enable Only show the service start time. This prevents bookings from being made between sittings and gives your team a clear gap between services to reset tables and prepare for the next sitting.
5. Ask guests for the information you’ll wish you had later
The earlier you collect information, the fewer phone calls your team has to make the week before a booking. Dietary requirements are an obvious example. Tableo’s booking widget can collect dietary and allergen information from guests when they reserve, alongside details such as their birthday or accessibility requirements. For a normal dinner, that’s useful. For a Christmas party of 16, it’s invaluable. Think about what else your team needs in order to prepare: children’s requirements, special occasions, accessibility requests, or menu selections where guests are choosing in advance. Decide now which of these you want to collect at the time of booking, and how. The goal isn’t to turn your booking form into an interrogation. It’s to collect the information that genuinely helps your team prepare.Tip – Need something more specific?: If you need to ask guests for additional information that isn’t already covered by your existing booking fields, you can create a custom field under Settings → Account Settings → Booking Settings and choose whether it should be mandatory. Keep in mind that custom fields apply to bookings generally, not to a specific event.
6. Don’t wait until December to tell people
Once you’ve decided what you’re offering, start talking about it. There is little advantage in creating a brilliant Christmas menu if your regular guests only discover it after they’ve booked somewhere else. Your existing guest database is a particularly good place to start. When you create an Event in Tableo, it gets its own shareable page containing the event information and booking form. You can use that link on your website, social media, newsletters or wherever you’re promoting your festive offering. Tableo can also help you announce an event to previous guests. An event announcement email can be generated using the information and imagery you’ve already added, ready for you to review before anything is sent. You can take this further through Guest Marketing, creating campaigns for relevant segments of your guest database and linking diners directly back to the booking widget. And you don’t have to announce everything at once. >September can be *Christmas bookings are now open*. >October might focus on company dinners and larger groups. > November can be the moment to push remaining dates or particular services that still have availability. By December, your marketing should ideally be filling gaps, not introducing your festive season offering for the first time.Tip – Send guests straight to your event: Once your Christmas event is ready, go to Services & Events → Events, select the event and click Share Link. Use this dedicated event link on your website, social media, newsletters, or other promotional channels to take guests directly to the event and booking form.
7. Prepare the team, not just the diary
There is one part of the restaurant Christmas checklist that software can’t do for you: making sure everyone knows what’s happening. Before the festive bookings start arriving in volume, make sure the people working those services understand the setup. Which menu applies on which dates? What has already been paid? What does a deposit cover? Which bookings have special requirements? Who handles large group requests? What happens if somebody wants to change their numbers? Make sure your team can easily access the information they need during service. The Tableo Manager app allows managers to check reservation details from a phone or tablet, without having to head back to the office. The technology only works as well as the process around it. Use the quieter weeks now to agree on that process.Tip – Keep your team in the loop: Use diary notes or private notes on bookings to share important information, such as special arrangements for a Christmas booking or anything the team should be aware of before the guest arrives.
Ready to make the most of the festive season?
Open Services & Events → Events in Tableo to start setting up your festive season events and experiences, then follow the checklist below to get everything ready for your guests.
