What Should Go in a Booking Confirmation – and in What Order?
A concrete prioritisation of the content in a restaurant's booking confirmation: time, party size, address, ability to make changes, practical information and menu link, and why the order matters just as much as the content itself.
Why the Order of Information in the Confirmation Matters
Most guests read a booking confirmation in a few seconds, often on their phone while doing something else. If the most important information sits at the bottom of a long text, it's easily overlooked. The order of the content therefore determines whether the guest actually ends up with the right information afterwards, or has simply skimmed a confirmation without registering the details.
When a confirmation is thrown together without clear prioritisation, the guest may end up having to contact the restaurant to clarify something that was, in fact, already stated. How often this happens, and how much time it takes away from other tasks, is something each restaurant should assess based on its own routines and staffing. A consistent structure, in any case, makes the answer easier for the guest to find on their own.
The First Three Things a Guest Reads: Time, Party Size and Address
The time should come first, and it should be stated clearly – not buried in a sentence together with other information. Include the date, the time, and, if the restaurant operates with fixed seating times, how long the table is reserved for. This is what the guest reads first to confirm that the booking actually applies to the right day, and it should therefore stand alone, clearly visible, at the top of the text.
Right after the time comes the party size, so that any errors in the booking are caught immediately by the guest themselves. Next comes the address, including the street address and, where relevant, which entrance to use if the restaurant has more than one. For guests unfamiliar with the venue, a precise address is more useful than a general place name they have to look up themselves.
What the Guest Needs Next: Ability to Make Changes, Practical Information and Menu Link
After the first three points, the confirmation should show how the guest can change or cancel the booking, with a direct link or a clear point of contact. This should appear early enough that the guest actually notices it, not as an afterthought tucked away at the very end. Whether a visible option to make changes leads to more adjustments coming in on time is something each restaurant must assess based on its own experience.
Practical information such as parking, dress code or notes about stairs and accessibility naturally follows the option to make changes, since it's useful but not decisive for whether the guest arrives at the right place at the right time. The menu link is placed last in this section. It's a nice extra for guests who want to plan their meal, but it should never compete with the time, party size or address for attention at the top of the text.
From Prioritisation to a Fixed Template
Once the order has been decided, the next step is to lock it in as a fixed template the restaurant uses for all bookings, rather than writing the confirmation from scratch each time. A fixed template also makes it easier to update a single element, such as a new parking arrangement, without having to rethink the entire text every time something changes in day-to-day operations.
In TableBooking, the restaurant can set up the booking link guests use without creating an account, and configure opening hours, capacity and tables directly in the dashboard, where bookings, guests and the table map are all shown together. The interface is available in Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and English, so the restaurant can maintain its own confirmation template tailored accordingly, and spend its time instead on the wording as described above.
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