The party of six has paid, said their thank-yous and headed for the door. On your booking system, their table is free. In the room, it is covered in glasses.
Every restaurant knows the gap between those two things. A table is not ready the moment the guests stand up. It needs clearing, wiping, re-laying, and on a busy Sunday that can take a quarter of an hour on a good day. Longer if the kitchen is shouting for plates.
Until now, NomNom treated a table as free the minute a booking ended. So if lunch was booked until 14:30, a guest booking online could take that table at 14:30. Most of the time your team coped. Sometimes a family stood at the door watching somebody polish their cutlery.
Introducing table turn time
Table turn time is a single setting on each meal and each event: the minutes your team needs to reset a table. Set Sunday lunch to 30 minutes and a table booked until 14:30 is next offered at 15:00, online and on the phone alike.
The important part is what it does not change. Your guests still book the same two and a half hours. Their confirmation email still says 14:30. Google still shows the same slot length. The extra time belongs to the table, not to the guest, so nobody is told they have to leave earlier or that their lunch got longer.
Different meals, different turn times
A turn time is set per meal, and per area, because resetting is not the same job everywhere. Breakfast tables might take five minutes. A formal tasting menu with fresh linen might take forty. Christmas Day, with crackers and place cards on every setting, is its own thing entirely.
That last one is what started it. A restaurant asked us for their Christmas lunch: guests get two and a half hours, and the team needs half an hour before the next sitting. With turn time set on the event, the second sitting is only offered once the first has been cleared.
You can see it on the chart
On the reservation chart, each booking now has a pale striped block after it, with a little cleaning icon. That block is the reset. It makes the busy stretches of a service easy to read, and it shows at a glance why a table is not offered at the time you might expect.
It respects the bookings you already have
Every booking remembers the turn time it was made with, the same way it remembers how long it is. So switching the setting on does not suddenly squeeze tables you have already sold back-to-back.
When you save a new turn time, NomNom offers to apply it to the upcoming bookings for that meal. It updates all of them it safely can, and lists any it left alone because the table is booked straight after, so you can decide what to do about those yourself.
And because this is your restaurant, your team always has the final word. If a member of staff seats a walk-in on a table that is still being reset, NomNom points it out and lets them go ahead anyway.
Setting it up
Open Configuration, then Meals or Events, and use the Table turn time setting next to the duration. It moves in five-minute steps and starts at none, so nothing changes until you choose a time. There is a step-by-step guide in our knowledge base.
If you have been padding every booking by half an hour just to give your team breathing room, this is the better way to do it: your guests see the time they actually booked, and your tables get the time they actually need.