Restaurants and the Dining plan

For restaurants, cafés, bistros and lounges: what the Dining plan sells, the words it uses, and which parts of the panel you will spend your time in.

If you run a room that fills and empties several times in an evening rather than selling one long night, this is the page for you. If you sell a dated night your guests buy into, read Events instead.

What Dining is

Dining is the plan for a venue that takes bookings against a date and a time. The room turns over during a service: a table seats one party, they leave, it seats another. There is nothing to publish and nothing to announce — the venue is simply open, and guests book into it.

It is €39 a month, or €174 for six months, which works out at €29 a month. The same price as Nights, because it is the same platform with a different shape of booking.

If your room does both — lunch and dinner during the week, and a booked night on Saturday, on the same tables — that is the Day & Night plan instead, at €59 a month or €264 for six months. It is one floor plan used two ways, with a cutoff that hands the room over from dining to the event.

To be set up on Dining or Day & Night, talk to the Noctessa team. Your plan is shown on your Billing screen — see Your Noctessa subscription.

The words Dining uses

These are worth learning, because the panel and this help centre both use them precisely.

Word	What it means here
A service	The stretch of a day you take bookings for — lunch, dinner. It is a property of the day, not something you create.
A turn	How long one party occupies one table before it is free again. One hour is the usual length, and your venue can set its own.
A seating	One sitting of the room at a start time — a 20:00 seating.
The last seating	The latest start time you still accept. On Day & Night it falls out of the event: the event's start time, less the cutoff you set.
A booking	One party, one table, on a date.
A table	Your bookable inventory — and, unlike a club, one you expect to reuse several times in an evening.

Two words you will not meet in Dining: an event (there is nothing to publish) and a night as the unit of business. A grill has a lunch service.

The parts of the panel you will use

Almost everything in this help centre is shared across the four plans. What a restaurant reads:

• Floor plan — draw your room once. Turn Chairs on in the layout settings; it is the setting restaurants and cafés want, and clubs leave off. Name your Sections — terrace, back room, window — because sections are what you open and close as a unit.
• The service floor — the live map you work from during service. Seat a walk-in, move a party, hold a table back for a phone booking, close the terrace when it rains.
• Reservations — every booking in one list, with the status machine your team works: New, Contacted, Confirmed, Waitlisted, Declined, Cancelled.
• Taking payments from your guests — if you take a deposit. The money goes to your own account with your own payment company.
• Venue settings — your name, your look, your address, your opening hours, your languages.
• Marketplace — free discovery on the Noctessa site, by city.
• Privacy and guest data — what you hold on a diner, and how to erase it when they ask.

What a booking carries today

Be clear on this before you sell anything, because it decides how your team works.

A booking records the guest, their contact details, the party size, the date, the table they were given and any note. Your team confirms it, seats it on the floor plan, and admits the guest.

A chosen arrival time, and a table that is expected back within the hour, are what Dining adds on top of that. Ask the Noctessa team where your venue stands before you put a booking link in front of diners, so what your site promises and what your floor does are the same thing.

Two settings that matter more to a restaurant

Who picks the table. You choose whether guests pick their own table on a map when they book, or whether your team assigns one. Both are built in: a restaurant that seats by judgement — the window for two, the corner for a birthday — turns guest picking off and assigns; a room where every table is much like the next turns it on and saves the phone calls.

Sections. They are how you open and close parts of the room. Blocking a section holds back every table in it that is still free and leaves the bookings alone — the honest thing to do when the terrace is closing and three tables are already sold. It is on the service floor.

If something looks wrong

• You cannot find a screen this page mentions. Some screens belong to a plan, and some can be switched off per venue. Check which plan you are on under Billing, then ask the Noctessa team.
• Your tables have no chairs drawn on them. Open Floor plan, click Edit layout, click on empty floor and tick Chairs in the layout settings.
• Your room has no sections. Select the tables and type a Section name in the inspector. The Sections panel on the live map appears once they have one.
• You are not sure which plan suits your room. Say what a normal week looks like to the Noctessa team — how many services, whether the same tables carry a booked night — and they will tell you.