Dojo Bookings.
Full tables. Smoother service.

What is Dojo Bookings?

Dojo Bookings is the reservations and table-management product in the Dojo ecosystem. If you already know Dojo for its card machines, this is the part that manages the front of house: the diary, the floor plan, online bookings from your website and Google, walk-ins, waitlists, and the guest communications that go around them.

Its heritage matters. Dojo built its bookings product on WalkUp, the restaurant discovery and virtual-queue app it acquired, which is why Dojo Bookings is unusually strong on two things most reservation systems treat as afterthoughts: managing physical walk-in queues, and putting your venue in front of hungry diners who are actively looking for somewhere to eat.

The one-line version we give clients: it's a reservation book that also protects your covers with card deposits and feeds you demand from Dojo's own diner app — for a fixed monthly fee rather than a cut of every booking.

What does Dojo Bookings cost?

This is the question every restaurant owner actually wants answered, and it's the one nobody publishes clearly — so here is the honest version.

Dojo Bookings is sold as a monthly subscription, and Dojo doesn't publish the tariff — you get a quote (Dojo says within one working day) and a 30-day free trial before you commit. The commercially important point is the model: it's a subscription, not a marketplace taking a commission on every diner it sends you. On a busy Friday that difference is the whole game — a per-cover model punishes you precisely when you're doing well.

Because Dojo tailors packages to the venue (and often bundles Bookings with card payments), the exact monthly figure depends on your setup — number of covers, whether you take card payments with Dojo, and any current promotion. Rather than quote a stale price that may be wrong for you, we confirm the live number directly and put it next to what you pay now. Ask us for your venue's exact Dojo Bookings price →

Dojo Bookings features in full

Here's what's actually in the box, grouped by what it does for you day to day.

Diary & table management

• Digital floor plan with your real table layout, covers and turn times
• Online booking widget for your own website — guests book on your site, not a marketplace
• Bookings direct from your Google Business Profile (the "Reserve a table" button)
• Automatic table allocation and pacing so the kitchen isn't hit all at once

Walk-ins & waitlists

• Virtual queue — guests join a waitlist and get a text when their table is ready, instead of crowding the door
• Walk-in management that folds into the same diary as reservations

Guest communications

• Automated confirmations and reminders to cut no-shows before they happen
• Guest history and notes — allergies, favourite tables, spend, special occasions

Protection & payments

• Card capture, deposits and no-show charges (covered in detail below)
• Settlement through Dojo card payments, so deposits and bill payments live in one place

No-show protection & deposits

No-shows are the reason most venues look at a booking system in the first place. An empty "booked" table on a Saturday is lost revenue you can't get back, and Dojo Bookings is built to stop it.

You can require a card to hold a booking and set the rules yourself:

• Per-service rules — protect Friday and Saturday dinner but leave a quiet Tuesday lunch open
• Per-party-size rules — take a deposit on large tables where a no-show hurts most
• Deposit or charge-on-no-show — either take a deposit up front (redeemed against the bill) or hold the card and only charge if they don't turn up

The Dojo diner app & virtual queue

This is the feature that separates Dojo Bookings from a plain reservation book. Dojo runs a consumer restaurant-discovery app — the WalkUp lineage — where diners find places to eat, join virtual queues and book tables. When your venue is on Dojo Bookings, it can be listed in that app — and Dojo puts that audience at over 850,000 diners.

In practice that means two demand channels most systems don't give you:

• Discovery — diners browsing the app for somewhere nearby can find and book you, which is incremental demand on top of your own website
• Virtual queuing — for walk-in-led venues, guests can join your queue from their phone and be paged when a table frees up, smoothing the door on busy nights

Dojo positions that reach as part of Bookings itself rather than a separate marketplace listing — we'll confirm exactly how it's packaged for your venue.

Setting up Dojo Bookings

Getting live is quick — Dojo quotes a setup of around 20 minutes, it runs on a laptop or tablet with no extra hardware, and there's a 30-day free trial. Here's the path with us:

1. Free consultation & quote

   We review how you take bookings now, your covers and your no-show problem, and confirm the exact Dojo Bookings package and price for your venue.

2. Floor plan & services built

   Your real table layout, service times, turn times and pacing rules are configured so the diary matches how your room actually runs.

3. Deposit & no-show rules set

   You decide where cards are taken — which services, which party sizes, deposit vs charge-on-no-show — and we set the rules to match.

4. Widget & Google connected

   The booking widget goes on your website and your Google "Reserve a table" button, and your venue is set up on the diner app.

5. Go live & hand-hold

   Staff get a walkthrough, and your consultant stays on hand for the first busy service to iron out anything on the night.

Dojo Bookings vs OpenTable vs ResDiary

The most useful comparison is on cost model and what you're tied into, not a feature checklist. Here's the honest lay of the land.

The short version: OpenTable gives you the biggest diner marketplace but its per-cover fees mean success costs you more; ResDiary is a solid flat-fee diary without its own consumer app; Dojo Bookings combines a subscription model, native deposits and its own diner app, and is strongest when you also take card payments with Dojo.

Who Dojo Bookings is right for

It's an especially good fit if you're a restaurant, bar, café or gastropub that: loses covers to no-shows and wants card-backed deposits without a separate payment tool; does meaningful walk-in trade and wants a proper virtual queue; is tired of a reservation platform charging you per diner; or already uses (or is considering) Dojo card machines and wants everything on one system and one bill.

It's less essential if you're a tiny venue taking a handful of bookings a week by phone, where a paper diary still copes — although even then, deposit protection on your biggest tables can pay for itself in a single saved no-show.

Dojo Bookings FAQs