Host
The host is the first person a guest meets. The role covers greeting arrivals, working the reservation book and the waitlist, quoting waits, and seating parties against the floor plan. It is also the point where a restaurant either recognizes a returning guest or does not, since recognition has to happen before the party sits.
The host stand is a small piece of real estate carrying a lot of decisions: who sits where, how long a walk-in waits, and whether the party at the door is treated as a stranger or as a regular. Hosts work almost entirely inside the reservation platform, which in most rooms means Resy, OpenTable, SevenRooms, or Tock. That screen is where guest information has to arrive to be worth anything at the door.
What should a host know about a guest before they arrive?
Four things, and the host needs them in a few seconds. Whether the guest has been here before and how often. What they prefer, meaning the seat, the table, the pace. What went wrong last time, if anything did. And who they are to the business, such as an investor, a critic, or a friend of the owner.
Everything past that list is noise at the door. A host reading a booking while a party stands in front of them cannot absorb a paragraph, so the value of a guest record at the host stand depends less on how much it holds than on how fast the important part can be read. A visit count, one tag, and a single line of note do more work than a full history.
Can my reservation platform show the host a guest’s full history?
Within its own book, yes. Resy, OpenTable, SevenRooms, and Tock all count a guest’s visits and store notes, so a host sees the record that platform has built over time.
Two things sit outside that record. Spend is the first, because the check lives in the point of sale, so the book can know a guest has come ten times without knowing they drink Barolo. The rest of the group is the second: a guest with fifteen visits across four sister restaurants looks like a first-timer at the fifth. A restaurant CRM joins the two halves, matching checks to reservations and holding one guest record shared across every venue in the group.
That still leaves the delivery problem, and it is the one that decides whether any of it reaches the door. No host is opening a second application at 7:45pm. Loyalist writes a guest’s tags and notes back into Resy and OpenTable, so cross-venue history shows up on the booking the host already has open rather than in a system nobody has time to check.
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