VIP Flag

Resy, OpenTable, SevenRooms, and Tock all let a restaurant mark a guest as a VIP, and so does any restaurant CRM sitting above them. The mechanism is never the problem. Meaning is, because one flag ends up representing a top spender, a critic, an investor, an industry friend, and a guest recovering from a bad night.

What does a VIP flag actually mean?

In most guestbooks it means several things at once, which is why teams stop trusting it. Pull the populations apart and each one needs a different response.

• High-spend or high-frequency guests. They want to be known and seated well. Nothing needs to be comped.
• Press and critics. Consistency, discretion, and usually a specific person on the table.
• Investors, owners, and friends of the house. Often carry an expectation about comps or table assignment that a host cannot infer from a flag.
• Industry peers. A different set of courtesies, and frequently a different check policy.
• Guests in recovery after a bad night. The most time-sensitive of the group, and the one a generic flag helps least.

A flag has to tell the person reading it what to do at 7:45 on a Friday, so several specific flags in the language the floor already uses outperform one VIP mark. The count matters as well: a guestbook with a fifth of the book flagged has no VIPs.

Where does a VIP flag need to appear?

On the reservation, in the pre-shift report, and at the host stand. A flag living only inside a CRM is invisible to the person opening the door, and the door is where it was supposed to do its work. Write-back into the reservation platform is the capability that decides whether VIP marking changes a service or only shapes a mailing list.

The sharpest failure is across venues. A four-year regular at one restaurant in a group arrives at the sister room as a stranger, and the flag sitting in the first venue’s book is exactly why nobody caught it. A flag held on a group-level guest profile applies wherever that guest turns up.

Should VIP status be set by hand or by rule?

Both, and keeping the two apart is what keeps the list credible. Spend and frequency VIPs can be a rule that re-evaluates against current data, so the flag arrives when a guest earns it and lifts when the pattern stops.

Everything else is human judgment. No system can infer that a guest is a critic, an investor, or the owner’s neighbour, and those flags should not expire on a schedule, because the underlying fact does not decay. What they need is an occasional review. Hand-set flags accumulate, and a guestbook carrying VIP marks placed in 2019 by staff who have since moved on is the normal state of affairs rather than a sign of neglect. One review pass a year keeps the flag meaning something to whoever reads it tonight.