Throughout the year, people come together with family and friends to celebrate holidays, milestones and vacations, or just to enjoy being together. These large parties often cap off their jam-packed day with a meal out at an upscale restaurant, coming into restaurants and filling up the biggest tables.

Groups often require lots of attention but surpassing their expectations and anticipating customer needs can net your restaurant goodwill and allow your servers to earn bigger tips. Most importantly, they can build customer loyalty, making your business their go-to for the next event. Here are three tips for creating group dining experiences that result in warm memories and better reviews.

Three tips for a better dining experience

1. Leverage back-of-house capabilities

Large groups order differently than smaller tables. Aside from the sheer volume of items per table, they may also order multiple rounds of drinks, appetizers and desserts in addition to main courses, creating complicated tickets for waitstaff and kitchen workers to satisfy. If you’re a restaurant that expects large parties, preparing for their visits requires some back-office management on your end.

Offer reservations

The last thing someone planning an event wants is to get to the restaurant and get turned away, so make sure guests can easily find where to reserve their table. Because you never know how tech-savvy the guests might be, it’s important to have more than one method for reserving tables.

Most people’s first interaction with a business is through your Google page. Potential guests can see your website, menu and wait times and even reserve a table. If you update your Google My Business page, you can create a seamless online experience for guests to select times. Older guests or more traditional restaurant-goers might prefer to call in, so giving customers multiple options for booking and listing your restaurant’s phone number can be helpful.

If you have any specific policies or requirements for group dining, such as requiring all guests to be present before seating or split-bill restrictions, it may be helpful to make that information available during the reservation process as well to manage customer expectations before they arrive.  

Promote group-friendly menu items

Promotions help your business stand out, but a special offer gets people into your restaurant. Most big parties typically order an appetizer for the table. If you have the data in your point-of-sale, see which of them is the most popular. From there, you can highlight that item, craft a discount or other offer on it and promote that item, positioning your restaurant among the competition as especially good for large groups.

If you really want to attract guests around a specific event or holiday, you could advertise a limited-time dish that you save for those holidays. This can look like a crab boil for summer, wings for fall sports or chili in the winter. Once you have the item, you can promote it online through social media or through email marketing.  

Staff your team efficiently

As an operator, you know what days and seasons are the biggest in your area. You might, for instance, work in a college town and get a lot of business during homecoming, or you could anticipate game-day traffic because your restaurant is near the biggest stadium in the city.

In any case, it’s vital to schedule for those busy seasons with staff you know you can rely on. Scheduling technology for your back office can save time planning and predicting what you need.

2. Dress up your front of house

Set the stage

With big events, it’s often the little things—that extra effort—that excites people. If you run a restaurant that has lots of big parties or seasonal celebrations, embracing them through décor makes your restaurant more exciting to diners.  

Gold, glittery fringe across the counter during graduation season or flowers around Mother’s Day can entertain guests the second they walk into your doors. It’s even more effective in the holiday season. Welcoming guests with a theme shows within seconds that you want to entertain them.

Organize your layout

Of course, if you want to host big crowds, you need to have the right space for them. While space is limited by the constraints of your restaurant, there are several different ways to accommodate large groups.

If you don’t have large tables already, the easiest way to create them is to combine small tables together. Consider what parts of the restaurant would be most convenient for diners and servers, and plan to rearrange that area when you have large group bookings. If you have a patio or a separate room or alcove, you can also designate these areas as available for large parties or larger-scale rentals.  

No matter which option works for your setup, it might be best to section them away from smaller tables. Think of who might be in these large groups: it could be a family with small children or a rowdy group of coworkers for a fun happy hour. Big groups having a good time might not be aware of their noise levels. Giving them space to themselves doesn’t just enhance their experience—it lowers the chance of a bad experience for other guests, too.

Having these organizational and back-office details laid out helps you set the stage for the service, where they’ll enjoy a great experience from the time they book with your restaurant to the time of service.

3. Make payment a breeze

After you serve up delicious food and top off everyone’s drinks, there’s one step left: payment. While it seems separate from the other aspects of dining, payment is an important experience in and of itself.  

Think of a time you’ve given a server your credit card and waited on it for several minutes or had to ask your server to correct incorrect items on a bill. Payment frustrations can color an otherwise wonderful dining experience; in contrast, nailing the payment ties a pretty bow on a day of excellent food and service.  

Be transparent about pricing

There are so many different percentages and add-ons to a bill, and nobody likes to be surprised. Clearly communicating what you’re charging for on the receipt helps the guests understand what they’re paying for so they can leave happy.  

You might be tempted, for example, to add a mandatory gratuity for parties over five or six people. Add that percentage to your receipt as a clear line-item so guests aren’t confused or upset when the total looks different than what they anticipated.  

You might also prefer cash discounting, which is when you allow customers who pay in full with cash to avoid the additional fees charged by credit card companies. Have signs in your restaurant that clearly explain this policy and the different prices so guests can opt in to save a bit more money.

Offer the right payment methods

The more payment methods, the more customers can come to your business. Think of the demographics in your area. If you’re in an older town, some guests still might prefer to use cash. If your guests tend to be younger, they will likely expect digital options like tap-to-pay.

For businesses who want a smoother, faster experience, there’s another type of payment method: pay at table. With pay at table, guests scan QR codes and pay from their seats without waiting for their servers—something that can traditionally take a long time.  

Allowing guests to pay at the table is especially helpful to groups, who often prefer to split the bill. With multiple tabs, servers have to print separate tickets, ensuring that items are split correctly, and also collect and run multiple payment methods. Instead, pay at table frees up time for servers to take care of guests at other tables.  

They can also rate their experience, and you can get fresh reviews for your restaurant before they leave. Offering a simple and straightforward payment experience complements the rest of the high-quality service you’ve provided, allowing your customers to leave your restaurant feeling happy and satisfied with their service.  The right guest experience starts with effective back and front of house operations, and it only gets better with fast payments.  

These three tips are the tools you need to create exceptional group experiences. Sharpening these tools helps you create lasting memories for your guests, and they can become better brand advocates too. If you want a starting point for better guest experiences, check out our page on pay at table to learn more about enhancing payments with the fastest checkout experience you can offer.

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