12 best WordPress restaurant reservation plugins for 2024 (& how to choose)

Want to accept and manage online bookings for your restaurant or other business? Here are the ten best WordPress reservation plugins to help you create a fully-functional and cost-effective website that can facilitate online reservations.

Looking for a WordPress restaurant reservation plugin for your website?

Whether you run a cozy café, a bustling bistro, or an upscale fine dining establishment, having a website for your restaurant is a must-have. 

Your website serves as a central hub. It makes it super easy for new customers to learn about your restaurant, browse your menu, view photos — and, with the right reservation plugin — view seating availability and make bookings.

Restaurant reservation plugins are incredibly useful. They simplify the booking process for customers. At the same time, they help restaurant owners, managers, and staff to effectively manage the restaurant.

However, there are so many plugins to choose from!

To help narrow down your search and find the best plugin that matches your needs, budget (and, most importantly, your restaurant), we've rounded up the best restaurant reservation plugins for WordPress. And for even better results, I'll tell you how to use these with the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin so that customers can make their food choices online as well as booking a table! 

Ready? Let's dive in and choose the best plugin for your restaurant!

What are WordPress restaurant reservation plugins used for?

There are various types of plugins used to manage restaurant websites. So, let's get super clear on what restaurant reservation plugins are.

A WordPress restaurant reservation plugin is a software extension specifically designed for WordPress websites that enables restaurant owners to accept and manage online reservations directly from their websites. 

Reservation plugins perform two essential functions:

1. On the front end of your website: They create a user-friendly interface for customers. This allows customers to select their preferred dates, times, number of seats, party sizes, and other relevant details for making table reservations.
2. On your website's back end/admin section: They enable restaurant owners, managers, and staff to manage the restaurant efficiently. Restauranteurs can organize incoming reservations, view availability, and make necessary adjustments.

Overall, restaurant reservation plugins help streamline the booking process, improve customer experience, and empower restauranteurs to manage their table reservations effectively.

It's important to note that restaurant reservation plugins don't have the functionality to let customers make food selections online. To accept online food orders, you'll need a restaurant ordering plugin too. Online ordering is a key requirement for many restaurants. So, we've also covered the best restaurant ordering plugin below.

Types of restaurant that need online reservations

Here are examples of the types of sites that you can build with a WordPress restaurant reservation plugin:

1. Websites that can accept online bookings for a single restaurant. Think: The local Italian pizza place in your neighborhood.
2. Websites that are capable of accepting reservations for multiple restaurants. Think: Websites for restaurant chains, such as Domino's Pizza.
3. Websites for restaurants that are attached to other businesses. Think: Websites for restaurants that are part of a hotel or resort.

By no means is this a complete or an exhaustive list. You can use a WordPress restaurant reservation plugin to create websites for virtually any type of restaurant.

Restaurants: Let customers order food online

We'll cover the best restaurant reservation plugins to help you accept bookings in the next section of this article. However, allowing customers to book reservations online is just one part of creating a fully-functioning website for your restaurant. 

Apart from taking bookings online, you should also consider allowing customers to place orders online via your website. To do this, you need the restaurant ordering plugin. 

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering is a powerful, lightweight plugin that enables you to quickly and easily accept food orders on your website. Plus, it pairs well with many reservation plugins. This allows customers to order their favorite dishes online before or during their visit.

You can use WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering to enable online ordering in a way that best suits your restaurant's unique requirements. Here are two ways to use the plugin:

1. Pre-visit ordering: You can combine WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering with your reservation plugin. This will allow your customers to place their food orders before they even step into your restaurant. There are several advantages to this approach. For one, it lets customers browse your menu, choose their desired items, and place orders conveniently from the comfort of their homes. This helps to streamline the ordering process, reduce wait times, and ensures a smoother dining experience upon arrival. Additionally, pre-visit ordering allows you to optimize your staff's efficiency and manage your restaurant effectively.
2. Table-side ordering: You can also use the plugin to enable your customers to order food directly from their phones, iPads, and other devices while seated at their tables. This eliminates the need for customers to flag down waitstaff or wait in long queues. Instead, they can effortlessly browse the menu, make selections, and submit their orders using smartphones or other devices. The benefits are twofold. Firstly, it enhances your customers' experience. Second, it streamlines your restaurant's operations and reduces your staff's workload.

Ok, now let's dig into the best restaurant reservations plugin to consider.

Best WordPress restaurant reservation plugins

No matter the size or type of your restaurant, there's a WordPress restaurant reservation plugin for you. Keep reading to discover the best plugins.

1. LatePoint

LatePoint is a standout choice for restaurant owners searching for an exceptional reservation plugin. Designed with a keen understanding of the unique needs of the hospitality industry, LatePoint provides an intuitive and streamlined reservation system for restaurant websites. With a focus on simplicity, diners can effortlessly browse and secure their preferred dining times, ensuring a delightful customer experience.

LatePoint is a top-tier choice among WordPress restaurant reservation plugins in 2023. With its user-friendly interface and dynamic capabilities, it redefines the booking experience for both restaurant owners and diners.

Key features

• Ensures a seamless and enjoyable reservation process for diners.
• Prevents overbooking and effortlessly adjusts to demand.
• Secure reservations with online payments, reducing no-shows.
• Keep staff updated and minimize scheduling conflicts.
• Comprehensive tools for reservation tracking, staff performance analysis, and detailed analytics.
• Looks fantastic with any WordPress restaurant theme, including Astra's restaurant templates.

Final thoughts

LatePoint is more than a plugin. With features crafted for the hospitality industry, it optimizes operations, enhances customer satisfaction, and secures reservations seamlessly. In the competitive realm of restaurant reservation plugins, LatePoint stands out as a reliable and innovative choice.

2. YITH Booking and Appointment for WooCommerce

YITH is one of the best reservation plugins we've tried. One of the reasons it's so popular is that it can be used to accept bookings for a variety of businesses. For instance, hotels, guest houses, concert venues, vehicle rentals, gyms, and of course, restaurants. Also, it's pairs well with the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin, so you can combine both plugins and easily accept online food orders as well as reservations. 

Key features

1. Easily create and display a booking calendar on your website for customers to view available time slots and make reservations. 
2. Create custom pricing rules based on specific periods. For example, you can charge lower prices on weekdays and higher prices on weekends and during peak times.
3. Automatically send email notifications to customers for booking confirmations, reminders, or cancellations to help you improve communication and reduce no-shows.
4. Create personalized booking forms with custom fields to collect valuable information from customers during the reservation process. For example, you can ask about dietary preferences or special requests.
5. Generate comprehensive reports in Excel and other formats and access analytics to optimize your restaurant's operations. This functionality lets you track booking trends and make data-driven decisions about your business.

Final thoughts

If you're looking for a comprehensive and fully-customizable WordPress restaurant reservation plugin, you've found it. YITH integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce and has a user-friendly interface. Not to mention, it has lots of advanced features and extensive customization options, making it a top choice for restaurant owners and managers looking to streamline their booking process and deliver an exceptional customer experience.

3. WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments

 

One of the top-notch reservation plugins we recommend is WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments, the ultimate solution for converting your services into bookable resources. Empower your reservations business with seamless booking functionalities and enhance customer experience effortlessly.

Key features

1. Offer single-day bookings for activities like tours, hall rentals, and more.
2. Enable multiple-day booking for events, courses, and other extended services.
3. Provide flexible booking options with start and end dates for hotels, rentals, etc.
4. Facilitate single appointment bookings with specific start times, ideal for appointments and services.
5. Allow flexible hourly bookings for various venues and rentals with customizable start and end times.
6. Incorporate recurring bookings for classes, therapy sessions, and ongoing services.

Final thoughts

WooCommerce Bookings and Appointments revolutionizes reservations management, ensuring smooth booking processes, optimized resource use, and enhanced customer satisfaction. Say goodbye to booking hassles and hello to streamlined reservations with this powerful plugin!

4. WooCommerce Bookings

WooCommerce Bookings — created by the folks at Automattic, WooCommerce's parent company — is another powerful reservation plugin. Like YITH, it can be used to accept reservations for restaurants and a variety of businesses. WooCommerce Bookings is compatible with WooCommerce, so it's a great choice to consider if you're planning to offer memberships as well as upsell and cross-sell deals for additional products and services on your website.

Key features

1. It has extensive customization options. For instance, you can set specific timeframes for bookings and configure working hours for each day. Also, you can define rules for minimum or maximum booking durations.
2. You can easily block out specific dates or time slots, for example, during restaurant closures or for private events. This helps you manage availability in your restaurant.
3. It lets you accept multiple bookings per time slot, which is ideal for reservations of large groups or hosting grouped events in your restaurant.
4. The booking system seamlessly integrates with WooCommerce, iCal and Google Calendar and easily syncs orders, inventory, and customer data.
5. It supports integration with popular payment gateways to accept online payments during the booking process.

Final thoughts

Another solid choice, WooCommerce Bookings is a robust and feature-rich WordPress restaurant reservation plugin that can effectively manage restaurants of any size. Another reason to choose this plugin is that it works well with WooCommerce. So if you want to add eCommerce features to sell other products, such as gift items and souvenirs, on your website, this is the perfect plugin for you.

5. Five Star Restaurant Reservations

Five Star Restaurant Reservations is a freemium plugin specifically created for restaurants. It lets you easily add a stylish and professional-looking booking form and reservation system to any page on your website. Five Star Restaurant Reservations has been tested for compatibility with WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering and both plugins work quite well. You can easily combine both plugins to add a reservation form and accept online orders from your website.

Key features

1. Create custom booking forms to collect relevant information from guests while booking. For example, you can confirm the number of guests, special seating requests, dietary needs, and more.
2. You can create a password-protected page on the front end of your site that lists upcoming reservations as well as guests who have already arrived. This helps the hosts and waitstaff manage the reservations better. 
3. It comes with beautifully-designed email templates which you can easily customize with your business name, logo, and brand colors. This makes it very easy to communicate with customers.
4. The plugin lets you manage availability easily. You can set capacity limits for each time slot, define maximum party sizes, and block out specific dates or time slots when your restaurant is unavailable.
5. It directly integrates with MailChimp, the popular email marketing tool. You can add a checkbox to the booking form for guests to opt-in to receive marketing emails from your business.

Final thoughts

The Five Star Restaurant Reservations plugin was built specifically for restaurants. This makes the process of configuring and managing the plugin very streamlined. This is an excellent choice to consider for any type and size of restaurant. 

6. MotoPress Appointment Booking

MotoPress is another top-tier reservation plugin for WordPress. It adds a powerful booking engine with a user-friendly interface to your website. It's packed with impressive features to help you streamline the process of accepting bookings on your website. However, what we love the most about MotoPress is how smoothly it integrates with any theme, ensuring the reservation system looks great on any website.

Key features

1. Its powerful booking engine makes it suitable for restaurants of any size — from small cafes to restaurants with multi-site locations and restaurant chains.
2. It's super easy to manage availability using this plugin. You can also add buffer times to block extra time for staff to clean up tables between reservations.
3. You can easily create and offer discount coupons to reward loyal customers. Customers can apply these discounts while booking online. Alternatively, staff members can apply them for customers who choose to pay offline. 
4. The plugin is easy to configure using the native interface. Also, it's compatible with popular drag-and-drop WordPress builders such as Divi, Elementor, and Gutenberg.
5. You can collect phone numbers from customers and send SMS notifications to customers for marketing or general communication purposes. For example, SMS' for appointment confirmation, cancelation, payment completion, survey collection, and more. Note: This feature is a premium Twilio add-on for MotoPress.

Final thoughts

MotoPress' appointment booking plugin just works. It's super easy to configure and use to manage reservations on your website. Not to mention, its integration with Divi, Elementor, and Gutenberg page builders makes it an even easier choice if you're looking to create and maintain your website by yourself.

7. Advance Seat Reservation Management for WooCommerce

At first glance, it may seem that Advance Seat Reservation Management for WooCommerce isn't a restaurant reservation plugin. That's because the primary use case is for theaters, concert venues, and transportation services. However, if your restaurant is attached to one of these types of businesses, then this plugin is worth checking out.

Key features

1. It creates a visual representation of the available seating options. This feature lets your customers view your restaurant's seating layout, floor plan and number of seats so they can select their desired seats or tables.
2. It displays the real-time availability of seats and tables, showing customers which options are already reserved and which ones are still available. 
3. You can charge different prices for tables in your restaurant based on their placement within the venue or other criteria. For example, tables next to the window may be priced higher than the ones in the middle of your restaurant.
4. The plugin lets you create discounts and unique pricing options for specific tables. This makes it easy to run promotions and offers.
5. You can send automated email notifications to customers after their reservation is confirmed. These notifications can be booking confirmations or include additional event-related information.

Final thoughts

Advance Seat Reservation Management for WooCommerce is particularly beneficial for restaurants attached to businesses that offer reserved seating options. For example, theaters, concert venues, cinemas, or any event or establishment where customers can choose specific seats or tables. However, if you run a standalone restaurant, you're probably better off using another plugin.

8. ARB | Appointment Reservation and Booking Plugin for WooCommerce

Appointment Reservation and Booking for WooCommerce (ARB) is another popular all-in-one reservation plugin. ARB is used on thousands of websites and is packed with all the essential features that you would expect from a restaurant reservation plugin. Like other all-in-one booking plugins, it can be used for restaurants as well as businesses in various industries such as healthcare, beauty, and consulting. 

Key features

1. You can create a beautiful booking form to accept reservations from customers. It has unlimited color variations, allowing you to customize the form's appearance to match your website.
2. It lets you create special discount coupons to reward customers and encourage repeat bookings at your restaurant.
3. You can allow guests to create customer accounts on your website to view reservations, update or cancel upcoming bookings, make payments, etc.
4. It creates a dashboard on your website's backend to help you manage bookings easily. You can add all bookings to a list to easily view, manage, search, and filter.
5. It has a message notifications center that lets you create custom messages to communicate with customers about their bookings. This feature is helpful for sending booking confirmations and updates to customers.

Final thoughts

If you're looking for a booking plugin that can manage reservations for any size of restaurant, ARB is worth checking out. It has all the essential features that you would expect in a booking plugin and much more.

9. BookingPress

BookingPress is another powerful freemium booking engine for WordPress. It's an all-in-one plugin that lets you create a booking system for a wide number of use cases, including restaurants. 

Key features

1. Create customized booking forms to allow customers to enter special requests, data, addresses, and other details while making reservations.
2. The premium version of the plugin integrates with 17+ online payment gateways, including PayPal, RazorPay, Stripe, Mollie, Authorize.net, and more.
3. It lets you create an advanced admin dashboard for your staff members. This helps to have a quick overview of the bookings in your restaurant and manage reservations effectively.
4. It comes with detailed reporting and analytics capabilities to track and improve your restaurant's performance.
5. It lets you send custom notifications and messages to customers phone numbers' via SMS and WhatsApp. This makes it even easier to send marketing messages to your customers.

Final thoughts

BookingPress is an easy-to-use yet powerful plugin. It simplifies the booking process for customers and helps restaurants operate more effectively. Not to mention, it's compatible with Elementor and Gutenberg page builders, making it an easy choice to help create and maintain your restaurant's reservation system.

10. WP Booking System

WP Booking System is primarily used on websites for hotels and other accommodation providers. However, it also works very well for restaurants. It's packed with many valuable features, such as a responsive booking calendar, customizable reservation forms, payment integrations, etc.

Key features

1. Easy to use form builder to help you create booking forms with custom fields. You can easily add text boxes, checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, etc., to collect customers' details.
2. It lets you manually approve or reject reservations and automatically block booked slots to prevent double-booking in your restaurant. 
3. It allows you to create coupon codes to offer discounts based on your preferred criteria to encourage repeat bookings.
4. It has a pricing tool that lets you set and adjust prices (including or excluding VAT and other taxes). Plus, you can charge based on the number of guests, timeframe of the booking, day of the week, and more.
5.  Its dashboard lets you easily create detailed reports and statistics on bookings, revenue, and other relevant data, to help you make business decisions.

Final thoughts

There's a lot to like about the WP Booking system plugin. Even though its primary use case isn't for restaurants, it's super-intuitive and is packed with all the features to help your restaurant operate smoothly. 

11. ReDi Restaurant Reservation

The ReDi restaurant reservation plugin was created specifically for restaurant businesses. It's straightforward to use and enables you to create a centralized booking system for cafes, pubs, and restaurants. ReDi Restaurant Reservation is compatible with the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin, making it easy for you to accept online orders and bookings on your website.

Key features

1. It has a fully-responsive booking form with a variety of fields to accept reservations from guests.
2. You can create a separate dashboard for hosts, waitpersons, and other restaurant staff to view guests who have arrived as well as upcoming reservations.
3. It includes an in-built survey collection system. You can send automated messages to collect feedback from guests after their visit.
4. It comes with several notification templates which you can easily customize to send booking confirmations, reminders, and cancellations to guests.
5. You can easily create manual reservations directly from the backend of your website. This feature is useful when customers contact your restaurant to book a reservation via phone.

Final thoughts

ReDi is another great WordPress restaurant reservation plugin choice for restaurants of all sizes. It offers a range of features and customization options that empower restaurants to manage their bookings and optimize their business effectively.

12. Tourfic

Tourfic is an excellent choice for a booking engine plugin. It lets you create bookable services on your website. Tourfic is best used for restaurants that are attached to hotels and accommodation businesses.

Key features

1. It has a comprehensive reservation management system that enables you to organize and oversee your bookings effortlessly. You can view, confirm, or modify reservations with a few clicks.
2. You can customize the booking form fields to help you collect all the required information from your guests, such as party size, date, time, and special requests.
3. The plugin creates shortcodes that let you embed a fully-responsive booking form anywhere on your website — on a separate booking page, widget, post, pop-up form.
4. You can keep track of your restaurant's availability in real-time using the intuitive calendar interface. This lets you easily manage and update the available bookable time slots, preventing scheduling conflicts or overbooking.
5. It includes a comprehensive review system to collect and display reviews from customers who previously visited your restaurant.

Final thoughts

Another handy WordPress reservation plugin, Tourfic is fully responsive and mobile-friendly. This helps you create a seamless reservation experience for your customers, whether they're using a desktop computer, tablet, or smartphone. Tourfic is an excellent plugin to use to manage reservations in your hotel/restaurant.

Which WordPress restaurant reservation plugin is best for you?

These days, restaurant customers expect to be able to reserve a table online. Fewer and fewer people are willing to pick up the phone to book a table!

There are lots of high quality restaurant reservation plugins available, and all of the above options are good choices. This is my top pick for the perfect combination:

• LatePoint for allowing customers to book a table. This is a fully functional plugin with everything you need to set online availability and make it easy for customers to book.
• Use it with WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering to allow customers to make their food choices online. This might be before they arrive or from the table, depending on how you choose to set it up.