The Empty Table: Deposits and No-Shows at Christmas and New Year

31 December, 8.45pm. Portici, a stone's throw from the Granatello pier. The cold rises off the wet paving and comes back into the dining room every time the door opens, along with the smell of the capon broth that has been bubbling away in Berto's copper pots since six this morning.

Berto is out front. He has the hands of a man who's worked since he was fourteen and very firm views on how to iron a tablecloth. The big table, the one for twelve, is an altar: place cards written by hand in ink, napkins folded like little books, two steel buckets with four bottles of traditional-method sparkling wine on ice since half seven. Outside, behind the seafront apartment blocks, Vesuvius is a black shape against a black sky.

By 9.15pm the dining room is a warm hum of plates and laughter. The table for twelve is a hole lit up like a stage.

Berto doesn't look at his phone. He waits the way you wait in this trade: a quarter of an hour for the traffic, another for parking. At 9.30pm he rings. Four rings, then voicemail. At 9.42pm someone picks up, with flat-party music under their voice: ‘Doc, so sorry, Auntie wasn't feeling well, we've stayed in. Happy New Year!’ Click.

Berto pulls back the kitchen curtain and counts the trays. Twelve portioned sea bass fillets, twelve truffle crêpes, twelve seafood terrines that won't last the night. At eight he turned away three couples without bookings, because the room was full. Twelve covers at €85 come to €1,020. The festive-season staff, hired by the shift, get paid regardless.

The silence lasts twelve seconds. Then Berto goes back out front and pours wine for the people who did turn up.

A Thursday in December, in Salford, down by the Irwell. Bobby has a pub with an open kitchen, red brick, craft beer on tap and a roast menu for end-of-year work dos. At half seven, eight covers haven't turned up. Nor at eight. At quarter past, Bobby tries the number: switched off. The corner table is laid and untouched, the roast turkey drying out under the heat lamps. Bobby has been wiping the same patch of bar for ten minutes. ‘They just ghosted us,’ he says, without looking up.

About 1,700 kilometres as the crow flies separate Portici from Salford. The gap at the table is exactly the same.

In 2026, 25 December falls on a Friday, the 31st on a Thursday and Epiphany on a Wednesday. Anyone who waits until Christmas week to decide how to handle bookings has already lost the takings. Decisions get made now, while things are quiet.

Here's where I stand, and I won't soften it: a deposit isn't distrust. It's the difference between an invitation and a booking. If you invite a friend to dinner and they don't show, you're disappointed. If a customer books twelve covers for New Year's Eve and vanishes, you lose time, stock and takings. Those are two different things and they need handling differently.

Mind you, I'm not saying ‘deposit from everyone, always’. The rule is something else. Written down, communicated beforehand, proportionate to the risk of that particular night, applied the same way to every table. The amount you calibrate. The rule you don't.

I've come at this from another angle in Food Experience Design: why Italy has the gold but still hasn't learnt how to set it, where the experience begins with the booking. Here I'm talking about the mutual commitment that comes before that, when the customer hasn't walked in yet.

The empty table has a price

Italy: what the numbers say

The Incrementoo-Ristorazione 2025 Observatory analysed more than 212,000 bookings across 300 Italian restaurants, from January to August 2025. The average no-show rate is 12.8%. At venues that ask for a deposit it drops to 5.4%: 58% lower. Where a reminder goes out by WhatsApp, SMS or email, the problem falls by 32%. Nearly four bookings in ten (38%) come through a platform, 22% through the website or Google, 21% by phone.

Why do people disappear? The TheFork study with the Commestibile newsletter (2024) says 12% of respondents admitted to at least one no-show. Among those who had, the most common reason was simply forgetting (46%), then something unexpected cropping up (36%). Embarrassment at having to cancel came third, at 11%.

In Italy, then, the main enemy is distraction, not bad manners. A reminder with a cancel button does more than any lecture.

When a big party falls through, the bill is plain to see. On 1 April 2026 Il Fatto Quotidiano reported the case of Vittorio Veneto: twenty-five people booked lunch and never turned up. The owner rang and was told something had come up. Ascom, the local trade association, reminded everyone of what restaurateurs always find out afterwards: to claim compensation, the penalty has to be communicated and quantified beforehand, at the time of booking. A table for two gets resold to the first passer-by. A room blocked out for twenty-five doesn't.

United Kingdom: what the numbers say

ResDiary's 2024 report, based on 2023 data (175 venues surveyed across the UK and Ireland), shows that 76% of venues had suffered no-shows, with on average 8% of bookings not honoured and an average loss of £3,621 a year per venue.

The OpenTable Restaurant Impact Report, published on 6 October 2026, says no-shows have fallen on the previous year, but a table for two that doesn't turn up still costs on average £55.70. Some 83% of diners know that not showing up hurts the venue. The average willingness to leave a refundable deposit is £35 a head, £49 among Londoners. OpenTable also claims that deposits handled through its platform cut no-shows by 60% globally: that's the provider's figure, not an independent check.

The Resos index, built on 3.77 million bookings across 2,417 restaurants between August 2025 and July 2026, adds another piece. It records only a 2.33% no-show rate, because it counts the ones flagged by staff. With a deposit or card guarantee the rate is 0.80%, without one it's 2.47%. Resos itself warns that this is an observed association, not an experiment.

The figure that matters to me for 31 December is a different one. Parties of ten or more fail to turn up in 1.15% of cases. But every time it happens, they take an average of 13.4 covers with them.

Why the numbers don't match

From 2.33% to 12.8% looks like another world. They're counting different things. Resos records what staff log. Incrementoo analyses bookings at Italian restaurants. ResDiary interviews people who answer a survey. Read these numbers as orders of magnitude, not as a league table between countries.

The same goes for the total cost. Zonal and CGA estimated in 2023 a cost of £17.6 billion a year to British hospitality. ResDiary was already talking in 2016 about up to £16 billion, and the 2020 #NoMoreNoShows campaign used the same figure. Two estimates, different years, different methods. Neither is your bill.

Working out the cost for your table

Your sum starts from a typical case: the table of twelve on New Year's Eve, set menu at €85. The lost revenue is 12 × 85 = €1,020. But the real damage is worked out like this:

net cost of the no-show = lost revenue − costs genuinely avoided − revenue recovered

These are assumptions: swap in your own numbers. But look at which line carries the weight. On a Tuesday in November you'll refill a freed-up table in two hours. On 31 December you won't. That's why the same no-show costs far more, and why your sector's average matters less than the number for that one night.

Five tools, five side effects

The reminder is the bare minimum of decency. A message at 48 and 24 hours, with a one-click ‘cancel’ button, catches the people who forgot and gives those with a genuine hiccup a way out without the embarrassment. If you've already got WhatsApp Business in 2026: the CRM you already have in your pocket, you're halfway there. The limit is built in: it costs nothing to anyone who ignores it.

The card guarantee doesn't move any money. The side effect is a technical one. On credit cards the hold reduces the available limit. On debit and prepaid cards it can show up as a real charge, and the refund takes anything from a few days to several weeks depending on the bank: even TableCheck, a booking platform, admits as much. The customer rings you convinced they've been robbed before they've even sat down.

Charging afterwards, remotely, needs a clear mandate. The European Banking Authority (EBA) explains that merchant-initiated charges, like a no-show fee, rest on a mandate given at the time of booking, with the customer's strong authentication: SCA (Strong Customer Authentication), the one that asks you to open your banking app. Accepting the terms at booking counts as an affirmative act. Skip this step and you risk the charge being disputed.

The deposit is the sturdiest safeguard, but in Italy it triggers a very specific two-way regime (art. 1385 of the Civil Code): more on that shortly. In the UK the same tool is called a deposit and has no code article behind it: it's judged under the Consumer Rights Act and the penalty rule, which I come to later.

The cancellation fee is the most convenient on paper and the most awkward in practice. In the UK the Observer found in 2023 that more than 90 of the country's top 100 restaurants charge for no-shows, with amounts from £20 to £375. But a figure that lands after dinner, on the card of someone who wasn't there, is the surest way to get a dispute.

The prepaid ticket is the model used by Next and Alinea in Chicago. Nick Kokonas, who came up with it, put no-shows at 10-12% on unpaid bookings. At The Aviary, another of his venues, tickets took it from 11.8% to under 1%. Kokonas himself says the system works best in small, chef-led places with few seats and heaps of demand. In my view, if you're not one of those, a prepaid ticket at a hundred euros doesn't wipe out no-shows: it wipes out bookings.

How I combine them

There's no single tool for the whole year. I calibrate the constraint to the risk of the night:

• Ordinary service, small tables: reminder and one-click cancellation. That's enough.
• Weekends and standard tables: card guarantee.
• Big parties and peak dates (Christmas, New Year's Eve, Easter): deposit or part-payment in advance, with a free cancellation window of 48-72 hours.

It's not a rule of law: it's my starting point. I don't pick the amount by gut feeling. I anchor it to the real damage of that table, the one you worked out above. With a net loss of €72.50 a cover, a €40 deposit isn't a punishment: it's less than the damage.

Italy: advance payment, caparra and penalty clause are not synonyms

Here I'm explaining how the law works, not what you should do in your own case: your policy should be reviewed by a solicitor and your accountant. In restaurant-speak ‘deposit’, ‘advance’, ‘caparra’ and ‘penalty’ get swapped around as if they meant the same thing. Under the Civil Code they don't.

The side nobody reads

The caparra confirmatoria cuts both ways. If you ask twelve people for €40 each, you've got €480 in the till. If on 31 December the table isn't there (overbooking, a boiler failure), the customer can withdraw and demand double the sum paid: €960. That's the €480 you took plus another €480 out of your own pocket. It happens to people who write ‘caparra confirmatoria’ on the form without having read the second paragraph of article 1385.

That's why I put the venue's side in the policy too. I deal with it in the ready-to-copy text further down.

The label matters

If you write ‘leave €100 to hold the table’, at best you've asked for an advance payment. An advance, if the customer doesn't come, gets returned; you're left with a claim for damages, and you have to prove the loss. For a sum to count as caparra, the label has to come out of the contract or the parties' actual intention: that's what an opinion from the Fondazione Studi dei Consulenti del Lavoro reminds us, citing the Court of Cassation (judgment no. 28697/2005). And the caparra penitenziale presupposes a right to withdraw provided for in the contract: it has to be written in, not improvised.

The customer is a consumer

Someone booking dinner for themselves and their friends is a consumer, and the Consumer Code gives them extra protection. Article 33, paragraph 2, letter f) presumes unfair, until proven otherwise, a clause that imposes on the consumer, in case of default, a manifestly excessive sum. If a clause is unfair it's void, the nullity operates only in the consumer's favour and the judge can raise it of their own motion (art. 36).

On the caparra front, the Court of Cassation has ruled that a judge can't reduce it as they would a penalty clause (judgment no. 17715 of 25 August 2020). The point is debated among legal scholars, and consumer-law scrutiny remains in the background anyway: a disproportionate amount is a risk, whatever you call it. If the person booking is a company, on the other hand, the picture changes, and that's a question for your solicitor.

As for the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union of 18 December 2025 (C-320/24), it restates that a national court must be able to examine unfair terms of its own motion: it concerned a penalty clause in a preliminary sale contract, not a restaurant, and shouldn't be read as a rule for restaurants.

Tell them first, and no fourteen-day cooling-off

To get compensation you have to warn people beforehand and quantify the penalty at the point of booking: Ascom said it again at Vittorio Veneto in 2026. Back in 2020, after the Cordignano case, the director of Ascom Vittorio Veneto was already advising venues to ask strangers for an advance or a caparra confirmatoria. The burden of proof is on you. A confirmed WhatsApp message or a tick on a digital form is the bare minimum.

And don't expect the law to bail you out afterwards. A customer who books online or by phone generally has fourteen days to change their mind. But article 59, paragraph 1, letter n) of the Consumer Code excludes withdrawal for catering services and leisure activities when the contract sets a specific date. The provision doesn't name the restaurant: a dinner booked for 31 December has a date, and the most natural reading is that it falls within it. If you're unsure about your own clause, ask your solicitor. Either way, the cancellation terms are the ones you write.

VAT: one for your accountant

A sum received as an advance payment counts for VAT purposes. A caparra confirmatoria, which is security and not an advance on the price, is in general outside the scope of VAT when received. If the customer then sits down, the caparra is set against the evening's bill. How to document it and record it in your till isn't for me to decide: that's for your accountant, before you publish the policy.

United Kingdom: deposit, fee and VAT

Bobby, in Salford, works with a different scaffolding. There's no code telling him what to call the sum. Three checks: is it clear and fair (the Consumer Rights Act 2015), is it proportionate (the penalty rule), does it pay its tax (VAT).

Fairness and transparency

Part 2 of the Consumer Rights Act 2015 requires that terms in consumer contracts be transparent and fair. The CMA (Competition and Markets Authority, the British competition and markets regulator) explained in 2016, in a letter to wedding and events venues, what it sees as fairer and what as less so. Fairer: a deposit that works as a reservation fee, meaning a small percentage of the price.

Less fair: a non-refundable advance payment, or a cancellation charge, calculated to cover all the venue's costs and lost profit. The government's guide for consumers says cancellation charges must be an honest estimate of the venue's direct loss. No percentage set by law: don't go looking for one.

The penalty rule

Then there's the common-law penalty rule. On 4 November 2015 the Supreme Court (Cavendish v Makdessi and ParkingEye v Beavis, [2015] UKSC 67) changed the test: a clause is a penalty, and therefore unenforceable, if it imposes on the party in breach a detriment out of all proportion to the other party's legitimate interest in enforcing the obligation. It's no longer enough to ask whether the figure matches a pre-estimate of the loss. In ParkingEye, an £85 charge for overstaying in a free car park was held to be valid.

For a restaurant, that means you can protect your service with a figure fixed in advance, as long as it isn't out of scale with what you're protecting. Mind the difference: the government guide talks about an honest estimate of the loss (that's the fairness test), the Supreme Court about proportion to a legitimate interest (that's the penalty rule). They're two different checks, and in ParkingEye the Court applied both.

As in Italy, there's no 14-day cooling-off: regulation 28(1)(h) of the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 excludes catering and leisure activities with a specific date.

VAT

HMRC, the British tax authority, changed the rule with Revenue and Customs Brief 13 of 2018: from 1 March 2019, VAT is due on payments retained for an unused service, even if the customer doesn't turn up. If you refund everything, no VAT. The official example in HMRC's manual (VATSC05825) is hotels. For your restaurant and the rate, have a word with your accountant.

Vocabulary, so you don't come unstuck in translation

Writing the rule down

A policy isn't a legal text written to frighten people. It's a map of mutual responsibilities. For it to stand up in front of the law and the customer, it needs to contain seven things:

1. Who's covered. All bookings, groups above a threshold, or just peak dates?
2. What you ask for. Card guarantee, deposit, payment in advance.
3. How much, and why. The amount follows your real cost per cover, not a figure that ‘puts the fear of God in them’.
4. The free cancellation window. With a day and a time: ‘until 8.00pm on 29 December’, not ‘with reasonable notice’.
5. What happens to the money. Deducted from the bill, kept, refunded.
6. The exception. An illness, a bereavement, a closed road: if documented, the venue can turn the sum into a voucher. A rule with a written exemption holds up better than a rigid one.
7. Where it's written. Before the ‘Confirm’ button, in the email, in the reminder. A condition buried in the general terms isn't a policy: it's a trap, and I talk about it in The trick that's now a crime: dark patterns, the DSA and design that deceives. Radical transparency, on the other hand, is in Show me the receipts.

What others ask for

In Italy there's no public price list, and the only solid reference is your own cost per cover. In the UK there are numbers to look at, with a date on them. In 2023 the Observer found amounts from £20 to £375. The Ledbury asked for £195 a head for a no-show, Core by Clare Smyth £150 for late cancellation. Moor Hall, in Lancashire, asked for £225 a head at the time of booking and kept it if you didn't cancel at least 14 days beforehand.

Benares, in Mayfair, £35 a head: Sameer Taneja, speaking for the restaurant, says no-shows have dropped considerably since, that they now charge four to six times a week, and that exceptions are made for strikes, bad weather and illness. The Palmerston, in Edinburgh, asks for £20 a head for tables of three or more who cancel within 24 hours, and raised it from £10: at £10, says the co-founder, plenty of people didn't bat an eyelid.

These are 2023 figures, from high-end venues. They're there to give you an order of magnitude, not a number to copy.

A text to copy

Example amounts: recalculate them on your own real cost. Here €40 is 47% of an €85 menu. In the Italian version ‘we’ is the restaurant: it's their text, not mine.

Italian version (website, email, WhatsApp)

New Year's Eve dinner: our rule To confirm your table we ask for a caparra confirmatoria of €40 per person (art. 1385 of the Italian Civil Code). If you turn up, the sum is deducted from the evening's bill. You can cancel free of charge until 8.00pm on 29 December, 48 hours before service: we'll refund the whole sum. After that deadline, or if you don't show, we keep the caparra to cover the costs we've already incurred. If we're the ones who can't guarantee your table, we'll return double the caparra, as the law provides. In the event of a serious, documented emergency, write to us: we'll try to turn the caparra into a voucher for a future dinner.

English version (for international guests)

New Year's Eve booking: our policy To confirm your table we take a card guarantee. Nothing is charged when you book. You can cancel or amend free of charge until 8.00pm on 29 December. If you cancel after that, or do not arrive, we will charge £40 per guest to the card you gave us. By booking you agree to this charge. If we cannot honour your booking, you will not be charged. We use your details only to manage your booking.

The two texts aren't translations of each other, and that's deliberate: the Italian caparra and the English card guarantee are different tools.

Same principle, different trade: in Agency contracts: 12 questions before you sign I say that clear clauses get written before the signature.

Fake bookings

There's another reason to have a barrier. At the Black Ladd, a pub in Shaw, Oldham, someone booked seven tables of six with false details: 42 seats blocked, 47 genuine customers turned away, nobody showed. At Rafters, in Derbyshire, on 3 January 2022, 23 fake bookings for 109 covers came in within a couple of hours, from just a few IP addresses (two or three, depending on the outlet). The restaurant introduced a £10-a-head deposit: anyone wanting to repeat the prank would have to shell out £1,090.

Three barriers, in order of cost: a verification code by SMS or WhatsApp, which proves the number exists; card verification with the bank's authentication (3-D Secure); a cap on bookings per IP address.

Saying it without losing the customer

A written rule isn't enough: it has to be said well.

Italy: the right word is ‘guarantee’

If you say, ‘Leave me your card, and if you don't come I'll charge you the penalty,’ the customer feels like they're on a watch list. If you say, ‘To protect the fish I order specially for your table, I'm asking you for a guarantee on the booking,’ they feel expected. The rule is the same. What changes is the person you're talking to.

Campania already has a precedent. In 2017 TheFork and FIPE (the federation of public establishments) launched credit-card booking for fine dining: free cancellation up to 24 hours before, no charge at booking, amount set by the restaurant and accepted by the customer. Among the first to adopt it were Sadler in Milan, Da Vittorio, and two Campanian names: Don Alfonso 1890, in Sant'Agata sui Due Golfi, and La Taverna del Capitano, in Marina del Cantone. 2017 is the date of the scheme, not their policy today.

United Kingdom: the embarrassment of cancelling

On the other side the problem is the mirror image. In July 2020 #NoMoreNoShows was born in Manchester, started by Sixty Eight People with Antonia Lallement of Gusto Italian, backed by operators and by Sacha Lord. Abi Dunn, of Sixty Eight People, says: ‘British people tend to feel embarrassed about cancelling’. The message is the opposite of a fine: it's fine to cancel, just say so. Three steps: plans change, let us know; rebook; get friends and family involved. And one of the supporters, Thom Hetherington, warns that the same deposits for everyone don't work for every venue: the campaign doesn't impose a model.

Two cultures, two different reasons, the same hole. In Italy people forget, in Britain people feel awkward. Either way the answer is to make cancelling a one-click affair.

When the platform disappears

On 19 February 2026 FIPE signed an agreement with Quandoo: preferential terms for members on the restaurant plan, on a platform with nearly 6,000 venues in Italy. In March Quandoo announced it would close by 31 December 2026. From 1 October restaurants can no longer manage bookings with that tool.

The lesson isn't about Quandoo. Your policy shouldn't live only inside a platform: it should be on your website, on your Google listing (Google Business Profile: your best salesperson costs you nothing), in the confirmation and in the reminder. Tools come and go. The rule is yours.

The revenge review

The customer who doesn't show up, sees the agreed sum charged and writes a one-star review on Google. The commonest mistake is to reply in anger. A reply to a review isn't written to convince the person who wrote it, but for the hundreds of people who'll read that screen over the following months. I've talked about it in The two-star review that changes your day. Here I'll add one rule: never name the customer and never recount their booking in public.

‘Thank you for writing. The booking was confirmed on the terms set out in the confirmation email, accepted at the time of booking: for the New Year's Eve menu we prepare the catch to measure for the number of guests expected. We'd rather not discuss a single booking in public. If you like, write to us privately and we'll talk it over.’

The reason is practical as well as one of style. Booking details exist to manage the booking. Publishing them to put customers on trial is a legal risk you don't want to find out about the hard way, as you'll see below.

Seven real-world cases

Among the campaigns I found, almost none come from big brands: they come from trade associations and operators. 

Christmas 2026: the calendar

The waiting list is the best insurance against the empty table. Someone pulled off it on 30 December sits down with a gratitude that no promotion can buy you.

Checklist before you publish the policy

 The rule is written and visible before the confirm button.

 The label is right: advance payment, caparra confirmatoria, caparra penitenziale or penalty clause.

 The amount can be justified by your real cost per cover.

 The free cancellation deadline has a day and a time.

 Reminders go out at 48 and 24 hours.

 Cancelling costs one click, not a phone call.

 The policy says what happens if the venue can't guarantee the table.

 Your accountant knows how to record the sum.

The rule written first

The ragù goes on the hob at six in the morning, for twelve people. At eight in the evening, if the twelve don't turn up, you can't put the ragù back in the jar.

Asking for a clear rule at the point of booking isn't a barrier thrown up against the guest. It's saying out loud what your time is worth, the produce you've chosen and the work of the people in the kitchen and on the floor on 31 December while the rest of the world celebrates. Someone who won't accept a clear rule isn't always a bad customer: sometimes they just haven't read it. That's why the rule goes where everyone reads it.

Berto didn't lose twelve covers because he didn't know the law. He lost them because the rule was in his head, not on the booking page. Same for Bobby. A rule written first is a service to the customer. No rule leaves you with nothing but the bill, at the end of the night.

If you'd like a hand writing the rule in the right words for your customers, drop me a line. Disclosure: among the things I do is build websites, so that includes the pages where a policy like this needs to sit in the right spot. The advice above holds with or without me.

This article is information, not legal or tax advice: your policy should be reviewed by your solicitor and your accountant.

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