The empty two-top costs more than the cover
A 7 PM reservation that never arrives is not one missed check. The waitlist was already told you were full. The section is staffed. The prep is done. And the table sits through the only ninety minutes on a Friday that were ever going to be worth anything.
Every restaurant knows this. Most restaurants respond by sending more confirmation texts, which is the cheapest available action and close to the least effective one.
Reminders are not the lever
A confirmation the day before and a reminder the morning of are table stakes at this point. They help the guest who meant to come. They do nothing for the party of six that booked three weeks out for a birthday that got rescheduled, or the walk-past booking made on a phone at midnight.
Reservations booked with a deposit no-show 73 percent less often. That is the number worth reorganizing around, and it is a change to the booking, not to the messaging.
How a deposit works on a reservation
You do not need a deposit on every two-top. Most restaurants that use this apply it to the bookings where a miss actually hurts: large parties, prime weekend slots, private events, holidays.
The mechanic is the same as everywhere else in the product. The moment the booking confirms, a Stripe payment link is created and texted into the conversation the guest is already in. They tap and pay before they have put their phone down. If they will not, you found that out three weeks early instead of at 7:15 on Friday.
What happens at the seat-by time
When the window passes, the no-show trigger fires on its own. The guest gets a message that offers to hold the table a little longer or rebook them for another night, with real availability rather than a request to call. Nobody has to notice the empty table first, which matters most on exactly the nights when nobody has time to notice anything.
Answering the phone during the rush
The other reservation problem is the one nobody counts: the calls that ring out between 6 and 8 because every person on the floor is carrying plates. Rex answers all of them at once. It handles hours, menu questions, allergen questions, party size, and booking, in 11 languages, without putting anyone on hold.
Restaurants default to SMS, voice, and webchat. Facebook stays off until you connect it.
Taking the order, not just the table
Restaurants are one of the verticals where the commerce tools are switched on. That means SMS takeout ordering, menu images sent as MMS instead of a link to a PDF, an online storefront, point of sale, and delivery with driver dispatch and live tracking. Gift cards, promotions, and offer codes run through the same system.
For a lot of operators this ends up mattering more than the reservation piece, because the takeout line and the phone line are the same phone line.
Be honest about the reservation book
RexRuby does not sync with Resy, OpenTable, Tock, or SevenRooms. There is no integration code for any of them and previous versions of this page implied otherwise, which was wrong. Bookings go into RexRuby's own calendar, Google Calendar, or Cal.com.
If your floor plan lives in a third party system, decide before you sign up whether you want reservations to move. Plenty of restaurants run the agent for the phone, the takeout line, and the retention side while leaving the book where it is.
What it costs
$299.99 a month, flat. No per-cover charge, no percentage of orders. Seven day free trial with no card charged until day eight.
Setup takes about twenty minutes and you talk to the agent in your browser before the payment step. Start at /start, or see the restaurant page.