Restaurant no-shows average 2.33% in new global index
Copenhagen's resOS tracked 3.8 million bookings over a year and found France losing the most covers to empty tables, Switzerland the fewest, and deposits doing far more than reminders to close the gap.
The restaurant no-show rate across almost 3.8 million tracked reservations comes out to 2.33%, according to a new index from Danish booking platform resOS. The company logged 87,953 recorded no-shows across 2,417 restaurants between August 2025 and July 2026, using staff-marked outcomes rather than a customer survey.
That distinction matters. Diner self-reporting on missed reservations has long run higher than what restaurants actually record, and resOS is explicit that its number is a floor, not a full accounting: 72.9% of the restaurants in the dataset logged at least one no-show, meaning some of the rest simply were not marking them.
Which countries lose the most covers
Deposits close the gap; reminders barely move it.
The country breakdown spans a wide range. Switzerland records the lowest no-show rate at 0.49%, followed by Germany at 1.30% and Denmark at 1.31%. France sits at the other end at 5.88%, with Italy close behind at 4.71%. The United Kingdom supplies more than half the dataset's reservations — over two million — at a middling 1.48%, while the United States comes in at 3.17%.
Party size complicates the picture. Tables of one or two guests no-show at 2.63%, more than double the 1.15% rate for parties of ten or more. But large parties that do no-show empty far more seats: 13.44 covers on average, against 1.96 for the smallest tables. And lead time runs counter to intuition — bookings made two to six days out show the highest no-show rate, 2.67%, while reservations made 30 days or more in advance come in lowest, at 1.96%.
What actually closes the gap
Two mitigation tools show very different results. Reservations protected by a deposit or card-on-file no-show policy recorded a 0.80% no-show rate, against 2.47% for unprotected bookings — a gap resOS is careful to call descriptive, not proof of cause, since restaurants that adopt deposits already differ from those that do not. SMS reminders show a smaller, still-observational effect: an associated 16% drop in recorded no-shows. Simple confirmation prompts, by contrast, barely move the number at all.
None of this settles the argument restaurants and diners keep having over deposits, surcharges and who absorbs the cost of running a dining room. It does suggest that the same booking software increasingly deciding who gets a table — the kind now facing scrutiny over AI agents gaming reservation systems — has the data to say which fixes actually hold a seat.
