What Should a Restaurant Host Be Doing? Skills & Challenges
Skills
Explore some of the most common restaurant marketing problems and their practical fixes so you can boost reservations and streamline guest communication.
October 7, 2025
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Restaurant Marketing
You’re pouring money into ads, social campaigns, loyalty programs, and every marketing tactic under the sun. But what if your biggest marketing leak starts at the front door – the phone?
Missed calls mean missed reservations, takeout orders, event leads, and guest questions that never get answered. Even a handful of lost opportunities can quietly add up over time.
We’ll look at the most common restaurant marketing problems that actually start on the phone, and share practical fixes you can put to work right away.
For most operators, ‘marketing problems’ sound like issues solved with more ads or better SEO.
But the truth is, many of the biggest leaks in restaurant marketing happen before a guest ever sees your dining room, i.e., on the phone when they first make contact with your business.
Here’s where the breakdowns happen, and the fix for every scenario.
Guests don’t call for the fun of it. They call to book tables, place takeout orders, ask about private dining, or check hours and menu details. When no one picks up, that revenue disappears.
More than two-thirds of Americans say they’ll move on if a restaurant doesn’t answer the phone. That’s a lot of lost revenue. Margins are already tight, and a handful of missed calls each night can be the difference between making a profit and running in the red.
Take The Stinking Rose Group, for example. Hostie handled over 24,000 calls across their locations, making sure no guest inquiry slipped through.
The fix is simple: make sure every call gets answered, even if it’s after hours or the dining room is packed. When calls are captured automatically, no cover slips away.
The first impression of your restaurant often happens long before a guest walks in. Most often, it happens when they call. One guest might sit on hold, while another gets a rushed answer. But both leave frustrated.
All the money you spend on marketing doesn’t matter if the very first touchpoint feels messy.
Consistency builds trust. A virtual concierge, like Hostie, makes sure every caller gets the same experience: a warm greeting, quick response, accurate information, and seamless follow-up, no matter who’s on shift.
That way, the brand you’ve worked so hard to build comes through in every interaction.
Picture a busy Friday night. The dining room is full, your staff is juggling tables, and the phones keep ringing with delivery and takeout requests. It’s impossible to keep up, so orders get missed and customers give up.
For restaurants relying on off-premise sales, this is a major leak. The campaigns you run to boost delivery will fall flat if no one answers the phone.
Automating takeout and delivery calls ensures those orders get captured without adding more staff to payroll. Instead of throwing away hard-earned demand, every caller gets through and every order counts.
Hostie automates takeout and delivery calls, capturing orders straight into top POS systems like Toast and Square. Every caller gets through, and your team stays focused on guests in the dining room.
Event and catering calls are some of the most valuable leads a restaurant can get. A single booking can be worth thousands. But too often, those calls go to voicemail and never get returned. By the time someone checks the message, the guest has already booked with another venue.
It’s painful to think about how much high-margin revenue slips away this way. The solution is to capture event details in real time and notify a manager instantly. Instead of a voicemail lost in the shuffle, you’ve got a hot lead ready for follow-up.
That’s exactly why we built our integration with Perfect Venue – so every private dining or catering inquiry is logged, flagged, and in front of the right person before the lead goes cold.
Most operators know their sales numbers and reservation counts, but what about the phones? How many calls go unanswered each week? What are guests actually asking about? Without that visibility, it’s impossible to know where demand is being lost or what guests really want.
A virtual concierge solves that by logging and transcribing every call. You can see when phones spike, what questions are most common, and how many leads come in for things like events or catering.
That data means smarter decisions. Instead of guessing where to put your marketing budget, you double down on the things guests are already asking for.
Hosts already juggle a lot – greeting guests, seating tables, updating the waitlist, and managing walk-ins. Add a constantly ringing phone, and something has to give. Staff are forced to choose between the person in front of them and the person calling in. It leads to mistakes and drives turnover.
Hospitality already struggles with retention. Even though the industry has added around 24,000 jobs a month in 2024, many operators still can’t fill shifts. Taking routine calls off your team’s plate helps ease that burden.
When staff can focus on guests in the dining room instead of splitting their attention, the experience improves for everyone.
Restaurants serve locals, tourists, international students, and diverse community groups. But most phone lines only support English. For guests who are more comfortable in another language, that barrier is enough to call somewhere else.
That doesn’t have to be the case. Platforms like Hostie already support 20+ languages, making it easy to connect with every guest who calls.
At Hostie, we know these problems because we’ve lived them. Our platform was built by restaurant operators, for operators, to plug the biggest marketing leak in the business: the phone.
Restaurants already using Hostie have seen measurable results:
Hostie makes sure reservations, takeout orders, and event leads don’t slip through the cracks.
And with full transcripts and analytics, you gain clear visibility into guest needs, from the peak times when calls spike to the most common requests.
Pair that with our integrations with leading platforms like Perfect Venue, Toast POS, Tripleseat, OpenTable, and others. Your call data flows straight into the tools you already use. The result is better marketing, smoother operations, and a stronger guest experience before guests even walk in the door.
Restaurant marketing problems don’t always start with advertising budgets or social media reach. Many start with something simpler: a phone that never got answered.
From missed reservations to lost event leads, the costs add up fast.
With Hostie, you don’t have to accept those losses. Hostie answers every call, captures every request, and gives your staff time back to deliver hospitality the way it should be.
See how Hostie captures every reservation, takeout order, and event inquiry. Book a demo or jump straight into your free trial today.
