Digital loyalty cards for restaurants

Why this works for restaurants

Restaurant spend ranges from a quick lunch to a large table, so rewarding visits equally would overpay small tickets and insult large ones. Points scale the reward to the spend and quietly encourage the larger order.

Restaurants have the opposite problem to cafés: visits are infrequent but valuable. A customer who comes monthly rather than quarterly is worth three times as much, so the goal is not to increase daily habit but to shorten the gap between visits.

Points work better than stamps here because the ticket size varies so widely. A table of six should not earn the same reward as a single coffee, and a points model makes the maths obvious to the customer without you having to explain it.

The highest-value feature for a restaurant is not the card itself but lapsed-customer detection. Knowing which regulars have not been in for 45 days, and being able to send a single wallet notification to exactly those people, is worth more than the stamp mechanic.

Why points rather than stamps?

Because a restaurant's tickets vary too much for a stamp to be fair. A solo lunch and a table of six cannot reasonably earn the same, and a stamp card that treats them identically will either overpay small tickets or insult large ones.

One point per euro with €10 off at 200 points is the legible version: a five per cent return the customer can estimate without arithmetic, reached by a typical couple after three or four dinners.

Who holds the card when a table splits the bill?

Whoever pays, and say so plainly at enrolment. Bill-splitting is the most common source of confusion in restaurant loyalty, and a rule stated once at the counter prevents a negotiation at every table.

If group dining is central to your business, consider crediting the booking rather than the payment. It requires a reservation system that holds the customer record, but it rewards the person who chose the restaurant.

When should a restaurant message its customers?

Mid-week, mid-afternoon, for a weekend booking, and rarely. A restaurant customer's normal gap is three to six weeks, so ninety days of absence is the lapse signal rather than a fortnight.

The strongest message references the points they already hold. A customer sitting on 160 of 200 points has a concrete reason to book rather than a general invitation.

What restaurants usually struggle with

• Long gaps between visits make customers easy to lose without noticing
• Ticket sizes vary too much for visit-based rewards to feel fair
• Booking platforms own the customer relationship unless you build your own
• Discount-led promotions attract one-time bargain hunters, not regulars

What we would set up for you

A points card with 200 as the goal and €10 off once 200 points are earned as the reward. Customers enrol by phone number at the counter (they never take out their phone), and the card lands in Apple Wallet or Google Wallet in about three seconds.

You can change the goal or the reward later without reissuing anyone's card, so there is no penalty for starting with this and adjusting once you have real data.