Does your restaurant booking platform charge per cover? How to check.

The three shapes a booking fee takes

• Flat. One monthly price, sized by plan or by how many bookings you take. A full night costs the same as an empty one. This is how Gaplessly charges.
• Per reservation or in tiers. A monthly price that steps up with your booking count, or a charge per booking above an allowance.
• Per cover. A fee for each diner seated. Some platforms apply it only to diners their own network sent you, and others to every cover that passes through the system.

Neither of the last two is wrong in itself. A per-cover fee on diners a platform genuinely found for you is a coherent deal: you are buying customers and paying for the ones who arrive. It becomes a problem when you cannot tell which covers it applies to, or when it quietly applies to guests who were already yours.

How to audit a month of covers

• Export one full month of bookings from the platform, with the date, party size and source of each.
• Mark the source of every booking: the platform's own marketplace or app, your website widget, a Google link, a phone call keyed in by your team, a walk-in.
• Count the covers in each group.
• Get the invoice for the same month and read each line. Find the per-cover or per-booking line and the number of covers it charged.
• Compare the two numbers. If the invoice charges more covers than the platform's own network sent, ask which others were counted and why, in writing.

A hypothetical month shows the gap. If the invoice charges 120 covers but your export shows only 70 came through the platform's own site or app, you have 50 covers to ask about. If it charges 70, the fee is working as described. Either way you have a number to put in front of the vendor and to weigh against what that network is worth to you.

Check the booking source for diners who clicked "Reserve" on your own Google listing. Operators report being charged per head on people who searched their name, and whether a platform counts those as its own diners depends on how the link is set up. Ask each vendor how a Google click is classified.

What a platform says about its own cover fees

Compare vendors by what each one publishes about itself. On OpenTable, its own plans page states that cover fees apply to diners who discover a restaurant through its site, app or affiliate network, and not to bookings made direct on the restaurant's website or by phone; its subscription and cover-fee figures for Australia were not published at source when we last checked. ResDiary publishes no price across its core plans, only a demo request. Quandoo is closing down, and its historical subscription and cover-fee figures were never published. Each of those is covered, with the source and the date we read it, on its own comparison page.

Ours is published: 35 bookings a month free on Venue Starter, then A$49 excl. GST a month for that month, and the paid venue plans are on the pricing page. There is no fee per diner, per cover or per booking, from any source, and no commission.

What a deposit really costs

Deposits are the other place a fee can hide. In Gaplessly a guest pays a deposit or a no-show fee to you, through your own Stripe account connected to ours. You are the merchant of record, we take no commission on those payments, and the only cost is Stripe's own card fee, charged to your Stripe account.

Stripe's standard Australian online rate, read on 6 October 2026, is 1.65% + A$0.30 on a domestic card. On a A$20 deposit that is A$0.63, about 3% of the deposit. A saved card takes no payment at booking, so card fees apply only to the no-show fees you actually charge.

Deposits and no-show fees come with Venue Growth and Venue Pro, or as an add-on for A$14.99 a month plus GST on Venue Starter.