The Hidden Flaw in TOCK: Why Your Tasting Room Will Lose Money & Guest Interactions

In the competitive world of winery and tasting room reservations, every seat counts. Unfortunately, many businesses are finding that TOCK, a popular reservation platform, has a significant limitation that affects their ability to maximize occupancy. This flaw lies in TOCK's inability to assign more than one table or location per experience, leading to unsold seats and lost revenue.

The TOCK Platform: A Brief Overview

TOCK has made a name for itself by offering a user-friendly reservation system designed to streamline bookings for restaurants, wineries, and other hospitality venues. Its features, such as dynamic pricing and prepaid reservations, have helped businesses reduce no-shows and better manage their guest experiences. However, despite these advantages, TOCK's rigid structure in managing table assignments is proving to be a major drawback for many establishments.

The Core Issue: Single Table Assignment Per Experience

At the heart of the problem is TOCK's restriction that each experience or booking can only be associated with a single table or location. This limitation means that if a winery or tasting room wants to offer an experience that could span multiple tables or locations (such as a large group tasting or an event with different stages), they are forced to either consolidate the experience into one area or create multiple separate experiences. Both options come with significant drawbacks:

1. Complexity for Varied Experiences: Tasting rooms often want to offer different experiences with varying visit times, durations, pricing, and locations. TOCK's system requires too much complexity to make these varied experiences halfway possible. This inflexibility means that staff must manually manage and adjust reservations to accommodate different types of tastings, which can lead to errors and inefficiencies.
2. Optimizing Guest Placement: TOCK cannot optimize where to place guests for a single experience across multiple floor plans. Their platform only supports a single table assignment per location, which may not be the party's favorite seating on the property. If that experience doesn't get booked, that table is left empty, resulting in lost revenue for the tasting room.

The Complexity of Managing Multiple Floor Plans

Adding to the complexity, TOCK requires wineries to manage multiple floor plans for different days of the week, months, or seasons. This requirement necessitates frequent and complex changes just to make simple yield management adjustments. For example, a winery might have to juggle different configurations for weekday tastings, weekend events, and seasonal promotions. Each change involves updating the system with a new floor plan, ensuring all staff are aware of the new setup, and managing potential overlaps or conflicts. This cumbersome process further strains resources and reduces the efficiency of operations.

"Due to the complexity and risks to making changes to floor plans to offer different experiences, only one of our team members was authorized to do so. And not salesperson we spoke to at TOCK ever mentioned that we could not assign multiple tables or floor plans to our experiences which is how we operate to maximize our bookings." - Sonoma Tasting Room Manager

Real-World Implications

To understand the real-world impact of this issue, let's consider a hypothetical example:

Example Winery: Encore Winery

Encore Winery is a popular winery that offers a unique tasting experience involving three stages: a vineyard tour, a cellar tasting, and a final seated tasting in the tasting room. Ideally, they would like to book a group of 20 guests for this comprehensive experience, moving them from the vineyard to the cellar and finally to the tasting room.

With TOCK's current limitation, Encore Winery faces a dilemma. They can either:

• Keep re-assigning booked parties to other tables assigned to other experiences as they get booked, which takes minutes per move; not efficient.
• Reduce the number of experiences to optimize number of bookings resulting in ho-hum wine tasting experiences.
• Offer an upsell when the guest arrives which limits the types of experiences to those that do not require any significant pre-planning to make the experience special.

The first option increases administrative overhead, the second diminishes the guest experience, while the third risks guests skipping over the property because the experiences offered are not engaging.

The Financial Impact

The inability to fully utilize available space means that wineries and tasting rooms are often left with unsold seats. These empty seats translate directly to lost revenue. For small and medium-sized businesses, every seat counts towards profitability, and even a small percentage of unsold seats can make a significant difference over time.

CellarPass: A Superior Alternative

Fortunately, there is an alternative that addresses these issues without a hiccup: CellarPass. Unlike TOCK, CellarPass was designed to meet the complex requirements that wineries need to assign multiple floor plans to any single experience. This flexibility enables tasting rooms to accommodate more guests for the experiences that they demand.

By accommodating varying group sizes and configurations without the need for complex adjustments, CellarPass maximizes bookings and enhances the guest experience. This adaptability helps wineries and tasting rooms to operate more efficiently and profitably, far exceeding the capabilities of TOCK.

It makes sense that TOCK has these issues, as their programmers re-used much of the yield management design from OpenTable, a system originally designed specifically for restaurants where typically only one type of experience is offered. Wineries and tasting rooms, however, operate differently, with managers often wanting to offer 4-5 different types of wine tasting experiences. This fundamental difference in operational needs highlights the limitations of TOCK's design for the winery and tasting room context.

Conclusion

TOCK's inability to assign more than one table or location per experience is a significant flaw that hampers the ability of wineries and tasting rooms to maximize their occupancy and revenue. Coupled with the complexity of managing multiple floor plans for different days, months, or seasons, this limitation creates substantial operational challenges. By switching to CellarPass, businesses can overcome these hurdles, ensuring every seat is filled and every guest experience is optimized.

As the hospitality industry continues to evolve, platforms like CellarPass are leading the way by providing the flexibility and functionality that venues need. With these tools, businesses can ensure that every guest counts and every experience shines.

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