Cornell's Center for Hospitality Research Offers Analytics Tool

The Cornell Center for Hospitality Research (CHR) has released the Restaurant Table Simulator (RTS), which gives restaurant managers a way to analyze table usage in their restaurant. The RTS was developed by Gary Thompson, a professor at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration. It is available at no charge from the CHR.

 

Thompson wanted to make the simulator more accessible and useful to the restaurant industry so it’s based on Excel to allow a wide application. All users have to do is plug numbers into the spreadsheet and it will return such metrics as table usage, customer wait, and customers lost, given a particular set of inputs.

 

The RTS provides a series of charts and results tables that allow managers to test "what if" scenarios, so that they can improve their restaurant's mix of tables. One other innovation of RTS is that it accounts for the many restaurants where customers select their own tables, instead of being assigned to a table by a host or hostess.