CANCELLATION RECOVERY
A cancellation is only lost revenue if nobody refills the table.
Cancellation Recovery is Fork Time's system for refilling tables that open at short notice, whether through a cancellation or a no-show. The moment a booking is cancelled, Fork Time checks your waitlist and recent enquiries, ranks the guests most likely to want that specific table at that specific time, and prepares a text offer. Your team sends it in one tap. The first guest to accept is added to the live book automatically, and every recovered booking is tracked so you can see the revenue brought back. Ranking uses party size, requested time and how recently the guest asked, so the offer goes to people who already wanted that table rather than to a list. Cancellation Recovery is included on every Fork Time plan from $99 a month.
WHY SPEED DECIDES THE OUTCOME
Up to one in five reservations become no-shows, and cancellations arrive alongside them. What decides how much revenue is actually lost is not the cancellation rate, it is the time between the table opening and the table being filled. A cancellation at four o'clock is a table you can still sell. The same cancellation discovered at eight is an empty seat during your best service.
HOW IT WORKS
When a booking is cancelled, Fork Time immediately checks the waitlist and recent enquiries, including guests who asked for that time and could not be accommodated. It ranks them by how well they match the table and how recently they asked, then prepares a targeted text offer with a claim window.
Your team reviews it and sends. The first guest to accept is booked automatically into the live book, and the offer closes.
TIME-TO-REFILL, THE NUMBER THAT ACTUALLY DECIDES THE REVENUE
Time-to-refill is the median number of minutes between a table becoming available and that table being rebooked. It is the metric that determines what a cancellation actually costs, and almost no restaurant tracks it.
The industry reports no-show rate instead, which is close to a vanity metric. A venue with a 20% no-show rate and a ten-minute time-to-refill loses less money than a venue with a 5% rate and no recovery mechanism at all. Prevention has a ceiling. Recovery does not, and it is unmeasured.
Every recovered booking is recorded in Fork Time, so time-to-refill becomes visible from the first week rather than being inferred at the end of a quarter.
BEST FOR
Restaurants with peak-service demand that exceeds capacity. Venues carrying a waitlist. Any operator who currently refills cancellations by calling down a list, if anyone has time to call at all.
WHAT CANCELLATION RECOVERY DOES NOT DO
It cannot refill a table nobody wants. A cancellation at eight o'clock on a quiet Tuesday is usually lost, because recovery works by matching an open table against guests who already asked for that time. No waitlist and no recent enquiries means nothing to rank.
It also depends on your team. Fork Time prepares and ranks the offer, but someone has to send it, so a venue where nobody looks at the system during service will recover less than one where the host does. That is a deliberate choice rather than a limitation we plan to remove.