Why We’re Separating Our Delivery & Dining Systems at The Beach Terrace

Running a restaurant today means feels like running several businesses at once.

There is the physical restaurant, of course. Then there is delivery, online ordering, reservations, customer communication, marketing, payments and a whole ecosystem of technology sitting behind the scenes and connecting all of it.

For a long time, the obvious solution seemed to be integration.

We have been using PetPooja as our billing and restaurant management software, and like many restaurants, we initially integrated it with platforms such as Swiggy and Zomato. The logic was that one system should ideally talk to all the others. Update something once, and it should automatically reflect everywhere. In theory, that is exactly how technology should work. In practice, hospitality is rarely that simple.

Over time, we realised that delivery platforms have a number of platform-specific requirements, rules and nuances.

A menu item may need to be configured differently on one platform. Pricing, availability, modifiers, photographs, descriptions and promotional structures can behave differently. Sometimes a change made in the restaurant's central billing system does not translate exactly the way we need it to on the delivery platform.

And when you are running a restaurant, "almost correct" is not really correct.

If a menu is wrong online, a price hasn't updated, an item remains available when it is actually sold out, or a platform-specific setting hasn't behaved as expected, the customer doesn't blame the software.

They blame the restaurant.

That is completely fair. The customer is dealing with The Beach Terrace, not with the technology stack behind The Beach Terrace.

So we made a decision.

We disconnected delivery from PetPooja.

Instead of trying to make one system control every aspect of our delivery presence, we decided that Swiggy and Zomato should be managed as the individual platforms they are. It creates a little more work for our team, but it gives us much more control.

Now, we're doing the same thing with dining reservations.

We believe technology should make a restaurant easier to operate, not make the restaurant adapt its operations to the limitations of the technology.

One of the issues we have encountered is the way reservation covers are handled through integrated systems. A restaurant doesn't necessarily operate with a single, fixed number of covers available for online reservations at any given moment. Availability can depend on the area of the restaurant, the type of booking, existing reservations, walk-ins, private events, weather, operational requirements and simply what is happening on that particular day.

But when an integrated system imposes its own logic on how many covers can be released for booking through a platform, we can end up with situations where the system says one thing while the restaurant's actual capacity and availability say another. That is frustrating for us, and even more frustrating for a customer who simply wants to book a table.

So we have decided to disintegrate our dining reservations as well.

We would rather manage our reservations directly on the platforms where customers are actually making those bookings, so our team also has better visibility and control over the inventory we release.

Integration is perhaps not always the answer.

There is a tendency in modern business to assume that the more integrated our systems are, the better our business will run. I'm not sure that's always true.

Integration is fantastic when two systems understand each other perfectly and when the business rules of both systems are compatible. But when they aren't, integration can create a false sense of efficiency. You may have fewer screens to look at, but you can also have less control over what is actually happening.

For a restaurant, that trade-off isn't necessarily worthwhile. Hospitality is a very physical, very human business. Technology is there to support the operation. It shouldn't dictate the operation. We'd rather have our teams spend a little more time managing two systems properly than have one integrated system make decisions that don't reflect the reality of our restaurant.

The customer experience comes first.

This decision has nothing to do with whether one piece of software is good or bad. PetPooja is an important part of our restaurant operations, and we continue to use it for what it does well. The question is simply what should be connected, and what should remain independent?

We've realised that delivery and dining reservations need a little more independence for us. When a customer orders from The Beach Terrace on Swiggy or Zomato, or books a table to come and spend an evening by the beach, what matters is that the information they see is accurate, the availability is real, and the experience works. If achieving that means having fewer integrations, then so be it.