What is the meaning / definition of Time per Table Turnaround in the hospitality industry?
The term, Time per Table Turnaround refers to a metric used to assess the time it takes a customer group utilising a table/ space from the moment they sit down to the moment they paid the bill and leave.
In total revenue management and the restaurant business it becomes important to measure this indicator. With a restaurant that makes low turnover per customer it is in the restaurants interest to reduce the time each customer spends in the restaurant. If not you may be left with a full restaurant and customers come to stay for multiple hours after only having one or two drinks.
To calculate Time per Table Turnaround it is important to first know what period of the day you would like insights into. For example the time during breakfast, lunch and dinner differs greatly depending on restaurant menu, location and many other factors. Therefore, first choose a period.
Thereafter you must count all the groups of customer occupying a table (parties) that are at your restaurant during set period. Therefore you must divide the number of parties divided by the number of tables. If you know manage to serve 100 parties at your restaurant in one hour during lunch and you have 50 tables – your time per table turnaround is 30 min (1/2 hour) per table.
