DINO
A two-sided platform that lets diners browse restaurants, book tables, pre-order food by dish, and flag allergens — while giving restaurant and hotel operators a live table grid, guest management system, and pre-order kitchen integration. Built to eliminate no-shows, increase revenue per cover, and make allergen management legally defensible.
Live table grid with guest details, allergen flags, and pre-order status visible before each party arrives.
Restaurant discovery, table booking, food pre-ordering, allergen flagging.
Live table grid, guest profiles, incoming pre-orders, allergen alerts.
Pre-orders arrive as structured tickets 30 minutes before guest arrival.
RESTAURANTS WERE LOSING £16BN A YEAR TO A PROBLEM WITH A KNOWN SOLUTION.
The hospitality industry's no-show problem is not a mystery: when there's no financial stake in a reservation, a meaningful portion of diners simply don't show up. The fix — deposit-backed bookings — exists. But most restaurant booking tools either don't offer it, or bolt it on as an awkward afterthought.
The founder of Dino came to Vazgro with a sharper version of the problem: existing platforms solve bookings but ignore everything else. Diners still arrive and verbally explain their allergen needs. Pre-ordering is impossible. Operators are still running table management from a paper diary or a spreadsheet open in a browser tab from 2019.
The brief was to build both sides of this product simultaneously: a diner app that felt as slick as any consumer product, and a restaurant dashboard that a floor manager could use without a training session.
Lost annually by UK restaurants to no-shows. The industry's single largest controllable cost, yet 64% of venues still take bookings by phone.
Of diners want to pre-order food before arriving — removing the wait, reducing anxiety, and boosting average spend per cover.
Of restaurant managers cite allergen tracking as their highest operational and legal risk. Most still manage it verbally or via paper notes.
Restaurant operators run table management from a paper diary or basic spreadsheet. No live view. No guest history. No pre-order visibility.
RESEARCH METHOD // 35 interviews with restaurant managers across London and Manchester · Usability testing with 28 diners across 3 prototype iterations · Competitive audit of 6 existing reservation platforms
DISCOVERY & SPRINT 0
We mapped two complete user journeys: the diner (discovery, booking, pre-order, arrival) and the venue operator (reservation intake, table management, kitchen prep, guest history). The key insight was that both sides had the same root frustration: information arriving too late. The product's job was to surface the right data to the right person before they needed it.
DINER APP — BOOKING & PRE-ORDER
The diner app had to do three things that no existing booking platform does together: real availability, food pre-ordering before arrival, and allergen flagging per dish. The booking flow was designed for completion under 4 minutes — restaurant discovery, slot selection, party size, pre-order, and allergen notes. All on mobile, all in one session.
RESTAURANT DASHBOARD
The venue-side dashboard gives hosts a live table grid, colour-coded by status (occupied, reserved, pre-ordered, available), with guest profiles, allergen flags, and incoming pre-orders accessible in two taps. The kitchen integration means pre-orders arrive as structured tickets — not phone notes — 30 minutes before the guest arrives.
LAUNCH & OPERATOR ONBOARDING
Restaurant onboarding was designed to be self-serve: menu upload, table layout setup, and team access in under 20 minutes. We shipped with Stripe-connected deposits (the single most effective no-show deterrent), automated reminder flows, and a simple analytics dashboard showing covers, revenue per table, and no-show rate by night.
THE NUMBERS THAT MATTER.
Deposit-backed bookings with automated reminders dropped no-show rates from the industry average of 18% to under 8.7% across pilot venues. That's recoverable revenue that previously disappeared without a trace.
Food pre-orders added an average of £340 additional spend per table per night across pilot restaurants. Guests who pre-order arrive more committed, order more, and stay longer.
End-to-end: restaurant discovery, slot selection, party size, food pre-order, allergen flags, and payment confirmation. Compared to an average of 11 minutes by phone — if you can get through at all.
Before Dino, pilot venues averaged 2–3 allergen-related complaints or incidents per month. Structured allergen data arriving digitally before the guest means kitchen staff know before they begin prep.