Hotel restaurant software: one property, several menus

A hotel does not have a restaurant. It has a lobby cafe that opens at six, a pool bar that closes when the sun goes, a dining room with a set menu, and four hundred bedrooms that all expect food at midnight. Each of those is a different menu, different hours and often a different team. Software that treats them as one restaurant will be wrong in at least three places on any given day.

This article separates the two systems a property actually needs, and sets out what the food side has to get right in Qatar.

Two systems, not one

The first is the property management system, which runs the rooms. Mews, one of the better known makers, describes a hotel PMS as the central hub for reservations, the front desk, housekeeping and billing. That is a real job and it is not ours.

The second is the food and beverage side: menus, orders, the kitchen, the runner, the bill for the food. In many properties this is still a paper docket and a phone extension, or a cash register bought for a restaurant that has one room and one team.

Get Menu is the second system, and we say that plainly. We do not manage bookings, we do not post a charge to a room folio, and there are no online payments in the product at all. Food is paid for in cash or on your card machine when it is handed over. What we do is take the order properly, get it to the right kitchen and the right team, and remember the guest.

How Qatar looks at your outlets

Qatar treats hotel establishments as licensed businesses in their own right. Qatar Tourism lists the licence services for hotel establishments, covering issue, amendment, renewal and cancellation, and notes that the tourism licence is valid for 5 years.

The food side is judged separately, and closely. The Taste of Qatar programme, run for Qatar Tourism, sorts food and beverage venues into seven categories in its programme manual: fine dining, upscale casual, casual, quick service casual, premium cafe, quick service cafe, and food truck or kiosk. A single hotel can easily hold three of those seven at once.

The programme scores venues by mystery visits against a written framework, and three of its criteria are things software touches directly. "Online Exploration and Reservation" looks at your digital presence and how easily a guest finds information. "Placing the Order" carries a criteria weight of 15% in the manual's worked example, and the food experience itself 20%. "Feedback Mechanism and Online Review" looks at how you gather and answer what guests say.

So the ordering step is not a back office detail in Qatar. It is one of the things an assessor is sent to grade.

One property, several menus

The way to run this is to treat each outlet as its own restaurant, then look at them together.

In Get Menu that means separate branches, each with its own menu, its own opening hours and its own WhatsApp groups, plus staff logins that only see their own outlet. The pool bar's team never sees the banquet orders. Your sales sit side by side in one view when you want to compare a slow Tuesday across three rooms.

Each outlet gets its own page on an address on getmenu.ae, included from the first day, and there are 12 layouts, so the fine dining room and the poolside snack list do not have to look the same. Items carry options and add-ons with their own prices, and a required choice stops a steak order arriving without a temperature. Menus can be uploaded from a spreadsheet instead of typed, which matters when a property has several hundred lines across its outlets.

The guest with a phone in their hand

Inside the room, the code does the work. A code is generated for every table, so the table is the address and the ticket says which one. At a pool, the same idea runs on sunbed numbers.

Group ordering puts a whole table on one bill while everybody orders from their own phone, which is the single most useful thing at a business lunch. Stock counts fall as orders arrive and an item flips to sold out at zero, so the lobby cafe does not keep selling a cake the pastry section finished at eleven. Every line is priced again at checkout from the live menu, so a printed card can never promise last season's price.

When an order lands, 3 messages go out over WhatsApp: a confirmation to the customer the moment they order, a ticket into the managers' group for that outlet, and a dispatch link for whoever is running it out, with the GPS pin dropped at checkout for anything leaving the building.

Room service without the phone extension

Room service is a delivery problem inside one building. The address list is yours to write, so a property lists its wings or towers and the guest gives a room number, exactly the way a delivery customer picks a building and unit number from a list. The ticket reaches the kitchen with the room already on it, and nobody repeats an order down a bad phone line.

Loyalty is worth more in a hotel than people expect, because the guest who eats at the lobby cafe on Monday is in the building until Thursday. Stamps turn into rewards, regulars grow into tiers, and the card sits in Google Wallet and updates itself, with no app to install. Apple Wallet is built here and waiting on a certificate, which is what we say rather than promising it. Coupons carry caps, exclusions and expiry dates, so a breakfast offer cannot quietly be used on a banquet. Invoices carrying your tax number download as a PDF without a login, and old order details are cleared automatically after 120 days.

"Hotels kept asking us for one thing: a menu per outlet, not a menu per hotel. Once you build it that way, the pool bar and the dining room stop fighting over whose hours are on the screen." — Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

Where to start

Pick one outlet, not the whole property. The lobby cafe is usually the right choice, because it has the most orders and the least ceremony. Put codes on its tables, run it for a fortnight, then add the pool.

You get 15 days to try it with no card asked for at signup, and afterwards a flat monthly price with 0% commission on the food you sell. For the wider view, restaurant management software covers what a single outlet needs, digital menus covers how the menu itself should read on a phone, and restaurant POS covers the cash register side of the same question.

Frequently asked questions

Does hotel and restaurant software replace my property management system?

No. The PMS runs rooms, reservations, housekeeping and billing. The food side runs menus, orders and the kitchen. Keep both, and be clear which one owns which fact.

Can food charges be posted to the guest's room bill?

Not through Get Menu. Food is paid in cash or on your card machine when it is handed over, so a property that needs room posting should keep that inside its PMS.

Can each outlet have its own menu and hours?

Yes. Each outlet is set up as its own branch with its own menu, hours, WhatsApp groups and staff logins, while the owner sees all the sales together.

How does room service work without a phone call?

The guest scans the code in the room, orders from the outlet's menu, and picks their wing and room number from the list you set up. The ticket reaches the kitchen with the room on it.

Is it useful for a small property with one restaurant?

Yes, and it is the easiest place to start. A single outlet uses the same menu, stock and loyalty tools, and you can add a second one later without moving anything.