A restaurant booking form for Christmas parties and set menus (free template)

It's the third week of November and the phone hasn't stopped. An office wants a table for 14 on the 12th. Someone else wants "the Christmas menu for about ten, maybe twelve", and a voicemail asks if you still have Fridays. By Saturday, the booking diary is a page of crossings-out.

For a lot of restaurants, December is the busiest stretch of the booking diary, and much of it still runs on phone calls and email chains.

Why Christmas table bookings get messy

A Christmas party booking isn't like a normal table. It comes with a set menu, a deposit, pre-orders for 14 people and at least one guest who is vegan, gluten-free or both. The details arrive in pieces, from a different person each time.

Your online booking system handles covers and times well. It usually wasn't built to collect 14 starter choices and a deposit agreement for a party of office colleagues.

A restaurant booking form for set-menu parties should collect everything you need to confirm the table in one go. One link, one set of answers, and nothing to retype from a voicemail.

What a Christmas booking form should ask

Keep it to what you need to confirm the table and plan the kitchen. The template below covers it.

Pre-orders for each guest can come later, through a second form, once the table is confirmed. Asking for everything at once puts people off.

A booking form template you can copy

Here's a starting point. In TinyX each line becomes a question:

Organiser's name
Phone number
Email address
Preferred date and time
Second choice of date and time
Number of guests (and how firm is that number?)
Which set menu would you like?
Dietary requirements and allergies in your party
Would you like to send pre-orders before the day?
Anything else we should know?

Change the wording until it sounds like your restaurant. A gastropub and a hotel dining room should sound different, even when they ask the same things.

If guests do pre-order, a second form per party keeps it tidy:

Your name
Starter
Main
Dessert
Any allergies we should know about?

Closing the form when the dates are full

This is where a booking form beats an email address. A TinyX questionnaire can take a response cap, a password and an expiry date.

A response cap closes the form once you have as many enquiries as you can handle. If the private room fits four Christmas parties a week and you've given it ten slots, set the cap and stop taking requests you'd have to turn down.

An expiry date closes it on a date you choose, such as the 1st of December, when you stop taking new Christmas parties. A password keeps a pre-order form for one party away from everyone else.

Set the cap and expiry before you share the link, not after the diary fills. A form that closes on its own means you're no longer saying no to people who thought they'd booked. You still confirm each booking yourself.

Getting the answers to the right person

Each response exports to CSV, so you can open the bookings in a spreadsheet and sort by date. That's how the kitchen gets the numbers for each night in one place.

A new response can also fire a webhook, which can post a message to your team's Slack or Discord. The manager sees the booking request when it arrives, not on Monday.

One honest note. Answers aren't end-to-end encrypted and are kept with the guest's IP address and location. That's fine for names, dates and dietary needs. Don't ask for card details on the form; take deposits through your payment provider.

The Free plan includes five questionnaires, Pro has 50 and Max is unlimited. The details are on the pricing page.

Putting the form where people book

Share the form as a short link in your Instagram bio, on your Christmas menu page and in the reply you send to every phone enquiry. Download its QR code and put it on the table cards in November, when regulars are already planning.

If you change where the link points later, for example to a January menu form, the printed code keeps working. We explain how in free QR codes for every link you create.

Bigger events are different. A 40-cover private dining booking with a quote and a contract needs more than a table form; a catering enquiry form covers that. If you want to send the final menu or a deposit agreement back on a link that stops working, see how to password-protect a link or file.

Put the form out before the first office calls

Copy the template above into a TinyX questionnaire, set an expiry for the day you stop taking Christmas parties and add the link to your Christmas menu page. Then let the phone ring a little less. For other ways restaurants use TinyX, see TinyX for restaurants.