DesignMyNight automates the front end of a booking well. Its widget takes reservations from your site and from a consumer network of millions of monthly visitors, enquiry forms you can personalise feed straight into Collins, and guests get confirmation by email and text. What it does not automate is the enquiry it cannot confirm on its own. On DesignMyNight's own account, some bookings arrive as enquiries that are not auto-confirmed, and the venue gets in touch to discuss them. That conversation is manual, and for a bar or late-night group it is where most of the money is.
What Design My Night automates today
Give it credit properly. For a UK bar, pub or experiential venue, DesignMyNight is a demand channel and a booking front end at the same time, which is a genuinely useful combination.
Capability | What it covers |
|---|---|
Booking widget | Takes reservations on your own site and through the consumer platform |
Personalised enquiry form | A Contact Us or general enquiry form you style yourself, feeding directly into Collins |
Enquiry acknowledgement | The guest is told their enquiry has been received, by email and text |
Booking confirmation | Sent by email once the booking is confirmed |
Consumer reach | Listing exposure to a large monthly audience looking for somewhere to go |
Venue-side management | Everything downstream runs in Collins: packages, deposits, pre-orders, function sheets |
The enquiry form is the part worth understanding. It is not a dead contact box that emails a mailbox nobody owns. It is wired into Collins, so a structured enquiry lands where your team manages bookings. That is better than most venue websites manage.
What Design My Night does not automate
The boundary is auto-confirmation. When an enquiry fits a rule the system can evaluate, the booking confirms itself and the guest gets an email. When it does not, the system explicitly stops: card details are not processed, and the venue is told to get in touch to discuss the enquiry.
That stopping point is the whole subject of this page, because of which enquiries stop there:
Large parties above whatever the widget will take unattended.
Anything involving an area, a booth or the whole venue.
Package enquiries where the guest wants to vary the package.
Bottomless brunch and event bookings with dietary requirements attached.
Anything with a bespoke minimum spend or an unusual time.
In other words, the small, standard, low-value bookings automate cleanly and the large, non-standard, high-value ones become a manual conversation. That is the correct behaviour for the software. It is also the exact inversion of what you would want commercially, because the enquiries that need a human are the ones worth the most.
And a share of enquiries never touch the system at all. Bar and late-night guests message on Instagram at 11pm, send a WhatsApp to the number in the footer or email a manager directly. None of that reaches the widget or the enquiry form.
What actually happens to an enquiry Design My Night cannot answer
Here is a realistic journey at a group running DesignMyNight and Collins.
A guest fills in the enquiry form on a Friday evening asking about bottomless brunch for 11 the next morning, with one gluten-free guest.
The system cannot auto-confirm it. The guest gets an acknowledgement saying the venue will be in touch, and the enquiry lands in Collins.
Nobody is at a desk on a Friday evening. The enquiry waits.
On Saturday morning a manager sees it, opens Collins and checks whether the late brunch sitting has 11 spaces.
They check which area 11 would sit in, whether the package minimum applies at that size, and what the kitchen can do about the gluten-free cover.
They reply by hand with options.
The guest has already booked somewhere that answered on Friday night.
The enquiry is closed as lost, if anybody remembers to close it at all.
The acknowledgement email did its job: the guest knew the message arrived. It could not tell them whether they had a table, which is the only thing they wanted to know. One operations director described the gap behind that workflow as "a black hole, no KPIs, no response rate, nothing."
The cost is specific to this kind of venue. A roughly 40-venue entertainment group lost a single booking worth £40,000 because the enquiry arrived outside working hours and nobody replied in time. A three-site pizza group put it more bluntly about a 30 to 40 cover enquiry: "It just sat there. No one saw it. They went somewhere else." Late-night venues take their enquiries at night and answer them in office hours, which is the worst possible mismatch.
Why the gap exists
The dividing line is between what a rule can decide and what a judgement can decide.
Auto-confirmation works when the request maps onto a rule: this many people, this time, this many covers left, confirm. DesignMyNight applies those rules well, and where they apply the guest gets an instant answer.
An enquiry that stops for review is one where no rule can safely decide. Can the back area take 11 for brunch with one gluten-free cover, at a package price, tomorrow morning? Answering needs live availability, a view of the space, the package terms and the kitchen's capacity, weighed together. That is judgement, and the system correctly declines to fake it.
So the enquiry is handed to a person. The problem is not that a person is involved. It is that the handover is to a mailbox or a task list checked in office hours, while the guest is deciding within the hour. Nothing in the chain acknowledges the specifics, drafts an answer or holds the space in the meantime.
Closing that needs something between the rule and the person: a layer that reads the enquiry, works out which venue and space it concerns, checks the diary, and drafts a real answer for someone to approve in seconds rather than composing one from scratch the next morning.
What automating the enquiry side looks like
The gap closes when the enquiry and the booking sit in one place, so a package question can be answered and held in the same reply. This is what RevVue does, and it is easier to show than to describe.
Enquiries are routed to the right bar or venue automatically, whether they came through the form, by email or as a DM, which matters when a group runs several late-night sites with different licences, layouts and last entry times.
Each site gets its own queue, so the answer always matches the venue that was asked about.
The AI drafts the reply in that venue's voice, grounded in its packages, its minimum spends and what the space can actually hold. Package enquiries are long and repetitive, and the draft arrives with those details already in it.
The package answer drafted in the venue's voice, waiting for one-click approval.
The enquiries a rule cannot confirm are the ones that get acknowledged instantly with something useful, at 11pm on a Friday, and held in a queue for a person to finish properly rather than discovered the next morning.
Deposit-carrying and large-party enquiries, acknowledged and prepared for someone to finish.
And because everything is tracked per site, you get the numbers the widget never produced: how fast each venue replies, how many enquiries convert, and which site is quietly losing its Friday nights.
Response rate, volume and conversion per site, including the enquiries that never converted.
An honest note on where RevVue is today
RevVue's DesignMyNight integration is in active development. That is the honest status. For now, venues run an email-only pilot that already covers the gap described above: capture across the channels guests actually use, instant acknowledgement out of hours, AI-drafted replies in each venue's tone, high-value enquiries held for a person, and reporting by location. The direct connection deepens it when it lands. The UK AI is in pilot.
Worth saying plainly: if your enquiries already flow through the form into Collins and you run one venue, configure that properly first. This matters most when you run several sites and when a real share of your enquiries arrive at night on channels the form never sees.
This is the move the Brasilia Group made, off a horizontal helpdesk and onto an inbox built for the job. Their founder, Nikolaos Kiosses, put it plainly: "The transition from Zendesk to RevVue has been a game changer."
Because party and package enquiries are the highest-value threads a late-night venue handles, triaging high-value group bookings is the most relevant read next, and since so many arrive after service, handling booking enquiries 24/7 is the other one. To see what the AI would have said to a real enquiry your team received last week, book 20 minutes.
Frequently asked questions
What email does Design My Night automate?
DesignMyNight sends an acknowledgement when an enquiry is received, by email and text, and a booking confirmation by email once the booking is confirmed. Its widget takes reservations on your own site and through the consumer platform, and a personalisable Contact Us or general enquiry form feeds structured enquiries directly into Collins, where deposits, pre-orders, reminders and function sheets are handled.
Why do some Design My Night bookings not confirm automatically?
Because the request does not map onto a rule the system can safely decide. Where automatic confirmation cannot be completed, card details are not processed and the venue gets in touch to discuss the enquiry. That is correct behaviour, and it means larger parties, area and whole-venue bookings, varied packages and anything with dietary or timing complications all become a manual conversation.
Which enquiries end up waiting the longest?
The valuable ones. Small standard bookings confirm themselves instantly, while large parties, private hire and package enquiries stop for review, so the highest-value requests are the ones queued for a human. For a late-night venue that is compounded by timing, because those enquiries arrive in the evening and are answered in office hours.
How do you automate the enquiry side?
You need a layer between the rule and the person: something that reads the enquiry whatever channel it arrived on, works out which venue and space it concerns, checks availability and drafts a real answer for someone to approve in seconds. That is RevVue. Its DesignMyNight integration is in active development, with an email-only pilot available now covering cross-channel capture, out-of-hours acknowledgement and reporting by site.
