No. Front has no native, purpose-built integration with DesignMyNight, and DesignMyNight is not on Zapier either, so there is no low-code shortcut. Front is a collaborative shared inbox and customer-operations platform. DesignMyNight is the UK discovery, booking and enquiry platform used by bars, pubs, late-night and experiential venues, with Collins as its venue-side software. Front organises the enquiry beautifully and cannot do a thing with it.
The short answer
Front can receive a DesignMyNight enquiry as a conversation. It cannot do anything with it in DesignMyNight or Collins. Checking capacity, holding an area, quoting a drinks package, taking a deposit: all of that still happens by hand, by a person.
Front + DesignMyNight | |
|---|---|
Native integration | None |
Best available workaround | A custom build on Front's API and the DesignMyNight API |
What the workaround still can't do | Check availability, hold an area, quote or attach a package, take a deposit |
Front is not short of integrations. Its App Store carries more than 160, across channels and messaging, voice, CRM and e-commerce, project management, knowledge, productivity, and dedicated categories for logistics and maritime and for travel. Front does build vertical integrations. It has just never built one for hospitality.
What actually happens to a booking enquiry
Front's strengths make the gap more obvious, not less. Shared visibility, assignment, internal comments beside the message, SLA rules and response-time reporting are all genuinely good. A group running enquiries through Front has fixed accountability. It has not fixed booking, and DesignMyNight enquiries are the kind where that hurts most, because they arrive as open-ended questions about packages rather than requests for a table at a time.
Here is the real journey of one enquiry when Front and DesignMyNight do not talk to each other.
An enquiry comes through the DesignMyNight widget about a hen party for 20 on a Saturday, asking what drinks packages are available, whether an area can be reserved, and whether they can bring decorations. The message lands in the shared inbox as a Front conversation.
An agent picks it up and reads it.
The agent opens Collins in another tab, because Front cannot see capacity or the area plan.
They check Saturday for 20, see which area is uncommitted at that time, look up the current package prices and minimum spend, and check the decoration policy for that space.
They pencil the area in, re-keying the date, numbers, package and the decoration note from the enquiry.
They switch back to Front and write the reply with packages and the minimum spend.
They snooze the conversation, because a hen party enquiry never closes on the first reply.
Five days later: "It is 26 now and we want the upstairs bar." Twenty-six changes the area, the minimum spend and the package maths. The agent repeats steps 3 to 7.
Every enquiry is handled twice, in two systems, by a person copying the same fields between screens. Package enquiries are worse than table enquiries here, because the thread runs for weeks and every round trip means re-quoting from scratch. One operations director described the inbox behind this workflow as "a black hole, no KPIs, no response rate, nothing," because the work happened in tabs and conversations that no report could see.
The sharper cost is the enquiry you never hear about again. Someone organising a hen party sends the same message to five venues on a Tuesday night, and the first one back with a package and a price is usually the one that gets the deposit. 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." Front did not cause those losses. Routing bookings through a system that cannot book anything is what makes the delay inevitable.
What Front actually connects to
Front cannot be accused of ignoring verticals, which is what makes its absence here notable. Its App Store has dedicated categories for logistics and maritime and for travel, built for a customer base in freight forwarding, shipping and travel operations. Front is entirely willing to build deep, industry-specific connections when it decides a market matters. It has not made that decision for hospitality. Search the App Store for DesignMyNight and you will find nothing.
The usual fallback is thinner here than in most cells of this comparison. Front is well supported on Zapier, but DesignMyNight is not on Zapier at all, so there is no zap to build. DesignMyNight and Collins connect outward through their own APIs to point-of-sale and marketing systems rather than exposing a general automation connector, so bridging to Front means a custom development project against Front's API and the DesignMyNight API. For a bar or late-night group that is a hard budget line to justify.
Even finished, what you would have is a pipe that copies enquiry text into a conversation, one direction, treating a party enquiry as a message. Front AI is a capable suite: Copilot drafts and answers from past conversations, help content and connected systems, Autopilot resolves routine requests, Smart QA and Topics analyse the queue. It is all grounded in conversation data. Copilot can write a persuasive reply about your drinks packages. It cannot check whether the upstairs bar is free on the 14th, hold it, or take the deposit.
Why this matters for booking enquiries
A support conversation and a booking enquiry look similar and behave nothing alike. A support conversation is resolved by a reply. A booking enquiry is only resolved when the space is held and the deposit is taken. That difference is the whole problem.
The shared inbox can write a polished reply. It cannot book the party in. The transaction, the part that actually earns the revenue, still lands on your team, one enquiry at a time. Front gives you the best-organised version of the old workflow: everyone sees the enquiry, everyone knows who owns it, and the booking still gets typed into another system by hand.
What it looks like when the tool is built for booking enquiries
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, which matters when a group runs several late-night sites with different licences, layouts and last entry times. Nobody quotes the wrong venue's closing time, because the team works from one queue, by location, rather than tags standing in for venues.
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.
Because it connects to the booking system, the AI does the step Front cannot: it checks what is free and prepares the booking inside the conversation. Straightforward requests are handled as they arrive, and the ones carrying a deposit or a whole-space hire are acknowledged instantly and held for a person to work properly.
Deposit-carrying and large-party enquiries, acknowledged and prepared for someone to finish.
And because everything is tracked per site, you get the numbers a booking widget never produced: how fast each venue replies, how many enquiries convert, and which site is quietly losing its Friday nights. Front reports on conversations and response times, which is a different question from how many Saturday bookings you won.
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 delivers the inbox value shown above: location-aware routing, instant acknowledgement, AI-drafted replies, high-value bookings surfaced, and reporting by location. The direct booking-system connection will deepen that when it lands, but it does not gate the value you get today. The UK AI is in pilot.
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."
The wider category view is in shared inbox software for restaurants. Because party and private-hire enquiries are where the money is for a late-night venue, how to triage high-value group bookings is the most useful read next. To see what the AI would have said to a real enquiry your team received last week, book 20 minutes.
Frequently asked questions
Does Front integrate with DesignMyNight?
No. Front has no native integration with DesignMyNight, and no restaurant or venue booking system appears in the Front App Store. DesignMyNight is not on Zapier either, so there is no low-code bridge. Connecting the two means a custom development project against Front's API and the DesignMyNight API, and even then it only copies enquiry text into a conversation. It cannot check availability, hold an area, or take a deposit.
Can I connect Front and DesignMyNight with Zapier?
No. Front is well supported on Zapier, but DesignMyNight is not on Zapier, so there is no zap to build. DesignMyNight and Collins connect outward through their own APIs to point-of-sale and marketing systems rather than exposing a general automation connector, which leaves a custom development project as the only route.
Why does Front integrate with logistics and travel tools but not booking systems?
Because Front has picked its verticals and hospitality is not among them. Front's App Store carries dedicated categories for logistics and maritime and for travel, reflecting a strong base of freight, shipping and travel-operations customers. That shows Front will build deep vertical integrations when it decides a market matters. It has not made that decision for venue booking systems.
What do bars and late-night venues use instead for booking enquiries?
Most run enquiries through a shared inbox and accept the double-handling, because no horizontal tool solved the booking side. A purpose-built option is RevVue, which is location-aware and whose AI checks availability and prepares the booking inside the conversation, with high-value party enquiries surfaced for a person to nurture. Its DesignMyNight integration is in active development, with an email-only pilot available now.
