No. Front has no native, purpose-built integration with ResDiary, and ResDiary is not on Zapier, so there is no low-code bridge to build. Front is a collaborative shared inbox and customer-operations platform. ResDiary is a reservations, table-management and yield-management system, popular with independent restaurants and mid-market groups on its flat-fee model. Front handles the conversation well and has no idea what a table is.
The short answer
Front can receive a ResDiary enquiry as a conversation. It cannot do anything with it in ResDiary. Checking the diary, creating the booking, respecting the yield rules, adding the allergy note: all of that still happens by hand, in ResDiary, by a person.
Front + ResDiary | |
|---|---|
Native integration | None |
Best available workaround | A custom build on Front's API and the ResDiary API |
What the workaround still can't do | Check availability, create or amend a booking, apply yield rules, read the guest's history |
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 genuinely good, and an independent group with two or three people covering the inbox around service feels the benefit immediately. What Front cannot do is take a single step of the actual booking off those same people.
Here is the real journey of one enquiry when Front and ResDiary do not talk to each other.
An enquiry arrives about a set-menu lunch for 16 to mark a retirement, asking for a Friday in three weeks, a quieter part of the room, and whether the set menu can be adjusted for two vegetarians. The message lands in the shared inbox as a Front conversation.
An agent picks it up and reads it.
The agent opens ResDiary in another tab, because Front cannot see the diary.
They check the Friday for 16, look at what the yield rules allow for a party that size at peak lunch, work out which section is quieter at that turn, and check the set-menu terms.
They create the booking in ResDiary, re-keying the name, date, time, party size, section preference and the dietary notes from the email.
They switch back to Front and write the reply with the menu detail.
They archive the conversation.
The guest replies: "It is 19 now, and can we make it 12.30?" Nineteen may breach the yield rule at 12.30. The agent repeats steps 3 to 7.
Every enquiry is handled twice, in two systems, by a person copying the same fields between screens. For a group where the same people run the floor and the inbox, that double-handling comes straight off the pass. 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. A 16-cover set-menu lunch is a good day's trading, and the person organising it has emailed three restaurants over a lunch break. 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 the gap 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 will build deep, industry-specific connections when it decides a market matters. It has not made that decision for hospitality. Search the App Store for ResDiary and you will find nothing.
The fallback is thin. Front is well supported on Zapier, but ResDiary is not on Zapier, so there is no zap to build. ResDiary connects outward through its own partner API to point-of-sale, CRM and property systems rather than exposing a general automation connector, which means bridging to Front is a custom development project against Front's API and the ResDiary API. For an independent or mid-market group that is a hard cost to justify, and what it delivers is limited.
Even finished, it is a pipe that copies enquiry text into a conversation, one direction, treating a reservation request 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. All of it is grounded in conversation and knowledge data, with no line into the diary. Copilot can write an excellent reply about your set menu. It cannot check whether Friday can take 19 at 12.30.
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 a table is held in the diary. That difference is the whole problem.
The shared inbox can write a polished reply. It cannot book the table. The transaction, the part that actually earns the cover, 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 inbox and the diary are one surface, so availability is checked while the reply is being written. This is what RevVue does, and it is easier to show than to describe.
Enquiries arrive already sorted by venue, so a group running different service patterns across its sites never answers one restaurant's question with another's shift times. The team works from one queue, by location, rather than tags standing in for venues.
Every enquiry tagged to its venue on arrival, so shift and service differences stay straight.
The AI drafts the reply in that venue's voice, grounded in its menus, its policies and its service times. The team approves or edits instead of composing the same availability answer from scratch.
The reply drafted in the venue's voice, with the team reviewing instead of re-keying.
Because it connects to the booking system, the AI does the step Front cannot: it checks what the diary will actually take and prepares the booking in the same thread. Routine requests clear on arrival, and the large parties, the ones that change the shape of a service, are acknowledged instantly and held for a person to place deliberately.
Large parties acknowledged and prepared, waiting for someone to decide where they fit.
And because every enquiry is tracked by location, the email channel gets the same scrutiny as the diary. Response times and conversion by site, next to the covers you are already managing, so the enquiries that never became bookings stop being invisible. Front reports on conversations and response times, and not one of those figures is a cover.
Response rate, volume and conversion by location, covering the enquiries the diary never saw.
An honest note on where RevVue is today
RevVue's ResDiary integration is on the roadmap, and the honest position today is an email-only pilot. That pilot 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, and if your enquiries currently sit in Microsoft 365, running a shared Outlook inbox for a restaurant group covers that setup and its limits. 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 ResDiary?
No. Front has no native integration with ResDiary, and no restaurant booking system appears in the Front App Store. ResDiary is not on Zapier either, so there is no low-code bridge. Connecting them means a custom development project against Front's API and the ResDiary API, and even then it only copies enquiry text into a conversation. It cannot check availability, create a booking, or amend one in ResDiary.
Can I connect Front and ResDiary with Zapier?
No. Front is well supported on Zapier, but ResDiary is not on Zapier, so there is no zap to build. ResDiary connects outward through its own partner API to point-of-sale, CRM and property systems rather than exposing a general automation connector, which leaves custom development 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 restaurant booking systems.
What do independent and mid-market restaurant groups use instead?
Most run booking 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. Its ResDiary integration is on the roadmap, with an email-only pilot available now.
