Pour the vermouth.We'll take the bookings.

Yes. Zavo connects to the booking platforms tapas bars typically run — ResDiary, OpenTable, SevenRooms, and Design My Night among them — and reads your live availability before offering a single slot. When a caller books, the reservation is written straight into your diary with the party size, time, and any notes attached, so the floor plan your host opens at 5pm is already accurate. Changes and cancellations sync the same way, in real time. If you take bookings through something less common — a local system, a spreadsheet your manager built, or even a paper diary you'd like to retire — tell us during onboarding and we'll connect Zavo to whatever you run, or set up a simple handover that fits how your bar works today.

It can, and it treats them differently — exactly as your floor does. You define the zones: dining tables for groups working through sharing plates, stools along the bar for couples who want the theatre of the counter, and any chef's-counter or window seats you sell separately. Zavo offers each caller the right kind of seat for their party size and preference, and never puts a six-top on bar stools. You can also protect space: many tapas bars keep half the counter walk-in only on Fridays and Saturdays, and Zavo will respect that rule to the seat. Every booking lands in your diary tagged with its zone, so service starts with a plan instead of a puzzle.

Group enquiries get the full treatment, because they're the most profitable calls a tapas bar receives. Zavo captures the party size, date, occasion, and any pre-order interest in your set sharing menus, then checks the request against the tables that can actually take the group. For parties above the threshold you set — eight is common — it sends a deposit link by text while the caller is still on the line and holds the booking until payment lands. The confirmed party arrives in your diary with everything your team needs: numbers, occasion, dietaries, and deposit status. No more 'someone called about a birthday' notes, and far fewer fourteen-person reservations that evaporate on the night.

Yes — within the boundaries you set. You load your carta, the sherry and vermouth list, today's specials, and your allergen matrix, and Zavo answers from that material alone. It can tell a caller which croquetas contain gluten, whether the tortilla is made fresh through service, what's genuinely vegetarian, and how many plates a table of four should order. What it will never do is improvise: if an answer isn't in what you've configured, it says so honestly and offers to have your team confirm. For allergen questions, many owners have Zavo give the configured answer and additionally flag the booking, so the kitchen sees the allergy note before the guest ever sits down.

That call gets escalated, not absorbed. A full-venue takeover — an office party, an engagement, a fortieth with forty guests — is worth far more than a standard booking, and it usually needs a human conversation about minimum spend, menus, and timings. Zavo recognises the shape of the enquiry, captures the essentials (date, headcount, budget signals, contact details), and routes it immediately to whoever owns events at your bar, by call transfer during the day or an instant alert after hours. The enquirer gets a professional first response within seconds of dialling, and you get a qualified event lead with notes instead of a voicemail that surfaces two days too late.

Always — you write the escalation rules and Zavo follows them. Most bars route venue hire, press, supplier issues, and anything emotional (a complaint about last night, a lost bank card under table six) straight through to the manager on duty, while bookings, menu questions, and opening-hours calls are handled end to end by the agent. During service it can transfer live; after close it alerts the right person and promises the caller a call-back window. The point isn't to wall guests off from humans — it's to make sure the only calls interrupting your floor are the ones a human genuinely needs to take, and that those arrive with context already attached.

Card details never travel through the phone call. When a deposit is due, Zavo sends the caller a secure payment link by text; they pay on their own device through a PCI-compliant payment page, and the booking confirms automatically when the payment clears. Your staff never read card numbers down the phone — and neither does the agent, which keeps your bar comfortably outside card-data handling rules. Refunds and cancellation windows follow the policy you define, and every transaction is tied to its booking, so reconciling deposits against the diary takes minutes. If a caller refuses the deposit, Zavo applies whatever fallback you've chosen: release the table, hold it provisionally, or pass the decision to your manager.

It treats guest data as yours, full stop. Names, phone numbers, booking history, and call recordings are encrypted in transit and at rest, access is restricted and logged, and nothing is sold on or used to train models for other businesses. Zavo operates to GDPR standards and is SOC 2 Type II aligned, with retention windows you control — keep transcripts for a fortnight or a year, whichever suits how you operate. Guests can ask what's held about them and you can answer cleanly, because every interaction leaves an auditable record. For a neighbourhood bar built on regulars, that discretion matters: the system remembers preferences to give better service, not to do anything else with them.

Both ends of the clock are exactly where it earns its keep. On a packed Friday, Zavo answers every line simultaneously — three callers at 7:45pm all get an instant pick-up rather than competing for one harassed member of staff — and books or declines according to your live availability. After close, it switches to your night-time behaviour: still booking future dates, still answering questions, and capturing anything that needs a human for the morning. Sunday evening, when half of next weekend's bookings are made, your bar is one of the few in the neighbourhood with a working booking line. There's no rota behind any of this; it simply never goes home.

Yes. Each site keeps its own identity: its own number, menu, floor plan, booking rules, and escalation contacts, all served by one Zavo setup. A caller to your original bar hears that bar's name and gets its availability; a caller to the new site gets the new site's diary. If one venue is fully committed on the requested night, Zavo can offer the sister site — a recovery that almost never happens when two phones are managed separately. You see both venues in a single dashboard: call volumes, bookings made, deposits taken, and enquiries routed, side by side. Adding a third site later is configuration, not a new contract.

Run the maths on your own numbers rather than ours. A typical tapas table spends well — plates for the table, a bottle, maybe a sherry flight — so even a handful of recovered bookings a month outweighs the subscription. The bigger swing is group trade: one rescued twelve-person birthday can cover a month on its own, and group enquiries are precisely the calls most likely to ring out during service or arrive after close. Zavo logs every call it answers, every booking it makes, and every deposit it takes, so within a few weeks you can put a hard figure on what the unanswered phone was costing. If the dashboard doesn't justify the fee, you'll see that plainly too.

No — it only ever says what you've configured it to say. Zavo doesn't browse the internet for answers or guess at your dishes; its entire knowledge of your bar is the material you load and approve: the carta, the drinks list, hours, policies, and your standard answers. Change the specials and the agent changes with you, the moment you update it. When a caller asks something outside that material — say, whether you'll open on a bank holiday you haven't decided about — it says it will check rather than inventing an answer, and flags the question for your team. Every call is transcribed, so if an answer ever reads as clumsy, you tighten the wording once and it's fixed on every future call.

Yes — the follow-up is where no-shows go to die. Every booking triggers an instant confirmation by text, and a reminder lands the day before with a one-tap way to confirm, shrink the party, or cancel. Cancellations release the table back into your availability immediately, giving Zavo the chance to resell it rather than letting a prime Friday four-top sit empty. For group bookings it can chase the unpaid deposit, confirm final numbers a couple of days out, and collect pre-orders for set menus so the kitchen preps correctly. You choose the cadence and the tone; the agent does the chasing your team never has time for between services.

Most bars go live the same day. The mechanical part is quick — point your existing number at Zavo and connect your booking system — and the rest is teaching it your bar: the carta and drinks list, your zones and booking rules, deposit thresholds, and who gets the venue-hire calls. None of it needs technical skills; if you can describe how you'd brief a new host on their first shift, you can configure Zavo. Most owners spend the first week listening to a few transcripts and sharpening answers — the way you'd coach that new host — and by the second week it's simply part of the furniture. We handle the integration work behind the scenes.

Not at all, and you'd be surprised how common it is. If you're ready to move on from paper, Zavo effectively becomes your booking system: it keeps the canonical diary, your team views it from any phone or the till, and the old book retires gracefully. If you'd rather keep your current routine, Zavo can capture every booking in a structured list — sent by text, email, or printed sheet before each service — so the diary stays yours and nothing changes on the floor except that the phone always gets answered. Plenty of bars start in that mode and switch to the full integration once they trust the system. Either way, an unusual setup is a conversation, not a barrier.