Every day, potential guests walk past your restaurant with no idea yet where they'll eat tonight — and that decision gets made on their smartphone, in barely thirty seconds.
A tourist chooses fundamentally differently from a regular guest. They don't know your restaurant, have no friend who recommends it, and may only walk through your city once in their life. Their entire decision happens on a small screen: they open Google Maps, type "restaurant near me", scan photos, ratings and menu prices for half a minute — and choose. Whoever wins those thirty seconds wins the table. Whoever doesn't show up in that search simply doesn't exist for that guest.
The good news: most restaurants make surprisingly little effort here. A half-filled Google profile, a menu that only exists in the local language, a phone number as the only way to book — that's the standard, even in tourist cities. Any restaurant that does tune its visibility, menu and booking process to travelers suddenly finds itself in a competition with very few entrants.
In this guide you'll get 7 concrete strategies to bring tourists to your restaurant — without neglecting your regulars and without turning your place into a tourist trap.
Why tourists are an underrated revenue source
Tourists have one trait no other audience shares: they have to eat out. No fridge to raid, no "let's just cook something tonight." Two to three meals a day, every day of their stay, and each time that decision happens again on a smartphone. In historic city centres, along the coast and in popular countryside destinations across Europe, that's a stream of demand that runs through the whole season — including the Tuesday evening when your dining room would otherwise sit half empty.
Tourists also tend to spend more generously: they're in holiday mode, order an aperitif, a bottle of wine and a dessert more readily, and don't compare your prices with the restaurant they visited last month. The only thing they need is trust — and you build that trust entirely online, before they ever set foot inside.
To understand where you're losing those guests today, you need to look at their search journey step by step. The funnel below shows the typical path:
How a tourist finds you — and where you lose them
Illustrative journey of 100 tourists searching for a restaurant in your area
Of 100 searching tourists, only 27 become guests here — every step is a leak you can close
Every transition in that funnel is a filter where you lose guests — not to better food, but to a restaurant that's easier to find. The 7 strategies below close those leaks one by one.
The ultimate guide The ultimate guide to restaurant marketing Visible to every guest — tourist or regular: the complete marketing system. Open the guideThe 7 strategies to win over tourists
1. Dominate "restaurant near me" with your Google Business Profile
For a tourist, Google Maps is the city. Whatever isn't on there doesn't exist. Your Google Business Profile is therefore not a detail but your most important shop window: the right category, up-to-date opening hours, a price indication, a linked menu and, above all, recent, appetising photos of your dishes and dining room. A polished, well-kept profile beats a half-filled one with a higher star rating.
Think multilingual while you're at it: write your business description in your own language and at least in English, and use Google posts for your seasonal offers. Google auto-translates reviews, but not your own text — so what you write yourself helps determine who feels spoken to. Want to dig deeper into how Google ranks restaurants? Read our guide to restaurant SEO: the same principles that push you higher with locals apply doubly to travelers who choose exclusively through Google.
2. Make your menu multilingual and scannable
The second big drop-off point in the funnel is the menu. A tourist who can't find or understand your menu won't gamble — they'll move on to the restaurant where it's clear what's on the plate and what it costs. So make sure your menu is online, findable from your Google profile, and translated into at least English. A couple of extra languages relevant to your region's typical visitors are a logical bonus.
Make the menu scannable, in every sense: a QR code on your window or sandwich board lets passers-by view your menu in their own language before they even step inside. Add photos of your signature dishes and mark allergens with universal icons — for a traveler with an allergy, that's often the deciding factor. A digital menu has another advantage: you translate once, and every price change is instantly correct in every language.
3. Collect reviews in multiple languages — and reply to them
A tourist has no friends in your city; reviews are their word-of-mouth. And reviews in their own language carry the most weight: a German guest who reads three German-language reviews immediately feels at home. So actively ask international guests for a review — the moment of paying the bill, with a QR code on the check folder, works best.
Just as important: respond to what comes in, including reviews in other languages and especially the critical ones. A calm, professional reply in the reviewer's own language shows every future reader that your restaurant listens. For how to handle this systematically without spending an hour on it every night, read our guide to reviews and reputation management.
4. Partner with hotels, B&Bs and tourism offices
Not every tourist chooses via a screen: the same question gets asked at the hotel front desk every evening — "where can we eat well around here?" The receptionist who then mentions your name is worth more than any advertisement. You can make that recommendation happen: introduce yourself to the hotels, B&Bs and holiday rentals in your area, and make it easy for them to recommend you.
In practice, this works best with a card or QR code at the desk that links straight to your online booking page, a guaranteed table for their guests (even on Friday nights) and a small gesture such as a free aperitif on presentation of the room key. Invite the reception team to come and eat once — staff who know your restaurant recommend it genuinely. Don't forget the local tourism office, city guides and city-pass programmes either — channels your competitors rarely think of.
5. Be bookable without a phone call
This is the quietest revenue killer of all: a foreign guest doesn't call. Phoning in a language you don't speak is a barrier, and plenty of travelers avoid phone calls abroad altogether. If your restaurant can only be booked by phone, you lose that guest at the very last moment — after your Google profile, photos and reviews had already convinced them.
The solution is simple: online booking, in the guest's own language, directly from your Google profile and your website. A good reservation system shows available time slots, confirms instantly and sends a reminder — without your team spending a single second on it. And for the tourists who do call: an AI receptionist answers in multiple languages, even during service when nobody has time for the phone.
6. Play up your local story
Tourists aren't looking for a restaurant; they're looking for an experience that belongs to the destination. Nobody travels across Europe to work through a pizza-pasta-noodles menu. The restaurants travelers remember — and go out of their way for — are the ones with a story: seafood sourced straight from the coast, the beer from the brewery around the corner, the stew made to your grandmother's recipe.
So put that story front and centre: on your menu, your website, your Google description and your photos. Name your regional products and your house speciality explicitly, and explain in two sentences why your restaurant does what it does. For how to build that kind of story without it feeling forced, read our guide to restaurant storytelling. Bonus: an authentic local story is instantly your best protection against a tourist-trap image — it also attracts the locals whose presence tourists read as proof of quality.
7. Time your offer to tourist flows
Tourists eat at different times than locals: lunch at 2:30 pm after the museum, dinner at 6 pm before the show, a terrace drink in the middle of the afternoon. A kitchen that's closed between 2 pm and 6 pm misses exactly the hours when travelers are wandering around hungry with no plan. Consider a continuous (smaller) menu, an early sitting or longer terrace hours in season — and communicate those hours crystal-clearly on your Google profile. A well-designed terrace is your strongest magnet during the summer months: it's your shop window and your extra capacity in one.
Also keep an eye on the rhythm of the season: school holidays, events, conferences and cruise-ship days drive predictable peaks through your city. Whoever tunes their offer, staff planning and promotions to those waves rides them instead of being caught out by them. Our guide to seasonal marketing shows you how to turn that into a year-round plan.
Tourist versus regular guest: the numbers side by side
Does all this mean you should neglect your regulars for the tourist stream? Quite the opposite — the two groups complement each other perfectly, precisely because they're so different. The comparison below puts the key differences side by side:
Tourist versus regular guest
Illustrative averages — measure your own numbers in your reservation system
Average spend per visit
Decision time before choosing
Likelihood the visit results in a review
Likelihood of returning within the year
Read the two columns as one system: the tourist spends more generously and leaves a review more often — reviews that in turn convince your next tourists and locals alike. The regular guest comes back and carries your quiet months. You need them both; you just need to approach them differently. And pay attention to that decision time: with the tourist you get one thirty-second chance, so everything they see in those thirty seconds has to be right.
Test yourself: how tourist-ready is your restaurant?
Time for a reality check. Tick below what's already in order at your restaurant today and instantly discover where your biggest quick win is:
Tourist-ready score
Tick what's already in order at your restaurant today
Tick above what's already in order — your score and personal advice will appear instantly.
Scored lower than you'd hoped? Good news: every box you couldn't tick today is a concrete leak in the funnel from the start of this article — and therefore a concrete place where extra guests are waiting.
A practical action plan
You don't have to do all of this at once. This phased plan works for almost any restaurant in a tourist area:
Step 1 — This week (the quick wins):
- Update your Google Business Profile: hours, category, description in your own language and in English
- Take ten fresh photos of your best dishes, your dining room and your façade, and upload them
- Put an English version of your menu online and put a QR code on your window
- Answer all outstanding reviews, including the ones in other languages
Step 2 — This month (the structure):
- Make your restaurant bookable online in multiple languages, linked to your Google profile and website
- Go round the hotels and B&Bs in your area and agree a simple partnership with three of them
- Put your local story — regional products, house speciality — explicitly on your menu and your website
Step 3 — This season (the optimisation):
- Measure in your reservation system how many guests come from outside the region, and when
- Tune your opening hours and (continuous) menu to the tourist flows you measure
- Retake the tourist-ready score above and tick off the remaining boxes
Conclusion: from passer-by to full table
Winning over tourists isn't a matter of luck or location; it's a system. Be findable where they search (Google), understandable in their language (menu and website), credible through others (reviews and hotels), and bookable without friction (online booking). Add a genuine local story and smart timing, and the stream of travelers currently walking past your door becomes a predictable extra layer of revenue on top of your regulars.
At HappyChef we built our reservation system exactly for this: your guests book online in their own language, automatically get a confirmation and reminder, and you see in your dashboard exactly where your guests are coming from. Try it free for 14 days and make this tourist season your strongest one yet.