Oh, how are we not surprised?
The booking service OpenTable thinks Fort Lauderdale has a bad reputation for flaking on restaurant reservations, ranking it among the 10 worst U.S. cities for restaurant no-shows.
Broward County’s largest city joins four other Florida spots on the list — Miami, Miami Beach, Jacksonville and Orlando — with the highest proportion of missed reservations, according to data in OpenTable’s recently released Restaurant Impact Report. The study spans online reservations made between July 1, 2025, and June 30, 2026.
By contrast, Florida’s Gulf Coast apparently has top-tier booking etiquette, with Naples and Sarasota ranking among the lowest proportion of no-shows in the country.
The report didn’t reveal each city’s numbered ranking, so it’s unclear whether Fort Lauderdale wins the top crown for diners ghosting their reservations. Nor does it identify whether the customers who bailed are tourists or locals, so we can’t blame this behavior on snowbirds.
Here’s what the study does share: Restaurants are “most vulnerable” to no-shows on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Diners skip the 10 p.m. timeslot most often, and the week of Valentine’s Day saw the highest no-show rate of the year, according to OpenTable’s data.
Restaurant owners surveyed argue that no-shows indirectly harm eateries, and that every no-show table for two costs $80 on average. Along with that revenue loss, 56% of operators say a no-show means turning away other bookings, while 51% cite staff costs and 49% report wasted food or stock, the study found.
A majority of diners, for their part, seem to get the message. About 67% of polled customers “agree that a no-show has a real impact on a restaurant’s business,” the report says. Meanwhile, 28% admit to missing reservations without canceling at least once in the past year, while 47% agree that knowing the financial burden of a no-show would make them more likely to honor or properly cancel a reservation.
One caveat here: These stats are compiled from interviews with 1,501 U.S. diners and 355 restaurant workers and aren’t South Florida-specific.
Our take? Read this study with a shaker of salt because the report doesn’t entirely address the nuances of consumer behavior. Third-party services like Resy and OpenTable, which compete to host top eateries on their platforms, have an incentive to share data around restaurant pain points like no-shows. OpenTable’s website says it uses artificial intelligence tools to track diner habits that it shares with restaurant point-of-sale systems, from drinking preferences to how often they’ve nixed reservations.
To deter no-shows, restaurants that use third-party platforms like OpenTable can charge booking or cancellation fees. A 2025 peer-reviewed study by the UK-based International Journal of Consumer Studies found that adding cancellation policies or fees creates social pressure to show up and is crucial to reducing no-shows.
Some Fort Lauderdale restaurants have such penalties in place. The Katherine, Timon and Marissa Balloo’s neighborhood sit-down, charges a $25-a-person no-show fee to anyone who cancels after noon on the day of their reservation. Calusso, the coastal Italian spot within Pier Sixty-Six, charges a $50-a-person fee for cancellations within 24 hours of the booking time.
Sun Sentinel senior features writer Phillip Valys can be reached at pvalys@sunsentinel.com or Twitter/X @philvalys.
Dining and Cooking