If you run a restaurant that takes bookings through Quandoo, you've probably already seen the email. In March 2026, Quandoo's parent company announced it was winding the platform down across all its active markets, including Australia. If you haven't dealt with it yet, the short version is: you have until the end of September to sort out a replacement, and until the end of the year before Quandoo disappears completely.
This isn't a "maybe switch eventually" situation — it's a hard deadline with a fixed date attached. Here's exactly what's happening and what to do about it.
The actual timeline
- Until September 30, 2026 — Quandoo keeps working as normal. Diners can still search venues and place new bookings through it, and your restaurant can keep managing bookings as usual.
- From October 1, 2026 — Restaurants will no longer be able to handle new or existing bookings through Quandoo. Any reservation already confirmed before this date will still be honoured, but the system itself stops being usable for day-to-day booking management.
- By December 31, 2026 — Quandoo takes down its website, app, and backend infrastructure entirely. Whatever data you haven't exported by then is gone.
There's also a smaller detail worth knowing if your restaurant has guests enrolled in Quandoo's loyalty scheme: points stopped accruing on June 30, 2026, and any remaining points needed to be redeemed by September 30, 2026.
The practical upshot: September 30 is your real deadline, not December 31. Once bookings stop working on October 1, you need a replacement already live, not still being set up.
What to do this week
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Export your data now, not in December. Quandoo's support team is staying in place through the wind-down specifically to help partners export their data — use that window while it exists. At minimum, get out your customer list (names, contact details, booking history) and any upcoming confirmed reservations. Don't wait until the infrastructure shutdown is imminent to ask for help.
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Audit where your booking link actually lives. Check your website, Google Business Profile, Instagram bio, and any printed material (menus, signage) for links pointing at Quandoo. Each of those needs updating once you're on a new system — it's easy to switch the booking platform itself and forget a stale link is still sending guests to a dead page in January.
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Tell your regulars before they find out the hard way. If you have guests who book through Quandoo out of habit, a short email or a note on your next few confirmations ("we're moving to a new booking system, here's the new link") avoids a wave of "the booking page isn't working" messages in October.
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Get a replacement live before September 30, not after. Migrating booking systems always takes a bit of trial and error — test bookings, table setup, confirmation emails. Give yourself buffer before the deadline rather than starting the week Quandoo cuts off.
What to actually look for in a replacement
Rather than picking whatever platform shows up first in a search, it's worth running any candidate through the same short checklist:
- Is the pricing public and predictable, or do you need a sales call to find out? Some platforms (NowBookIt is a common example) don't publish pricing — you get a custom quote based on venue size and feature modules. That's not automatically bad, but it makes it harder to compare options quickly when you're on a deadline. A flat, published monthly rate is easier to evaluate fast.
- Is there a lock-in contract? Ask this explicitly — it's the detail most likely to get glossed over in a sales conversation and matter later if the platform doesn't work out for you either.
- Can you actually get your customer list and booking history in? A platform that makes it easy to walk in with a CSV of existing customers saves you from starting from zero with your regulars.
- Does it charge per booking, or a flat fee? Per-cover or per-booking fees add up fast for a busy venue and are worth modelling against your actual booking volume before committing.
- Do you need features you're not using today? If your Quandoo usage was really just "guests book a table online," a platform built around CRM, marketing automation, event ticketing, and gift cards may be more than you need — and priced accordingly.
Where DiningMate fits, honestly
We built DiningMate for exactly the kind of restaurant that used Quandoo for straightforward table bookings and doesn't need much beyond that: a flat $49/month rate (no per-booking fees), no lock-in contract, and a 3-month free trial with no card required so you can actually test it against your own service before paying anything.
A few things specific to us that might matter if you're weighing options: table assignment happens automatically rather than manually, so a host isn't juggling a floor plan by hand for every booking. Confirmed bookings also get an automatic email reminder timed for about 24 hours out, so guests get a nudge without your staff picking up the phone. And if you want no-show protection, guests can optionally have a card held on file at booking time that's only charged if your restaurant manually confirms a no-show or late cancellation — there's no automatic charge and no deposit taken up front.
Other options worth a look
Quandoo customers researching alternatives are also worth pointing toward the more established names — OpenTable, ResDiary, and NowBookIt all serve overlapping segments of the Australian market, each with different strengths around marketplace discovery, enterprise-scale table management, or bundled CRM and marketing tools. If your restaurant relied on Quandoo's guest-discovery marketplace (diners finding you through the app itself, not just booking via a link on your own site) rather than just the booking mechanics, a platform with its own consumer-facing marketplace is worth weighing more heavily than one that's purely a booking tool for your own website.
The bottom line
You have a hard deadline, not a vague "sometime this year" nudge — new bookings through Quandoo stop working on September 30, and the whole platform is gone by December 31. Export your data now while support is still available, get a replacement tested and live before the cutoff, and update every link pointing at Quandoo so your guests aren't the ones who discover the outage first.
