Covers in the hotel and restaurant industry: what a cover means
Updated
In a restaurant, a cover is one guest served one meal. A table of four at dinner is four covers; a restaurant that “did 120 covers” served 120 meals. The word comes from the place setting laid for each guest.
Covers at a hotel breakfast
At a hotel, breakfast covers are counted the same way: one guest, one breakfast. Room 214 with two adults who both come down is two covers. If only one of them does, it is one.
That is where the count gets harder than it sounds. A hotel usually knows how many guests are entitled to breakfast, because it is in their rate. It knows far less reliably how many actually ate. A printed list gets ticks, but not always for every guest; a host on a busy morning may tick the room rather than the people. The kitchen counts plates, the restaurant counts ticks, and reception counts what was booked, and the three numbers rarely agree.
The difference has a name in some hotels: breakfast leakage. That’s breakfasts eaten that nobody was entitled to and nobody charged for, usually a guest on a room-only rate who walked in during the rush. It is an operational term, not a statistic. Most hotels can’t say how large theirs is, precisely because the covers weren’t recorded.
Where covers show up in OPERA and Mews
OPERA Cloud usually posts breakfast that is included in a package at night audit, whether or not the guest came down, so the posting tells you who was entitled, not who ate. Recording who ate is a separate step.
In Mews, breakfast is a product on the stay or on a restaurant service, and Mews has a digital Product Checklist that staff can use to record what guests use each day.
In both, a breakfast that is charged leaves a trace on the guest’s bill. For a breakfast that is included, there is a record of who actually ate only if someone records it.
Related
Kløvr registers breakfast at the restaurant door and writes it back to OPERA Cloud or Mews.