Online booking, digital menu, delivery: how many Italian restaurants already have them

One restaurant in seven already has online booking. One in seven has a digital menu. One in five uses a delivery platform. These numbers say two things at once: most Italian restaurants still don't have these tools, and a sizeable share already introduced them within a single year.

The data comes from FIPE-Confcommercio's Rapporto Ristorazione 2025, compiled with information available as of 6 March 2025 and based on a Fipe-Format Research survey among business owners in the sector. It refers to 2024, the last year for which the report breaks the data down by individual digital tool: the following report, published in April 2026, only shows an aggregate figure for modernization in general, without splitting it by type of intervention.

What the numbers say

In 2024, 38% of restaurants introduced some novelty in customer service. Three of these relate directly to the digital side:

• delivery through digital platforms: 21.9% of restaurants
• takeaway through digital platforms: 12.2%
• digital menu: 14.4%
• online booking system: 13.5%

These are shares of the total number of restaurants, not of the 38% that innovated: a restaurant may have introduced more than one of these tools at once, which is why the individual figures don't add up to the total.

This sits within a year where the propensity to invest, overall, fell: 43.2% of bar and restaurant owners say they made at least one investment in 2024 (44.6% for restaurants, 42.6% for bars), down from 55.1% in 2023. For 2025, the share planning an investment drops further, to 35.2%. It's not a sector slowing down its digitalization, then: it's a sector that, after two years of stronger push, is investing more selectively, choosing where to put its resources.

What changes for those who introduce it

Each of these three tools answers a different problem, which is why it's worth looking at them separately rather than as a single "digitalization" package.

Delivery moves part of the work outside the restaurant: whoever uses it reaches customers who would otherwise never walk in, but almost always through a third-party platform, which brings visibility and in exchange keeps a share of every order. It's the same mechanism as any marketplace: it helps you get found, but the margin on each sale doesn't all stay with the restaurant.

The digital menu solves a smaller but concrete problem: a menu that changes often, by season or by availability, costs money to reprint every time. A menu you check from a code at the table updates in minutes, without waiting for the next print run.

Online booking mostly changes the work of whoever answers the phone: fewer calls to handle during service, a record of table occupancy that doesn't depend on whoever is on shift that evening remembering it. For a restaurant that runs on reservations, it's often the tool with the most immediate effect on the time of whoever works the floor.

The difference between renting and owning

What the three tools have in common is the same choice that faces any business considering digitalization: relying on an external platform or building a channel of its own. It's not an either-or choice: many restaurants use both, the platform to get discovered by people already searching that category, a site of their own for returning customers and for people searching for the restaurant by name. I wrote about this in more detail, with the same reasoning applied to a different type of business, in website for artisans: the logic of a rented channel versus an owned one doesn't change from one sector to another.

What changes from one restaurant to another is whether it's worth starting from an off-the-shelf product, like a subscription-based booking system, or whether a specific process at the restaurant (shifts, private events, multiple locations) justifies something built custom. It's the same question that applies to any management software, not just restaurants: I wrote about it in business management software: standard or custom, with data on how often installing a standard product still requires revising how you work.

Where to start

If the restaurant doesn't have any of these three tools yet, there's no need to introduce them all at once. It's worth starting from whatever solves today's most pressing problem: if the phone keeps ringing during service, online booking; if the menu changes often and reprinting it is a hassle, the digital menu; if the dining room holds up but revenue outside peak hours doesn't, delivery.

If you want to work out which of these tools makes sense for your restaurant, and whether it makes sense to build it into a site of your own instead of renting it from a platform, get in touch and tell me how your restaurant runs today: I'll tell you what's worth introducing first, even if the answer is that it's not the priority right now.