Toast's Guestbook is the guest profile that gets created automatically the moment anyone orders from your restaurant or sits down at a table, whether they've joined your loyalty program or not. It holds contact information, full visit history, order patterns, and any notes your team has left behind, one profile per guest, built without anyone having to set it up. Most Toast accounts already have thousands of these profiles sitting inside them right now, because almost nobody logs in to look.
Is Guestbook the Same Thing as Toast’s Loyalty Program?
No, and this is the mix-up that trips up most operators. Toast’s loyalty program is the rewards side of the guest relationship: the points, the perks, what a guest sees when they choose to join.
Guestbook is different. It’s the profile Toast builds in the background for every single guest, regardless of whether they ever signed up for a rewards program. A guest who has ordered from you a dozen times but never joined loyalty still has a full Guestbook profile sitting there. Loyalty is optional. Guestbook is automatic.
What’s Actually Sitting Inside a Guestbook Profile?
Contact info, where a guest has provided it through an order or a reservation. Visit history, including frequency and timing. Order patterns, so you can see what a guest tends to order and when. And any notes your team has added along the way, table preferences, allergies, the small details a good server picks up over time.
None of it needs to be built from scratch. It’s already attached to every guest who has ever ordered from you, dined in, or picked up takeout.
Why Does Being "Remembered" Matter This Much to Guests?
In Toast’s own Regulars Report, guests were asked what made them feel most valued at a restaurant. Forty-eight percent said one thing: staff remembering their name or their usual order. Not the food. Not the price. Not the ambiance.
That’s the case for Guestbook in one stat. It’s the digital version of the memory a great server builds over years on the floor, except it doesn’t walk out the door when she does.
Is Guestbook Meant to Bring In New Guests, or Keep the Ones You Already Have?
Keep the ones you already have. Among restaurants using Toast’s automated marketing tools, 86% of email-driven orders and 83% of SMS-driven orders came from guests who had already dined there before.
Guestbook profiles are what those campaigns are built on. This isn’t an acquisition tool, it’s a retention tool, and it earns its keep specifically on repeat guests.
Does Actually Using This Data Make a Measurable Sales Difference?
Toast’s own Marketing Suite data shows restaurants using loyalty, email, and gift card tools together see 63% more sales than restaurants using none of them. Guestbook is the data layer underneath all three. It’s what makes real segmentation possible, so campaigns get built around actual visit history instead of guesswork.
What’s the Fastest Way to Actually Start Using Guestbook?
Open your Toast account and look. That’s the first step, and for most operators, it’s a step they haven’t taken yet. From there: check whether contact info and visit history are populating for your regulars, pull a segment of guests who haven’t visited in a while, and send one targeted email using what’s already sitting in their profile. None of this requires new software or a rebuild. It requires about twenty minutes and an account you already have.
When we build a campaign off Guestbook data for a Toast restaurant, we connect it to your real margins, through our partnership with Accountific or whatever bookkeeping setup you already have. Not just whether a guest came back. Whether that guest coming back actually helped your bottom line.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Toast’s Guestbook?
Guestbook is the automatic guest profile Toast builds for every person who orders from or dines at a restaurant, capturing contact info, visit history, order patterns, and staff notes, whether or not that guest has joined a loyalty program.
Is Guestbook the same as a loyalty program?
No. Loyalty is the optional rewards program a guest chooses to join. Guestbook is the underlying profile every guest gets automatically, loyalty member or not.
Do I need to set anything up to use Guestbook?
No manual setup is required to create the profiles themselves. Toast builds them automatically from orders and reservations. What most operators need to do is log in and start using the data that’s already there.
Is Guestbook meant for attracting new guests?
No. Toast’s own data shows the large majority of email- and SMS-driven orders from Guestbook-based campaigns come from guests who have already dined there. It’s a retention tool, not an acquisition tool.
How does Guestbook data connect to actual sales results?
Toast’s Marketing Suite data shows restaurants using loyalty, email, and gift card tools together see 63% more sales than restaurants using none of them, and Guestbook is the data foundation those tools run on.
Ready to See What’s Sitting in Your Guestbook?
Book Your Free Toast Marketing Audit: Get a free 30-minute review of what’s already dormant in your Toast account. tidycal.com/pam-pormentilla-monteith/restaurant-growth-session
Download the Free Checklist: Grab the Toast Marketing Activation Checklist and see which features to switch on first. greatworkonline.com/toast-activation-checklist