Most restaurant loyalty programs are built around the same fundamental idea: Give guests a reason to come back. Spend enough, earn enough, redeem for a discount. It's a logical framework, but according to new data from Toast, it might be only telling part of the story.
Toast recently surveyed more than 1,400 U.S. adults who had dined in, ordered takeout, or ordered delivery in the past three months. The results reveal a significant gap between what restaurants are offering and what their valuable guests might actually want.
Only 20% of diners say they often or always receive a personalized experience when dining out. For the rest, the experience can feel anonymous — consistent, maybe, but not personal. In an industry that runs on return visits, that can be a problem.
The discount isn't the point
It would be easy to read the data and conclude that guests want better promotions. And they do. Tailored loyalty perks (49%) and personalized discounts (48%) rank at the top of what diners say they’d like to receive when dining at a restaurant. But the more telling findings are further down the list.
For Boomer diners, preferential seating (37%) and simple staff recognition (35%) ranked highly, as well. Notably, these are the guests who report feeling recognized least often.
Tom Kuntz has been running restaurants in Red Lodge, Montana for three decades. He operates four concepts and a hotel through Red Lodge Hospitality and has used Toast's loyalty program product since 2017. He considers it a cornerstone of his business, but not for the reasons you might expect.
“When I work in the restaurant and you ask someone if they want to redeem their points, the answer is almost universally no,” Kuntz says. “They build up their points, and then they use it for something special.”
For his customers, the loyalty program isn't just a discount mechanism. It's a way to mark moments — a birthday dinner, an anniversary at the steakhouse, a night that's worth saving up for. And beyond the points themselves, the program gives Kuntz's staff a natural opening to learn a guest's name. That, he says, is the real value.
“It gives us that conversation,” Kuntz says. “That really is our focus — not discounts.”
Where the personalization gap is biggest
The personalization gap isn't evenly distributed. Guests in the Northeast report the highest frequency of personalized service. Diners in the South and Midwest report the lowest. And there's a clear urban-rural divide. Guests outside major metro areas are more likely to say they rarely or never experience any personal recognition at all.
For operators in those markets, that's actually an opportunity. When personalization is rare, even small gestures carry outsized weight — remembering a name, saving a booth, or starting a regular's drink before they sit down, which Kuntz's bartenders do for guests they can see walking past the window.
Charlie Eblen, who owns Single Tree BBQ in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, takes an equally direct approach. When he wants to connect with a guest, he picks up the phone.
When Single Tree started developing a new house-made smoked hot dog, Eblen called a few regulars, invited them in to try it on the house, and asked for feedback. “It makes them a part of the business,” he says, “not just another customer at a restaurant on the corner.”
Sending out a coupon, he'll tell you, has its value — but it's not the end-all be-all.
The takeaway for operators
The data makes the opportunity concrete: When a large percentage of your guests feel like strangers, the bar for standing out is remarkably low. Loyalty programs are a useful infrastructure for building those relationships, but the relationship itself still has to come from the people on the floor.
In a business built on return visits, being remembered might be the most powerful offer on the menu.
