Switching from Chope or Quandoo: A Singapore Restaurant's Migration Guide

You've decided to move. Here's how to do it without losing anything.

If you run a restaurant in Singapore and you've been taking bookings through Chope or Quandoo, you've probably had the same thought lately: is this still the right home for my reservations?

Two things have pushed that question to the front. Quandoo is winding down its Singapore platform, with bookings live until 30 September 2026 and full closure by 31 December 2026. And Chope now sits under Grab, following Grab's acquisition in July 2024. Neither change is a disaster on its own. But together they raise a question most operators never stop to ask: when your bookings live on someone else's platform, whose guests are they, really?

If you've already decided to leave, the worry usually isn't the new system. It's the move itself. Will I lose my guest list? What about the 30 bookings already sitting in the calendar for next month? Will a diner turn up to a reservation that quietly vanished?

A switch done in the right order loses zero bookings and zero guest history. This guide walks you through exactly that order: what to export before you cancel, when to make the switch, how to keep your deposit and no-show rules intact, and where to land so your bookings actually work for you afterwards. If you're still weighing up which system to move to, start with our full guide to choosing a reservation system in Singapore, then come back here for the how.

First, understand what you actually own (and what you don't)

Before you cancel anything, it helps to be clear-eyed about what a marketplace booking platform gives you, and what it keeps.

A platform like Chope or Quandoo does two jobs well: it puts you in front of diners browsing for somewhere to eat, and it takes the booking. That discovery is genuinely useful, especially when you're new or quiet. But the relationship that comes out of it largely belongs to the platform, not to you. The diner found you through their app. Their account, their history, their next reminder email, all of it runs through the marketplace.

This is the normal way the industry works, and it isn't sinister. It only becomes a problem the day you want to leave, or the day the platform leaves you. That's the situation Quandoo's restaurants are now in. When a platform winds down, everything sitting inside it, your booking history, your guest contacts, your no-show records, goes with it unless you've pulled it out first.

The contrast worth understanding is direct ownership. With a system like Oddle Reserve, the booking page carries your restaurant's brand rather than a marketplace's, and the booking comes straight to you. The guest is yours from the first reservation. That difference barely registers on day one. It matters enormously on the day you'd otherwise be exporting years of guest history against a deadline.

So the first rule of switching is simple: know what's yours before you cancel.

What to export before you cancel anything

This is the part nothing else really tells you, so read it twice. Do all of this before you cancel your current platform. After you cancel, or after a platform closes, the data may be gone for good. And if you're on Quandoo, you have a hard deadline: pull everything well before 30 September 2026.

Here's your pre-cancellation checklist:

• Your guest list with contact details — names, phone numbers, emails. Just as important, note the marketing consent or opt-in status for each, because that determines who you can legally keep contacting after the move.
• Your full booking history — past and upcoming reservations, party sizes, dates, plus no-shows and cancellations. This is your baseline. Without it you lose your covers trends and your no-show patterns, the numbers you use to run service.
• Your deposit, prepayment and no-show settings — the exact amounts, the cancellation windows, the rules. You'll rebuild these in the new system, and it's far easier to copy them than to reconstruct them from memory.
• Guest notes and tags — VIP markers, dietary and allergy notes, seating preferences, the regulars' quirks your hosts rely on. This is the institutional memory of your front-of-house.
• Any future bookings already in the system — every reservation a guest has made for a date after your switch. These have to move across, or be re-entered, or you'll strand a diner who did nothing wrong.

Most platforms let you export this as a CSV from your settings or dashboard. If yours doesn't make it self-serve, email the platform and ask, in writing, for a full export of your guest and reservation data in CSV format before your account closes. Be specific: contacts, past and future bookings, notes, tags, and your policy settings.

One honest caveat. Some marketplaces redact contact details for diners who never opted in to share them, so your export may have gaps, a date and a party size but no way to reach the guest. That's frustrating, and it's the clearest argument for owning the channel next time. When the booking is direct, the contact is simply yours.

Once you have the files, open them and check them before you trust them. Confirm the row counts look right, the upcoming bookings are all there, and the contact fields aren't empty. Validate first, cancel second.

Time the switch around your booking calendar

A reservation system isn't a light switch you flip at midnight. It sits in the middle of live service, with real diners holding real bookings. So the goal is a quiet, boring cutover that nobody notices.

Pick your slow window to go live: early in the week, between service periods, on a day-part you can afford to babysit. Never on a Friday dinner rush, and never in the middle of a festive peak when your forward bookings are stacked deep. Protect your busiest periods by switching well away from them.

Then run both systems in parallel for about two to four weeks. Keep the old platform live and taking bookings while you stand up the new one, so no inbound reservation falls through the gap while you redirect your traffic. During that overlap, re-point every place a diner can book you: the button or widget on your website, your Google listing through Reserve with Google, the link in your Instagram bio, anywhere a reservation can start. As each forward booking on the old system passes or gets moved across, you wind it down.

Here's how that looks for a real venue. Say you run a 60-cover bistro doing around 250 covers a week, with roughly 30 reservations already booked for the weeks ahead. You switch on a Monday lunch, the quietest shift you have. You run the new system alongside the old one through the next two weekends, watching new bookings land cleanly. You move those 30 forward bookings into the new system by hand, a half-hour job. Only then do you close the old account. No diner ever sees a seam.

The point of the overlap isn't caution for its own sake. It's that a reservation is a promise to a guest, and you don't break promises to test software.

Keep your deposit and no-show policy continuity

This is where switches quietly go wrong. You move systems, and without meaning to, your booking terms reset. A guest who paid a $20 deposit per head last month books again and finds different rules, or none at all. Small inconsistencies like that erode the trust that makes deposits work in the first place.

So carry your policies across deliberately. Rebuild the same deposit per cover, the same cancellation window, the same no-show handling you had before. If diners were used to a 48-hour cancellation cut-off, keep it. If you charged a no-show fee on a card guarantee, set that up again on day one.

Oddle Reserve maps these directly, which makes the rebuild straightforward. You can collect a deposit per person that's applied to the guest's final bill, so a $20 deposit comes off their total when they dine. You set the cancellation window yourself: non-refundable, or cancellable up to a set time before the reservation, after which the deposit is forfeited. For card guarantees, you can charge a no-show fee when a guest doesn't turn up, with the terms shown clearly to the diner before they confirm. The guest sees exactly what they're agreeing to, so there are no surprises at the table.

The aim is that a guest booking the week after your switch has the same experience as the week before. Continuity is invisible when you get it right, and very visible when you don't.

The real reason to switch: connected, not standalone

Fees are the reason most operators start looking. They're rarely the best reason to move.

The better reason is what happens after the booking. Most booking tools, marketplace or not, stop at the calendar. They fill the seat and, at best, hand you a spreadsheet of who came. What you do with that spreadsheet is your problem. That's the industry norm, and it's why so many restaurants sit on thousands of guest contacts they've never once used to bring anyone back.

A connected platform turns the same booking into the next visit. With Oddle Reserve, every reservation feeds Customer Intelligence, a single profile of each guest built from their bookings, their orders and their visits across every touchpoint. From there, Marketing acts on it automatically. A cancelled reservation triggers a win-back. A guest who hasn't been in for a while gets a gentle nudge. A no-show gets a follow-up. None of it depends on you remembering to write an email, and none of it needs a separate marketing tool bolted on.

A marketplace can't really do this for you, because the guest was never fully yours to begin with. The whole shape of Oddle is built around that gap: the path from winning a new guest, to knowing who they are, to keeping them coming back. The booking is just where it starts.

That's the difference between a tool that holds your calendar and a system that grows your repeat business. Both take reservations. Only one does anything with them.

The economics: what you're really paying a marketplace

Now the money, in plain terms.

A marketplace makes its income from your covers. Whether it's a fee per booking, a commission, or a subscription for visibility, the model is the same underneath: you're paying for access to diners, and a meaningful share of that flows back to the platform that sits between you and your guest. You're effectively renting a relationship with people who came to eat your food.

An own-channel flips the arithmetic. When the booking is direct, the demand is yours, the guest is yours, and bringing that guest back costs almost nothing. An automated email to a guest you already have is close to free at the margin, nothing like the cost of acquiring a new diner through a marketplace listing every single time. The upfront switch takes a bit of your time. The saving compounds quietly every month afterwards.

This is the case we made in why 'free' reservation systems can cost more than you think: the sticker price is rarely the real price. If you want the full side-by-side on the platforms specifically, see how Oddle Reserve compares with Chope and with Quandoo.

Who should NOT switch yet

Switching isn't right for everyone today, and pretending otherwise wouldn't help you. A few cases where it's worth slowing down.

If you lean heavily on marketplace discovery and you haven't built any direct demand of your own yet, don't go cold turkey. Leaving the marketplace before you have your own booking traffic can cost you covers you can't afford to lose. Build the direct channel first, let it carry real volume, then migrate the rest across.

If you're in the middle of peak season, or you've got a wall of forward bookings you can't safely move right now, wait for a quieter window. There's no prize for switching during your busiest fortnight of the year.

And if you're a very low-volume venue where a notebook and a Google listing genuinely work, any reservation system might be more than you need. Be honest with yourself about your actual volume before adding software.

One exception cuts through all of that. If you're on Quandoo, the clock is real. Even if you're not ready to choose a replacement, export your guest data and booking history before the platform closes. You can decide where it lands later. You can't get it back once it's gone.

Frequently asked questions

What happens to my guest data when Quandoo closes?

If you don't export it first, it may be unrecoverable once the platform shuts down. Quandoo's Singapore bookings stay live until 30 September 2026, with full closure by 31 December 2026. Pull your guest list, booking history and policy settings well before that window closes, even if you haven't yet chosen where to move them.

Can I move my existing Chope or Quandoo bookings to a new system?

Yes. Export your upcoming reservations and either import them or re-enter them into your new system. The safe way is to run both systems in parallel during the transition, so any booking still landing on the old platform is captured while you redirect diners to the new one. Nothing gets dropped if you overlap.

Will I lose my booking history if I switch?

Not if you export it before you cancel. Your past bookings, no-show records and guest notes are the numbers you run service on, so saving them is the whole point of the pre-cancellation checklist. Once exported, that history moves with you.

How long does it take to switch reservation systems?

The setup itself is fast. The part that takes time, deliberately, is the two-to-four week overlap where you run the old and new systems together so no booking slips through. You're not waiting on software; you're giving your forward bookings time to clear safely.

Is it expensive to switch off Chope or Quandoo?

The main cost is your time during the move, not a big cheque. The ongoing saving runs the other way: direct bookings you own outright, instead of paying a marketplace a share of every cover, every month, indefinitely.

Do I have to tell my guests I've switched?

No. If you redirect your booking entry points and your new booking page carries your own brand, the change is invisible to diners. They book the same restaurant the same way. The plumbing behind it is your business, not theirs.

Making the move

Strip it back and the whole migration is four moves: export everything before you cancel, time the switch for a quiet window, carry your deposit and no-show rules across intact, and land somewhere that does something with your bookings instead of just holding them.

It's a one-time effort. What you get on the other side is a guest relationship you actually own, one that keeps working long after the switch is done.

If you'd like to see what taking your bookings direct looks like, take a closer look at Oddle Reserve, or book a quick walkthrough with our team and we'll help you map out the move.

Related guides

• The Ultimate Guide to Finding the Best Restaurant Reservation System in Singapore — start here if you're still weighing up which system to move to.
• Oddle Reserve vs Chope — the full side-by-side for operators comparing the two directly.
• Oddle Reserve vs Quandoo — how the two stack up, especially as Quandoo winds down in Singapore.