Quandoo is closing down: what your venue must do before 30 September

If you take bookings through Quandoo, the date that matters is 30 September 2026. That's the last day the platform accepts a reservation, the last day you can log into the restaurant tools, and — for a lot of venues — the last day anyone will bother telling you what you're about to lose.

Quandoo announced the shutdown on 24 March. Most of the coverage ran that week, aimed largely at a European audience, and then went quiet. If you're an Australian venue that skimmed the email in autumn and filed it under "deal with it later," later is now about four weeks away.

This is the practical version: what happens, what you need to get off the platform first, and the one thing that will still be quietly broken in December if nobody touches it.

The dates that actually matter

Quandoo isn't being sold or absorbed. Parent company Recruit Holdings — the Japanese group that bought Quandoo out of Berlin for around US$219 million in 2015 — ran a strategic portfolio review and decided to wind the whole thing down, describing it as a "business decision" to "undertake a planned and orderly wind-down process." There's no buyer, no successor platform, and no migration path someone else has already built for you.

Every market is on the same schedule — Australia and New Zealand alongside Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Turkey, the UK and Singapore. Software directories put Quandoo at roughly 17,000 restaurants across those eleven countries; nobody has published a breakdown of how many of those are Australian.

24 March 2026 — closure announced. Platform keeps running as normal.
30 June 2026 — last day diners could earn loyalty points.
30 September 2026 — the one that counts. Last day for new bookings, last day to redeem loyalty points, and last day of the restaurant partner tools.
1 October 2026 — consumer services end. You can no longer handle new or existing bookings through Quandoo. The site and app may linger for a while in a static, read-only state.
31 December 2026 — website, app and all infrastructure permanently offline.

One genuinely decent thing Quandoo did on the way out: service fees have been waived for the final six months, so partners "have the time and flexibility to plan." If you're still listed, you haven't paid a cover fee since around April. That's not nothing — but it also means the platform has been sitting there costing you zero while you postponed dealing with it, which is precisely how a deadline sneaks up on a busy kitchen.

Your existing bookings are fine. Your data isn't.

Start with the reassuring part, because it's the first thing every owner asks: reservations already confirmed through Quandoo will be honoured. A booking is an arrangement between the guest and your restaurant — Quandoo was only ever the messenger. If someone booked in August for a dinner in late September, that table still exists.

The catch sits on either side of it. Diners can only manage their own bookings — change a time, adjust a party size, cancel — up to 30 September. After that, Quandoo's own guidance is to contact the restaurant directly. Expect a run of calls from people who assumed the app would keep handling it, and brief whoever's answering the phone.

The part that actually costs you something is the data. On 1 October you lose the partner tools, and with them:

Guest history — names, contact details, visit frequency, and the notes your staff built up over years: allergy flags, "always wants the corner table," the regulars marked as VIPs.
Reservation history — the past bookings you'd use to work out what a Tuesday in July actually looks like.
Table layout and shift configuration — the setup someone spent a long afternoon getting right.
Marketing permissions — which guests opted in to hearing from you and which didn't. Without that record, you can't safely email the ones who did.

Quandoo has said partners can export while the platform is live, and its support team is staying in place through the wind-down to help. Take them up on it now, not in the last week of September when every other venue will be doing the same thing. Export to CSV, save it somewhere that isn't one laptop, and open the file to check it worked.

One caveat: a guest booking through a platform is not the same as a guest joining your mailing list. Check what they actually consented to before importing anything into an email tool — once that list is on your machine, handling it lawfully is your problem.

The Google button nobody's mentioning

Here's the one that's going to catch people out, and it's barely in any of the coverage.

Quandoo was an official Reserve with Google partner. When you signed up, Quandoo set up the booking link on your Google Business Profile for you — that's the blue "Reserve a table" button diners see on your listing in Search and Maps without ever visiting a website. It was a headline selling point, and it worked. Plenty of owners have never touched that setting, because they never had to.

From 1 October, that button points at a platform that no longer takes bookings.

Two things make this worse than it sounds. First, Google's own guidance is that a third-party booking button is controlled by the provider, not by Google support — if the link is there, the provider has to unregister it. Don't assume it tidies itself up on schedule. Second, the part that stings: manually pasting your own booking link into your Business Profile does not give you the blue button back. You get a plain link. The prominent call-to-action is reserved for Reserve with Google integration partners.

So the honest sequence is:

Open your Google Business Profile today and check where the booking link points. If it's a quandoo.com.au URL, you've found your problem.
Decide whether the blue button matters enough to move to another Reserve with Google partner — and get written confirmation they support the integration in Australia. Not every platform operating here does.
If it doesn't matter that much, point the link at your own booking page and accept the plainer treatment.
Either way, do it before 30 September. A dead booking button on your highest-intent listing is the worst version of this.

We've written before about what a Google Business Profile can and can't do for a venue. This is the sharpest illustration of that argument going: the button was never yours, and it's going away because someone else's business changed.

Your Quandoo listing was also a search result

The second-order effect is quieter, and takes longer to bite.

Quandoo didn't just handle bookings. It ran a profile page for your venue — photos, menu, address, reviews — on a large, well-established domain. For plenty of venues, particularly ones without much of a website of their own, that page turns up in Google when someone searches the restaurant by name. Sometimes alongside your own listing. Sometimes instead of it.

On 31 December, those pages stop existing. Whatever search visibility they were carrying goes with them, along with every link pointing at them from directories, local guides and old write-ups.

If you already have a real website, this is a small dent and arguably an improvement — traffic that was landing on a rented profile has one fewer place to go, and comes to you instead. If you don't, you're about to have less presence in Google than you had in November without having changed a thing.

You've got until the end of the year to put something of yours in that slot: a page you own, on a domain with your name on it, carrying your menu, hours, address and a way to book. It doesn't need to be elaborate. It needs to exist before the Quandoo page goes, so there's somewhere for that intent to land.

Why this keeps happening to Australian venues

This is the second time in about two years. TheFork — which started life here as Dimmi in 2009, was sold to TripAdvisor in 2015 and rebranded in 2019 — pulled out of Australia entirely on 31 March 2024. Now Quandoo, the other major discovery-and-booking platform operating here, is going too. Both built an Australian venue base. Both left when the numbers stopped working for a parent company on the other side of the world. Neither exit had anything to do with how your restaurant was trading.

That's the actual lesson, and it isn't "pick a better platform."

A discovery platform's booking button is a channel you rent, on terms that can be revised or revoked by someone whose spreadsheet you will never see.

Renting it is fine when it brings covers you wouldn't otherwise get. It's not fine as the only way a guest can reach you. Whatever you replace Quandoo with, make sure at least one booking path runs through something with your name on the domain — then the next exit is an inconvenience, not a scramble.

If you're shopping for a replacement now, we've compared what the remaining Australian booking systems actually cost — which ones charge per cover, which charge a flat fee, and which won't give you a number without a sales call.

Quick answers

When exactly is Quandoo closing? Quandoo stops accepting new bookings on 30 September 2026. Consumer services end on 1 October 2026, and the website, app and infrastructure go offline permanently on 31 December 2026.

Is Quandoo closing in Australia specifically, or everywhere? Everywhere, on the same timeline. The wind-down covers all eleven markets Quandoo operated in, Australia and New Zealand included.

Will my existing Quandoo bookings still be honoured? Yes. Confirmed reservations stand — they're an arrangement between guest and restaurant, not something Quandoo takes with it. But from 1 October, guests can't change or cancel through Quandoo and will need to contact you directly.

Why is Quandoo shutting down? Parent company Recruit Holdings decided to wind it down after a strategic portfolio review, describing it as a planned and orderly process. There's no buyer and no successor platform.

What do I have to do as a restaurant? Three things before 30 September: export your guest and reservation data, fix the booking link on your Google Business Profile, and get a replacement booking path live. None of it happens automatically.

What to skip

Skip waiting for a migration tool. There isn't one — there's no acquiring company to build it. Every "switch from Quandoo" offer in your inbox is a competing platform's marketing, and the free-migration promises tend to expire at exactly the moment your export window does.

Skip signing a 12-month contract in the last week of September because you left it late. That's how venues end up paying for enterprise software built for a floor plan they don't have. Work out your real monthly cover count first, then look at pricing models — per-cover fees and flat subscriptions behave very differently once you get busy.

And skip assuming the Google button sorts itself out. It's the highest-intent surface you have and the one most likely to still be broken in December.

Reading this after 30 September? The order changes but the list doesn't: check your Google Business Profile link first, because that's the one actively losing you bookings right now, then get a replacement booking path live, then chase whatever data you can still pull before 31 December.

The honest pitch

Straight up: FastPage is not a like-for-like Quandoo replacement. No real-time availability, no floor plan, no waitlist, no CRM — and we're not a Reserve with Google partner, so we can't hand you the blue button back. What FastPage is, is the page that link should point at: a site for your venue with your menu, hours, address and a booking request form built in, where a guest picks a date, time and party size and you approve or decline from your phone. It's the request-and-response pattern venues ran over the phone for decades, moved online, with no cover fee attached — on a domain with your name on it, which is the entire argument of this article.

Sign up and have something of your own standing before the Quandoo page comes down. The pricing is on one page, in dollars, with no per-booking fee to model.