CentralPlanner

CentralPlanner is a reservation-management system for operators booking tables, rooms, or activities. It suits businesses that need guest records and space planning as well as online bookings. Its free tier is tightly capped, but the paid plans scale from unlimited reservations to automated decisions and post-visit follow-up.

Overview

Reservations create guest contacts and build a visit history, keeping repeat customers’ bookings connected. CentralPlanner also handles rooms, tables, seating capacity, and suggested table combinations. That makes it applicable to hotels and sports centers as well as restaurants, although its fit depends on needing to coordinate bookings with physical space or activities.

Customers can submit bookings through a form embedded on a business website or Facebook page. This gives businesses a direct booking channel without requiring customers to call, while operators retain manual review as an option even when automation is enabled.

Key features

Guest records and space planning

Linked guest histories can help staff recognize returning visitors and keep reservation context together. Table and room management, capacity information, and suggested combinations support seating and allocation decisions. Professional adds capacity planning, which is more relevant to operators managing demand against available space than to businesses that only need a simple booking diary.

Booking automation and follow-up

Premium and higher can check capacity and accept or reject online requests immediately. That can reduce manual handling where availability rules are clear; businesses that prefer to screen every request can continue reviewing them manually. Professional adds reservation attachments, reminder emails, and post-visit thank-you or review emails. Its 5GB attachment allowance is useful for teams that keep PDFs or images with bookings, but is a defined storage ceiling.

Support and infrastructure

42he GmbH, based in Cologne, says it generally answers routine questions within 10 minutes on workdays and about 10 hours on weekends, with around-the-clock on-call support for outages. It says its servers are in German data centers, backups are made daily to decentralized storage, and core components are redundant. Those components support a stated average annual availability of 95%, a figure businesses with demanding uptime needs should weigh carefully.

An API key allows an external application to write directly to a CentralPlanner account. That makes integration possible for systems that need to send data into the account, without implying broader API capabilities.

Pricing

CentralPlanner uses a freemium model, with a 30-day trial and a free Starter plan billed as free forever. Starter costs nothing and allows 50 reservations per month. It is a sensible entry point for very low booking volumes, but the cap may quickly rule it out for a busy venue.

Basis is billed at 19,90€ / Monat zzgl. MwSt. and allows unlimited reservations. It suits operators who need to remove the monthly booking ceiling but do not need Premium’s automated capacity decisions. The listed price is custom pricing.

Premium is billed at 34,90€ / Monat zzgl. MwSt. and also allows unlimited reservations. Choose it when immediate capacity-based acceptance or rejection of online requests matters; it retains manual review as an option. Its listed price is custom pricing.

Professional is billed at 59,90€ / Monat zzgl. MwSt. with unlimited reservations and 5GB of file storage. It adds capacity planning, attachments, reminders, and post-visit emails, making it the most suitable tier for teams that want planning and follow-up tools in the same system. Its listed price is custom pricing. Compared with Starter, all three paid tiers remove the 50-reservation monthly limit; the higher tiers are justified by operational features rather than additional reservation volume.

Platforms

CentralPlanner runs on the web and offers free iOS and Android apps, so staff can access reservations from internet-connected devices through a browser or mobile app. An API is also available for external applications to write to an account.

Who it's for

CentralPlanner is a good fit for restaurants, hotels, sports centers, and other businesses that book rooms, areas, or activities and want guest history alongside capacity-aware planning. Smaller operators can start on Starter if 50 monthly reservations are enough. Businesses that need unlimited bookings have a clear step up to Basis, while Premium and Professional make more sense when automated decisions or operational follow-up will be used. It is less compelling for a business that only needs a basic booking form and has little need for guest records or space planning.

Pros and cons

Pros: Reservations build guest histories, keeping repeat-customer records connected to bookings.

Pros: Website and Facebook booking forms, table and room management, and suggested combinations cover both booking intake and space allocation.

Pros: Paid plans provide unlimited reservations, while Premium adds automated capacity decisions and Professional adds planning and follow-up tools.

Cons: Starter’s 50-reservation monthly cap is restrictive for higher-volume businesses.

Cons: Capacity-based automatic decisions begin at Premium, so Basis users still lack that booking automation.

Cons: Professional storage is capped at 5GB, and the stated average annual availability is 95%.

Alternatives

Restaurant Reservation Software is a useful place to compare options across the category.

Anolla is worth considering if a free plan with basic online table reservations and the option to activate paid features as needed is the priority.

simpleERB may suit a restaurant seeking a free trial capped at 250 covers, with no credit card or commitment, or a training restaurant eligible for its free-for-life college plan.

Eat App offers a free plan capped at 100 guests monthly, so it is an alternative for operators whose volume fits that allowance.

Favouritetable may fit a business wanting a free-for-life web reservation diary with up to 30 online bookings monthly, onboarding included, and no contract; its plan requires Favouritetable.

GetReserve is an option for a business that wants a free online booking page, list and calendar views, one floor-plan space, and guest profiles with visit history.

Resos is another freemium reservation platform to compare.

Tableo is another freemium platform to compare.

Taybl may be a better fit for ticketed events, charging 70p per paid ticket with no monthly fee; free and complimentary tickets cost nothing.

Verdict

Choose CentralPlanner if your business needs reservations tied to guest histories and space planning, with a path from a 50-booking free tier to unlimited reservations and automation. Its strongest case is the combination of booking, capacity decisions, and post-visit follow-up in higher plans. Look elsewhere if the Starter cap is too low or if the stated 95% average annual availability does not meet your operational needs.