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Habit
How to never miss a restaurant reservation again
To stop missing reservations, keep them all in one list with a reminder the day before. Forwarding your confirmations to CityNoms does this automatically.
Why reservations get forgotten in the first place
People do not miss restaurant reservations because they are unreliable. They miss them because the details are scattered. A Resy confirmation lives in one app, an OpenTable one lives in another, a Tock tasting menu ticket gets buried under three coupon emails, and the Saturday text from a chef-owned spot disappears in your messages. By the time you are deciding what to do for dinner on Thursday, the booking made three weeks ago is the easiest one to forget.
The fix is not a better memory. It is one list and one reminder. Once every upcoming table sits in the same place, and a quiet email lands the day before, the question stops being "do I have anything tonight?" and starts being "what time, and how do I get there?"
The one-list-plus-reminder fix, in plain steps
- One list. Pick a single place that holds every upcoming reservation, no matter which platform booked it. The goal is to never have to remember which app a particular dinner is on. CityNoms is built for exactly this, and it is free.
- One reminder. Sometime the day before the reservation, you want a short message that says where, when, and for how many. That is the moment the booking moves from a thing in a list to a thing you are actually doing tomorrow.
- One forwarding rule. The list and the reminder only work if the list is up to date. Forwarding the confirmation emails into it, automatically, is the part that runs in the background once and then never asks anything of you again.
Setup in minutes
Sign up at CityNoms. You will land on an onboarding screen with your private CityNoms address shown at the top. Two paths from here, depending on how much volume you book.
If you book once a week or so
Forward each confirmation by hand the moment it arrives. Open the Resy email, hit Forward, paste your CityNoms address, send. That booking shows up in your list within a minute, with the platform tag and the date and time. Done.
If you book three or more times a week
Set the auto-forward rule once and stop thinking about it. In Gmail, open Settings, then Forwarding and POP/IMAP, and add your CityNoms address as a forwarding address. Gmail sends a confirmation email to that address. CityNoms confirms that email automatically, so the forwarding address goes live without you copying a code.
Then create a filter that catches the senders that matter:
from:(resy.com OR opentable.com OR exploretock.com OR sevenrooms.com)
Choose to forward filtered messages to your CityNoms address. From that point on, every confirmation from those four platforms is in your list before you have closed the tab.
What the reminder actually looks like
The day before each reservation, CityNoms sends a short, plain email. Where you are eating, what time, and how many people. No marketing, no upsell, no calendar link to "manage your subscription". Just the one piece of information you needed to surface from a week-old confirmation. If a reservation is on the same day as another, both show up in the same morning email, so you walk into the day already knowing the rhythm of it.
Short FAQ
What if my plan changes?
Open the reservation in CityNoms and edit it, or delete it. Cancelling on the booking platform itself does not touch your CityNoms list, so a quick swipe to delete keeps the list tidy.
Does it work outside the four main platforms?
Yes. Anything you forward gets saved, even confirmations from a small restaurant that emails you directly. The platform tag will say Other, but the rest of the booking files itself the same way.
Will I get spammed with reminders?
One reminder per reservation, the day before. That is the whole thing. There is no nudge an hour before, no follow-up after, no "rate your experience" email. Quiet is the point.