Why we built Couvella
My name is Johannes van Eeden. I have spent much of my working life building technology companies. I have also spent a large part of it around restaurants, hotels, kitchens and dining rooms.
Those two worlds are the reason Couvella exists.
My wife Saskia and I own and operate hospitality businesses in Switzerland and France, including Saskia’s, our gourmet restaurant in Villars-sur-Ollon.
Running restaurants has taught me something very simple: the people building restaurant technology and the people actually running restaurants do not always want the same things.
We experienced it ourselves.
We needed a good reservation system. Nothing extraordinary. A great diary. Tables and capacity. Guest history. Card guarantees. Messages. Reviews. Useful statistics. Something our team could understand quickly and use during a busy service.
And something that looked like our restaurant, not the software company behind it.
Instead, we kept finding the same thing: complicated pricing, commissions, charges per cover, features divided between different plans, someone else’s branding in the middle of our guest experience, and increasingly complex software for what should be a relatively simple job.
It frustrated me.
Not because the technology was difficult to build. I knew it was not.
I have spent decades building technology businesses and working with teams that build systems handling far greater complexity. So eventually the obvious question was:
Why are we still paying so much for restaurant reservation software we do not actually want?
We decided to build our own.
At first, that was really all Couvella was supposed to be.
We wanted the reservation system we wished we had at our own restaurants. Simple enough that a new member of staff could understand it. Powerful enough to run the operation properly. Beautiful enough that we would be happy putting it in front of our guests.
Then we started questioning everything.
Why should a software company take a commission when a restaurant charges a no-show?
Why should a restaurant pay for every person who books a table?
Why should useful features be withheld unless you buy a more expensive plan?
Why should the booking experience carry somebody else’s brand?
Why should the software company sit between the restaurant and its guests?
And why, with the technology available today, should restaurant staff still have to work their way through screens and settings just to make a simple change?
That last question led to Ask.
Couvella has a complete visual interface. You can use the diary and dashboard exactly as you would expect.
But sometimes it is simply quicker to ask.
“Close the terrace tomorrow.”
“Move the Martins to 8pm.”
“How many covers do we have tonight?”
So we built that too.
Not AI for the sake of saying we have AI. Intelligence that removes work when it is useful, while leaving the normal interface there whenever you prefer it.
That principle became the philosophy behind Couvella:
Give restaurateurs what they actually need, not what we would like to sell them.
One product. One straightforward price. All the features.
Your branding.
Your guest relationships.
Your data.
Your Stripe account.
Your money goes directly to you.
Couvella stays in the background.
We are restaurateurs ourselves. We know that €129 matters. So does €500. So does every unnecessary monthly charge that quietly becomes part of the cost of running a restaurant.
Technology should earn its place in that cost structure.
That is why we built Couvella the way we did.
It began with our own frustration and our own restaurants. Now we are making it available to other restaurateurs who feel the same way.
Not another platform trying to own the relationship between a restaurant and its guests.
Just very good technology, doing the job it is supposed to do.
Johannes van Eeden
Founder, Couvella