Does a support person count toward party size on the waitlist?

Ontario’s accessibility standards require that a guest with a disability and their support person be allowed to enter together, and that any amount payable for the support person be made known in advance. Seat them together and say so on the join screen if a cover charge applies.

Does my restaurant website have to meet WCAG under Ontario law?

The web content rule in the Integrated Accessibility Standards applies to large organizations — 50 or more employees in Ontario — which have had to meet WCAG 2.0 Level AA since 2021. Smaller rooms are not caught by that section, but the customer-service duties still apply.

Do I need consent to text a Toronto guest that their table is ready?

You need the number collected for that stated purpose, and you should keep a record of what the guest agreed to. Service messages about the guest’s own wait are not a marketing list: keep promotional permission separate from the moment someone joins the queue.

How do I run one queue across a dining room and a curb lane patio?

Treat them as two seating pools with one list. Quote from combined availability, tag which pool a party can take, and check the patio is on your liquor sales licence before seating a drinking party outside.

Restaurant Waitlist Software in Toronto

Why a Toronto dining room is different

Most waitlist tools are built for one room, one seating pool and one kind of guest. A Toronto operator is running something more awkward than that, and the awkwardness is not seasonal noise — it is written into provincial law and into the way the city has reshaped the curb since 2020.

Ontario’s accessibility standards reach the front of house directly, and they reach almost everyone: the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation applies to organizations with at least one employee in the province, and it prescribes how you serve people, not only how wide your doorway is. That turns a queue from a convenience into a regulated interaction: who is admitted with whom, what you tell people when a facility they rely on is out of service, and how someone complains about the way they were treated at your door.

The second difference is physical. Toronto now runs a very large outdoor dining program, and for a big part of the year the host is quoting from two pools of tables with different weather risk, different licence status and different turn times.

What the law requires when you text a guest in Toronto

Two bodies of rules meet at the host stand, and they are usually confused with each other.

Accessibility, under provincial law. The Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation carries the customer service duties that used to live in Regulation 429/07. Three of them touch a queue every single service:

A guest with a disability accompanied by a support person must be permitted to enter the premises together, and must not be prevented from having access to that person while inside. If an amount is payable in respect of the support person, notice of the amount has to be given in advance.
If a facility or service that people with disabilities usually use is temporarily disrupted, you have to give notice — the reason, how long it is expected to last, and what the alternative is. An accessible washroom out of order on a Saturday is a notice, not a shrug.
You need a process for receiving and responding to feedback about how you serve people with disabilities, and it has to be usable by them.

On top of that, organizations with 50 or more employees in Ontario have had to make their websites and web content conform to WCAG 2.0 Level AA since the start of 2021 — and a join-the-queue screen is web content. Organizations with 20 or more employees also file an accessibility compliance report, with the current cycle due at the end of 2026.

Privacy and messaging, under federal law. PIPEDA governs the phone number your host collects: identified purpose, meaningful consent, use limited to that purpose. Canada’s anti-spam law is separate and governs commercial electronic messages, which a “your table is ready” alert is not — but a brunch promotion sent to the same number three weeks later is. The practical rule is to keep the two permissions apart from the first day, and the accessible waitlist guide walks through what the join screen should actually say.

The Toronto dining calendar

Toronto’s pressure is not one long peak. It arrives in shapes that break different parts of the queue.

Patio season, roughly May to October. CaféTO supported about 1,500 outdoor dining spaces across the city in 2025 — 285 curb lane cafés, 579 sidewalk cafés and 703 private patio endorsements. For a host, that is a second seating pool that appears in spring and disappears in autumn, with its own turn time and its own rain risk.
September, festival weeks downtown. Late seatings collapse into two narrow windows around screening times, and party sizes are larger and later than a normal Thursday.
Winter. The vestibule is the constraint. A room with no airlock loses parties before the host has taken a name, and quoted waits that were fine in July read as insulting in February.
Curb lane applications. The city’s 2026 curb lane intake closed in February, which means the decision about whether you will have that second pool is made months before the season it belongs to.

The POS and reservation stack you will meet in Toronto

Ontario does not impose a certified sales-recording device on restaurants the way Quebec does, so the checkout market here is genuinely open and most rooms run whatever their payment processor bundled. That has a consequence people miss when they shop for a waitlist: the constraint in Toronto is not the till, it is the licence and the layout.

A liquor sales licence describes the area you may serve alcohol in. A curb lane café is not automatically inside that area, so a host quoting “twenty minutes, patio” for a party that intends to drink needs to know the patio is on the licence. Check the AGCO licence conditions before the season, not during it.

The other thing you will meet is a reservation network that wants the guest relationship. If your room is walk-in led, look hard at what a marketplace actually costs you per cover before you accept it as the default — the alternatives to the Yelp waitlist page lays out that trade honestly.

How StoveOps fits a Toronto room

The guest scans a QR code at the door, enters a name, party size and phone number, and waits wherever they want — the bar, the sidewalk, the shop next door. When a table opens, the host taps once and the guest gets an SMS, WhatsApp message or email. Party notes travel with the entry, which is where a support person, a service animal or a step-free table requirement belongs so it is visible to whoever seats the party rather than to whoever took the name.

Your guest data stays yours. StoveOps is not a discovery marketplace, does not resell your list and does not charge per cover. If you run more than one Ontario room, the national view is in restaurant waitlist software for Canada; if the question is what the host actually holds at the door, see the iPad host stand waitlist app.

Toronto operator checklist

Write down how a support person is handled, and make sure the host has read it.
Put any support-person charge on the join screen, in advance, not at the table.
Post a notice process for a disrupted accessible washroom, ramp or lift.
Give guests a way to tell you how the door treated them, and read it weekly.
If you have 50 or more employees in Ontario, audit the join screen against WCAG 2.0 Level AA.
Check whether your accessibility compliance report is due this cycle.
State the purpose of the phone number on the screen where you ask for it.
Keep promotional permission separate from the waitlist permission.
Confirm the curb lane café is inside the area on your liquor sales licence.
Re-quote your winter waits in January; the July numbers will be wrong.

A Toronto queue is governed by accessibility law before it is governed by anything else