“Holding out for the right fit.”

Frank Lozito knows exactly what kind of place he runs. When reservation platforms offered him free iPads, he held out for a tool that fit his brewery instead of reshaping his brewery to fit the tool. Today Celebration Brewing welcomes groups of 8, 20 and more with a simple setup: a text, an email, and a yes or no from his phone.

A family brewery ten minutes from Disney

Celebration Brewing Company is a family-owned brewery, taproom and brewpub in Celebration, Florida, about ten minutes from Walt Disney World. Frank Lozito and his family opened it in 2021. Frank designed it as a relaxed, walk-in taproom, and his team runs the floor without a host stand. On a busy night, his lead bartender manages the wait from memory.

Groups seek the place out: tourists, youth sports teams, race weekends.

“Marathons, cheerleading competitions, all that stuff. That’s when I get twenty people, twenty-five, thirty, forty. One time we had forty, and then another forty that night.”

Celebration Brewing doesn’t take reservations or hold tables, and that is a deliberate choice. Frank wants every guest who walks in to feel welcome.

“We will get a table cleaned as quickly as we can. And if someone has to wait an extra two minutes, then grab a beer.”

Frank Lozito, co-owner, Celebration Brewing Company

The challenge every busy bar and restaurant knows

Groups used to reach the brewery the old-fashioned way: “Phone call or email.” Same-day requests were simple. “You called today: ‘Hey, do you have any availability for two o’clock?’ And I look around. No problem.”

The harder case was the group organizer planning ahead. Someone rounding up 15 people for next Thursday does the calling whenever they get a minute, and that minute is often a Friday night, exactly when the brewery is slammed. On a full night, Frank’s team stays focused on the guests in front of them, and the phone takes a back seat.

“Can’t hear the phone. We’re busy.”

That organizer is fifteen guests who would have loved to come in. The phone just wasn’t built to catch them on a Friday night. And if someone did pick up, the answer depended less on the question than on when the phone rang.

“If you call at two on a Tuesday, I look around and say come on in. If you call at seven on a Friday, the only honest answer anyone behind the bar can give is first come, first served. Same brewery, same policy. The difference was when the phone rang.”

The rule itself was never the problem.

“Our rule was always first come, first served. The problem was that it lived in our heads. Whoever picked up the phone had to explain it on the spot, in the middle of a shift, and the caller heard whatever version there was time for.”

That worked fine for a table tonight. It worked less well for a party of 15 two weeks out.

“Somebody calling about a party two weeks from now was getting the answer for tonight, because tonight is all the person on the phone can see. That’s not a bad answer. It’s the wrong answer for that question.”

Frank saw the opportunity. He wanted a way to say yes to a group of 15 next week, with one answer no matter when the phone rang, and without turning his taproom into a reservation restaurant.

A tool that fit the brewery

Every reservation platform wanted Celebration Brewing, and most pitched a free tablet for a host stand Frank had chosen not to have. He evaluated them and passed.

“The functionality was not what I wanted. They required that you have an iPad or some device where you would check in people, and cost. It just wasn’t our business model.”

“I don’t want to be walking around with an iPad and clicking on tables. … It’s not that kind of place.”

What he wanted was flexibility.

“If I were to go to Toast Tables or a Yelp thing, I’m all in. [EnRoute] at least lets me take a little piece of it and not put my entire brewery into it.”

An engineer’s approach to something new

Frank heard about EnRoute from another restaurant owner and signed up for a demo account. Curiosity runs in his background: “I like testing things out. I like new things. My background is engineer.”

He took his time. The brewery was still new and still finding its rhythm, and nothing about the demo asked him to change how he ran it.

“I think it was just a let’s see if it works kind of thing, and it didn’t adversely affect me. … How could it hurt?”

When EnRoute offered to build the page around his own policies, hours, weekly events and wording, he gave it the green light. In December 2025 the link went on the brewery’s Google listing, and in January Frank added it to his website.

“The fact that you did the heavy lifting helped me out.”

The simplest version there is

Celebration Brewing uses EnRoute the plainest way possible. Here is the whole setup.

• One page. Frank’s EnRoute page is linked from the brewery’s website and from the Reserve button on its Google listing. It states the policy up front: Celebration Brewing does not accept reservations or hold tables. Parties of 8 to 20 can send a priority seating request, a heads-up that they’re planning to come. Private events, up to 30 in the private room or 100 on the covered patio, have their own request.

• His rules, in his words. Small party requests need a day’s notice (three days for larger events). The page shows when groups can’t be taken: Monday trivia, Wednesday bingo, and Friday through Sunday evenings from 5 to 8. Frank set those himself.

• A short form. The guest gives a name, a party size, a date and time, and where they’d like to sit. As Frank puts it, from the guest’s side: “If I just go boom, name, number of people, and where I want to sit, I’m set.”

• A text and an email. Every request lands on Frank’s phone with the contact and booking details. He approves or declines from his phone or his computer. The guest gets a text back. Approved groups go straight onto the brewery’s calendar: “[The] calendar function… That helps me out a lot.”

That’s it. No tablet. No host stand. No check-in screen. Nobody on the floor does anything differently.

“I like the fact that I know [no] additional equipment required. That’s a nice thing. Easy to use, of course. The price is great.”

Priority seating, not a reservation

Parties of 8 to 20 send what EnRoute calls a heads-up and what Frank’s bartenders call a priority seating request. They’re the same thing: the group says it’s coming, Frank says yes or no, and nobody has promised a table.

When Frank approves one, the group gets priority seating. Guests who have visited the theme parks down the road already know how it works: show up at your time, check in, and take the next table that fits your party.

“You are in line to get that next available table. You bump up in your priority. It’s not guaranteed.”

“I think they learned that from Disney.”

A reservation is a different promise. A reservation means a table is waiting when you walk in, maybe with a Reserved sign on it. Celebration Brewing doesn’t make that promise, and Frank is careful never to use the word. The only time he does is for private events that put down a deposit: “Now you’re locked in. … So that’s officially a reservation.”

“The reservation versus priority seating request, those words do make a difference. … People will get upset, guaranteed, if they come in: ‘Well, you said I’m here at 5:15. I’m now here at 5:15. Where is my seat?’”

“It’s better than call ahead seating. So it’s almost guaranteeing when you’re not guaranteeing. And again, I hate using the words guaranteed reservations because that’s what people think.”

The page gives every guest the same message in writing before they ask: this is not a reservation, and the brewery will text you once it has checked availability. The bartenders have one answer now, too.

“I refer them to our online priority seating system. Right on our homepage. … ‘For parties of eight or more, please go to our website and click on the link that says for parties of eight or more.’”

Asked whether any guest has come in since then saying they were told something different on the phone, Frank’s answer was one word: “No.”

What the page took off his plate

One in three of Frank’s group requests this year arrived while the taproom was closed, most of them in the morning before opening. Those guests decided to come and acted on it at an hour when no one could answer a phone. Would they have reached him anyway? “Probably. But in that quantity, probably not.”

“My buddy is going to be like, ‘Hey Frank, can I get seats for 12?’ He’s not going to bother calling, going through the system. But someone on vacation, what’s the first thing they’re going to look at? The website or Instagram.”

Frank knows the other side of that, too. One recent night he tried to call a restaurant down the road at 9:30 about seats for his own group. “You couldn’t get through. ‘Sorry, we’re closed.’ And that was it. So we didn’t know if we could get seating.” He wished for what his own guests have: “to be able to just go online and, okay, cool, boom, I got it secured. … That would have saved me from … being concerned about not getting a spot when we showed up.”

Now Frank captures that demand. The typical group gives about a week’s notice, and 26 groups this year booked more than a month ahead. Frank finds out at breakfast, not at 6:15 on a Friday.

Asked what he’d miss if it went away tomorrow:

“The automation piece of it. I’d have to do a lot more things manually.”

“I’d rather have this. It’s more professional looking when you have a system, versus an email.”

Guests notice too. “Instead of writing an email out, you click on a link and fill out a couple pieces of a form.” Guests who found the brewery on Google went straight from the Reserve button to Frank’s page 443 times this year.

The group organizer does the marketing

Behind every group request stands one person rounding up the others: a birthday, a team, a group of coworkers, a visiting family. Frank knows what that organizer is worth.

“That is money. … When it’s someone you know and they’re bringing their friends or guests, then you also want to make sure you do an extra touch on that table. But I think that friends of friends wind up being regulars more.”

Playing the friend who got invited along, he says it in one line: “I didn’t know about this place until Joe told me about it.”

At Celebration Brewing the loop runs in both directions. Often it starts with a regular.

“It starts out as a customer that’s a regular, and then they turn it into the group thing and they bring more people. … ‘Hey, do you guys do large parties?’ or ‘We want to do a baby shower,’ because we love the place so much.”

And the people they bring get their first look at the place.

“If they didn’t know about us, now they know about us based on that organizer of the party. And then yes, we’ve had some follow-up business, and [it] winds up becoming their place.”

Restaurants spend real money to get one new face through the door. An organizer brings fifteen at once, for free. Frank’s job is simply to make it easy for that organizer to say “we’re coming” and get a straight answer.

And these are big groups. Of the 131 requests that came through Frank’s page this year, 99 were for 10 or more guests, and those parties account for 2,026 of the 2,292 people who came through it. A party of 15 on a Wednesday fills a taproom that stays open to everyone else, and it leaves behind a dozen people who now know where the place is.

What Frank tells a friend who runs a brewery

“It’s a great platform where you can have your customers go online and book priority seating for your establishment. It’s flexible, where you can block out certain days and times. You can specify a number of folks that you’re looking for, and you can accept or decline based on availability.”

Frank Lozito, co-owner, Celebration Brewing Company

Frank judges a tool by results, and he didn’t start out convinced.

“I didn’t know who you were. And I didn’t know the product. I think using it and seeing it, trying it, and then the proof is in the pudding. It’s working, so I like it.”

Celebration Brewing still runs exactly the way Frank designed it. Now groups have an easy way to say they’re coming, and Frank has an easy way to welcome them.

About the numbers

• All figures cover January 1 to October 29, 2026, and come from EnRoute’s report for Celebration Brewing, which combines Google Analytics on the brewery’s EnRoute page with the EnRoute dashboard.

• “Group requests” are the 131 parties planned through the page: 100 priority seating requests from parties of 8 to 20 and 31 private event requests. Both sources count the same 131.

• Guest counts, group sizes and notice come from the dashboard, including the 99 parties of 10 or more guests (2,026 of the 2,292 guests). Requests “while the taproom was closed” are the 42 sent outside posted hours, counted by Google Analytics by the hour.

• Visits from Google’s Reserve button (443) are page visits, not requests.

• Frank’s quotes come from three conversations with EnRoute, in March, October and November 2026, lightly edited for length. This story makes no claim about the brewery’s sales.