Restaurant review sites have long been plagued by polarized opinions - most of the people that take the time to write something have either loved a place or hated it. These sites also have to deal with reviewers who share their opinions, regardless of if they’ve ever visited the restaurant in question. Today OpenTable, the web-enabled restaurant reservation manager, has introduced a new set of restaurant rankings that they hope will skirt most of these issues.
The new rankings, called “Diners’ Choice”, are based off of surveys that OpenTable distributes through email to recent diners. OpenTable says that visitors to their site tend to take a certain amount of pride in food, which will motivate them to complete the reviews, even when they might not feel particularly strongly about a restaurant.
While this assertion is debatable, OpenTable does offer something that is unique to the review space: confirmation that every review came from someone who actually dined at the restaurant. This is made possible by OpenTable’s unique reservation system, which can monitor which patrons have actually been seated.
Unfortunately, OpenTable is currently only displaying the results of these reviews as ranked lists - there is no way to see what each individual reviewer had to say (only the restaurants themselves receive this data). This is surprising given the site’s purportedly increased accuracy, and it may lead many readers to turn to more thorough review sites like Yelp instead.
It’s about time a company provides trustworthly restaurant reviews I tired of waiting for magazines from my city.
Trustworthy reviews are great but not being able to read what the patrons had to say is a bummer. Absolute ranking is absolutely relative.
Peter
Follow me @ http://twitter.com/peterurban
I knew something was up a few weeks ago when they started sending emails about the restaurants the day after the reservation.
Yelp has too much paid review, but i dunno if they are fake though.
I’m amazed at how many people care so much about food, that there’s room for so many restaurant rating websites.
The restaurant business is very competitive. Bad places go out of business quickly.
Are these sites proving a valuable source of information?
I eat to live, I don’t live to eat….. obviously many people feel differently.
Yes, it is valuable information when you are paying restaurant prices for food.
This could be very damaging for yelp and other sites that send traffic to Opentable. They should stop sending traffic to them and cut all their links. OT makes a lot of their revenues from these deals and looks like they are going after that market.
Tablefinder.com has had this feature since launch. But there you can see both reviews from people that cannot be guaranteed as diners and also the reviews with a Tablefinder Quality Assurance stamp.
The problem is that there are not that many reviews so far. But keep them coming.
//Anders (CEO at Tablefinder)
this will alienate opentable restaurants.
I’ve always wanted a mashup of yelp + opentable, however for OpenTable to let people review the very restaurants they are selling rez/RM systems to is very dangerous.
This is useful for the fancy Friday night out restaurant, but what about the great little hole in the wall cuban place that will never take reservations and will never ger reviewed (along with thousands of other places in a city)?
I speculate that the reason for not making reviews public is that it could potentially hurt thier cheif revenue source, which is selling reservation, table management and guest management software for restaurants. By the nature of reviews and the number or restaurants, most reviews would naturally fall short of 5 stars or “Amazing!”. It would be a tough to sell a restaurant on back-end software to manage diner flow while also providing a venue for diners to say negative things about the restaurant.
The guarantee is interesting when compared to menupages and citysearch. However, against Yelp, the new OT is less compelling. The credibility of each user in the community is a verification mechanism, as is the number of reviewers for a restaurant.
This actually gives more credibility to reviews which can still be fake. Most fake reviews that aren’t for humor value alone will come from the restaurant itself or from its competitors. These parties can easily send in stooges to eat somewhere as it will only cost a few hundred dollars of meals to thoroughly wreck a competitor’s reputation.
7, 9 and 13 you make good points . 7, 9 This is why every company cant just add features that seem obvious ..
13, you are right - Its easy to flaw the system .
Basically Opentable has no business with reviews . Just stick to selling the reservation systems . You are not going to make more money by adding reviews … Are you going to lie when one of the restaurants that you make $1000 from every month has a series of low survey scores or will you be honest and cost the restaurant customers thereby ultimately hurting your self when they fire you .
zagats provides the best reviews…
reading reviews on yelp is akin to reading the crap written on a bathroom stall…
13 and 14 - spot on. Whilst you’d hope a crappy business would want to improve anyway they certainly wouldn’t want it further damaged by bad reviews from the same site that might be keeping their reservations alive. And, yes, there’s nothing to stop people booking into their own, or other restaurants and posting reviews (good or bad).
What they could have done was take some aggregate scores and feedback from the multitude of review sites out there. Keep the booking and reviewing separate. We do a similar thing with sites such as urbanspoon etc, and they carry some of our content too. I’d think that with data from multiple sources there’s more chance of seeing a truer picture. YMMV etc …
Speaking of OpenTable, they’re officially mobile through the GetMobio Lifestyle Portal (along with a bunch of other apps - Twitter, Kaboodle, CheapGas, Movies, Recipes, etc). http://www.GetMobio.com to try it out
By the way, ratings from OpenTable can’t hurt. People who really want a fair/comprehensive review of a restaurant will probably check multiple sites anyway.
This is a fun story but not technically accurate - OpenTable are not unique as an online booking system or as a review site. toptable has been publishing user reviews for years and almost all of them are genuine.
We have always emailed diners and invited them to review or rate their experience at a restaurant. If a venue is bookable online, then only diners who booked via toptable can review. We also have a reputation system in place indicated how trustworthy a diner’s review is based on their previous ratings.
Within the next few weeks we will have over 450,000 reviews published on the site.
See an example venue…
http://www.toptable.com/venues.....s/?id=1313
ps. We do have a few venues which are not bookable online and those are open to anyone for reviewing, however these represent less than 1% of our total reviews database…