OpenTable, the web-enabled restaurant management provider, has introduced a new mobile feature that lets users make restaurant reservations from their from their phone’s browser. The new site, which is available here, supports the 8,500 OpenTable restaurants scattered across the country.
To book a table, users specify the date and the restaurant they wish to dine in, and the site presents a list of available times. Alternatively, users can request to see all available listings for restaurants in the area – a feature that will be a lifesaver for those last-minute anniversary reservations. A quick run through the site on an iPhone worked well, allowing me to find an available restaurant and book a table in less than two minutes.
OpenTable offers restaurants a reservation management solution that allows prospective diners to reserve tables from the web. Since its launch in 1999, the site claims to have booked over 70 million diners across its 8,500 restaurants.
opentable owns their space. everyone loves it (biz owners) and users. this takes the cake.
There’s a few services like this out there. I have always thought it strange that restaurants don’t want to talk to their customers and use the internet instead – it is called the hospitality industry after all.
It can be an advantage for customers when openTable aggregates availability info. The best thing about openTable for me is that on a Saturday, I can ask it for all open tables in SF for that night. So I’m not wasting time calling restaurants to be told they have no table, like in the bad old days. I agree that if you have one restaurant in mind, and you book well ahead, the advantage is minimal.
Hey Jason, welcome to 2006…Open Table is older than Yelp… Open Table is pretty good, but it’s also pretty old…
Hey Isaac, you might notice that the post says they launched in 1999. This feature, however, is new.
I have to say … this is actually my favorite company on the web. When I’m hanging out in LA (or a new town) … I log into OpenTable and get my reservations (and choose the option to forward to others in your party). Valentines day … or they offer “Romantic Ideas”. You get points which are not wroth much right now – but way better than Virtual Currency for selling friends on social networks. Haven’t you noticed the POS (Point-of-Sale) at most restaurants have OpenTable software connected directly? What web company have brick-n-more, real-time knowledge of most restaurants – imagine the stats to corporations and marketers and “Service Industry Engagement/Metrics” and type their behavior on the web too.
Contact me – I’d love to discuss building Restful APIs for OpenSocial, MySpace, and other social networks! We can help for sure.
OpenTable, to me, has everything a biz model needs now and what I can envision for robust and increasing growth.
Hey Jason, “this feature” was 1 line in your 3 paragraph introduction to Tech Crunch Readers on Open Table…stop back pedaling, you wrote an intro piece on Open Table… just take the criticism and move on.
Given the headline or the article, I agree with Jason on this one.
*on* the article, sorry.
Jason,
I worked in bar tending and serving from 16 to like 22. The restaurant industry moves slow.
I could have only imagined trying to convince a restaurant conglomerate or even small boutique or hundreds to use the internet for a reservation medium. It probably took Restaurant A seeing Restaurant B actually increased nightly guest counts and happy customers. There was a tipping point.
Just my quick thoughts …
How about a USELESS mobile feature from OpenTable? It takes time to load the site from the iPhone… It takes forever to type stuff on the virtual keyword… and it doesn’t give me what I want!
Here’s an interesting tidbit of info found from the net. According to the National Restaurant Association, there are total of 945,000 restaurants/whatever you want to call it serving more than 70 billion meals and snack occasions. So… total of 8,000 restaurants supported by OpenTable compared to total of 945,000 restaurants in the US = 0.85%. Wow!!! What a selection to expect from OpenTable…
Alright… Let me share another opinion. If I needed to make a last minute anniversary reservation – It probably means a nice and/or a decent place. When selecting “The French Laundry” in San Francisco, it says “There are no reservations currently available for the day you have requested. The French Laundry maintains a waitlist via the phone only. They would be happy to add your name to the list. ”
PHONE ONLY? I could have saved the time and get the same info in 10 seconds… When looking into Nobu or Masa in NYC? It doesn’t even show up as an option?
You’ve got some more work to do or at least at lot of convincing to the remaining owners of the 937,000 restaurants!
How about adding a mobile feature that calls all those damn restaurants… ask a question and let them respond back to your query from the web/iphone/bb/what ever? Please go work on them!
@Katie
Obviously they have a long way to go before they get all of the restaurants on board. It’s still nice to be able to book something if you’re just looking to get a table somewhere and aren’t too picky.
@Isaac
No need to get nasty. I thank you for your thoughts and the creative logic behind them.
Computer in any business not just restaurant is useful. If you can be on top of your business line, why ignore using it? Internet can even boost your business sales productivity. They just have to find out how. Well, I am here and blogs are all around to help them. Mike, ah an expensive and busy dog. hehehe!
@ Katie – you just named 3 of the top 100 restaurants in the world – so talking about the french laundry (waiting list about 2 months now) is not even in the context of where opentable fits in. Pick any of the top 100 zagat rated san francisco restaurants, and then you have an argument and oh wait, they all use opentable…
Nobu. come on! really?
The fact is, on the ground, the tipping point has happened with opentable. The most expensive piece to this proposition for restaurants is the hardware. after that they are automating reservations and collecting data on those who submit online reservations. it also automates the reservation system for the rest from the books to the screen / computer / database + features online ie. advertising / minor seo / placement etc.
Every restaurant owner I talk to: thank God we have this – its great!
That’s the tipping point
(and, a lot of those million restaurants you quoted are low level, denny’esque, garbanzo bean, not ever gonna need a reservation system anyway type restaurants.)
I own a restaurant & opentable runs between $450-$700 per month depending on how many reservations are booked. Plus the customer information from the online system stays on the opentable system. We don’t own the information.
I like the sytem, but don’t thank God for it. I wish it was more affordable-but it is a great deal for the guests.
The information on the system IS the restaurants. It is available for you exclusively. It is ON the system, because that is where the database resides. Opentable does not make any use of the customer information from your database, only the customer information that comes via their web site. If you ever need your database downloaded, just make the request through support at 1-800-opentable! You are also able to run marketing campaigns using the manager console, tailoring searches, creating lists based on your own custom codes, dates, # of visits per meal period etc..The power is all yours to utilize, make the best of it, generate some revenue, for free!
I’ve been a fan of OpenTable for quite some time now, and even though not all of the restaurants that I would like to visit in NYC are on their database, its still a cool way of checking out others.
Having a way to do it via mobile of course is a plus. I can book my reservations for Tao while on the train en-route!!
I guess to appreciate the mobile service depends on what type of mobile user a person is. Then again the process is quicker if your restaurant is already listed.
@katie
Your numbers are off. (or I would like to see the data) You can’t count every single restaurant in the US for that as it is not the demo for Opentable. From my numbers there are about 100,000 restaurants in the US that are _bookable_ which is the key to this measurement.
if the restaurant is not bookable then there is no point of it being on Opentable. 8000 restaurants out of 100k is quite good considering there is almost no competition in the US. But considering that the world is _a bit_ bigger than just the US
, there are a couple of competitors rising in Europe such as Livebookings, TopTable, and Tablefinder (my company).
OpenTable has a clear and very good business model, but I think that they are not as forward thinking as they could be. I’m just glad that they haven’t realized their potential yet.
On the other hand, their business model of having a physical machine at each restaurant makes their sales process relatively slow, and is very expensive which holds back their growth.
Are they going public yet?
after 9 years, $54M, and they have 8,000 restaurant to participate? good luck getting your money back on this one VCs. I tried a similar concept in college, making the site was the easy part, getting in front of the restaurant owners is a whole different story, most of them didn’t even speak english or had a computer.
i love opentable, but the mobile version is missing something. there doesn’t seem to be a way to login with my existing account.
bbebop: if u simply provide the email to your existing account the reso goes to that account.
is OpenTable working on an IPO?
I have come across a number of publications (Abstracts) that are useful for these types of restaurant web-applications. Here is the abstract of one, which might be a useful reference to software developers in this domain. Perhaps this is the type of software capability that Katie wants.
Abstract:
———–
Utilizing Global Positioning System (GPS) technology, it is possible to find and recommend restaurants for users operating mobile devices. For recommending restaurants, Personal Digital Assistants or cellular phones only consider the location of restaurants. However, a user’s background and environment information is assumed to be directly related to recommendation quality. In this paper, therefore, a recommender system using context information and a decision tree model for efficient recommendation is presented. This system considers location context, personal context, environment context, and user preference. Restaurant lists are obtained from location context, personal context, and environment context using the decision tree model. In addition, a weight value is used for reflecting user preferences. Finally, the system recommends appropriate restaurants to the mobile user. For this experiment, performance was verified using measurements such as k-fold cross-validation and Mean Absolute Error. As a result, the proposed system obtained an improvement in recommendation performance.
The full paper , A Personalized Restaurant Recommender Agent for Mobile E-Service can be purchased online from the publishers website or otherwise get into your local University library and photocopy the article from there for free. It was published in the , Database and Expert Systems Applications journal from (Lecture Notes in Computer Science) book series.
Here is another one:
Abstract:
———–
A recommender agent in mobile environments should be context-aware to assist users while the users are moving. Many different kinds of contexts can be used by a recommender agent, such as weather, route conditions, time and location, etc. In this paper, we demonstrate a prototype design of a software agent that recommends travel-related information according to contexts of the user in mobile environment. The recommendation procedure includes the dialogue between the user and the agent for modifying constraints given to the agent. We illustrate with a scenario of recommending a restaurant to a tourist in Taipei city by interacting with a personalized agent in a mobile device.
The full paper : A Personalized Restaurant Recommender Agent for Mobile E-Service can also purchased online or just photocopy from your local University library from the , Proceedings of the 2004 IEEE International Conference on e-Technology, e-Commerce and e-Service journal.
Oops, I pasted a wrong title for reference in @18 . The correct title for that paper is :
Location-Based Service with Context Data for a Restaurant Recommendation
The algorithms used in this paper are readily available in the most popular open source Java data-mining/machine learning project on the planet from here in New Zealand developed at Waikato University called WEKA, so developers who are reading this thread who might be interested to develop similar restaurant web-apps can check out WEKA.
I forgot to mention the autonomous software agent system that is also needed for restaurant web-apps recommendation. JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Environment) is an open source software agent API developed in Java and it is very popular can be used for any restaurant web-apps recommendation development as described in those 2 publications I have cited in my previous messages. JADE has a 3rd party extensions and a very active user group (mailing list discussion). JADE team had written a book on JADE (which is a good start for developers who have no background in software agent system). JADE is also a multi-agent system, ie, you can develop an app which have many software agents communicating with each other autonomously & collaboratively in order to complete a certain task.
I forgot to mention the autonomous software agent system that is also needed for restaurant webapp recommendation. JADE (Java Agent DEvelopment Environment) is an open source software agent API developed in Java and it is very popular can be used for any restaurant web-apps recommendation development as described in those 2 publications I have cited in my previous messages. JADE has a 3rd party extensions and a very active user group (mailing list discussion). JADE team had written a book on JADE (which is a good start for developers who have no background in software agent system). JADE is also a multi-agent system, ie, you can develop an app which have many software agents communicating with each other autonomously & collaboratively in order to complete a certain task.
@Anders Fredriksson Thanks for listing the European sites. I was just about to bemoan the fact that OpenTable is US only.
One of my favorite websites. As someone who travels frequently, I like being able to discover new restaurants and make reservations easily. I think there’s untapped potential here for Foodies – comments, networking, etc. but I applaud OT for focusing on doing one thing really well before exploring other opportunities.
Isaac why don’t you go troll another site. Nice article Jason.
Z
@Anders, nice to see you in on the comments!
sounds pretty nice. I really like their business approach, Once a restaurant is using their system, they will have a hard time leaving for the competition (if competition ever comes!).
Book restaurants with OpenTable also from iGoogle or Netvibes widget by TripTouch:
http://www.trip...uch.com/widgets
I just added mobile.opentable.com to the home screen of my iPhone and was surprised to see that there wasn’t a WebClip Bookmark Icon. It amazes me when little details like that fall between the cracks…but the app look spretty good nonetheless.
@Jason – For what it’s worth I appreciated you reporting this new feature here on TechCrunch.
That a nifty little site, I wish I would have known of it for some time now I would have been using it. I sure will be now.
Jason — This feature came out 3 weeks ago. Dude, you got scooped by Better Homes & Gardens on this one…FAIL!
Is opentable have any API? to do reservation through our site..
Not that this is a comparison, but here’s a nice site that has some interesting features http://www.menusnearu.com . granted it looks like they need to get a lot more restaruants to put their menu online, but it’s fast and easy to use. The flyer I just got said they are also releasing online reservations soon….look out open table.
It won’t be something I will be looking at for years down the road (or using at the prices it costs for restaurants) but eventually, maybe.
Hopefully by then the prices will drop and the new ‘additions’ to service will be a cheaper per-month lease/rental system.
They still have a ways to go company wise before I would invest. But good luck to them, they do have brand name recognition — at least from my restaurant/catering background I have heard people talk about their ‘open-table’ systems.
Like everything else, if they get the kinks worked out the MOBILE idea is a good one.
Seems weird this being on TechCrunch, do you have any posts on new POS systems for restaurants?
That is a review I would be interested in!
GuestBridge is a competitor of OpenTable.
http://www.guestbridge.com