Instagram just announced it will enable in-app restaurant reservations thanks to a new partnership with reservation platform Quandoo. That means you can now search for a restaurant and book it just by hitting a button and without ever leaving the Instagram environment.
Quandoo is currently in 12 different countries across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Users can search 17,000-plus restaurants on the Quandoo website or mobile app, and quickly book a table reservation.
But it’s the restaurants themselves that stand to reap a lot of benefit from using a service like Quandoo, which can function as a reservations-management system and marketing services platform rolled into one. Those marketing services include everything from custom websites that integrate with the Quandoo reservations platform to newsletter placement to social media strategies. Restaurants can choose from different pay-per-month plans that range in price and the number of services. Ultimately, Quandoo helps restaurants handle more bookings per table and therefore generate more revenue.
The deal means restaurants have an even larger potential audience and/or customer base, as well as a means to make businesses more searchable and shareable. Facebook may still be the top social network, but Instagram, alongside WhatsApp, is inching closer (Facebook owns both companies). Plus, Instagram’s been dabbling in the restaurant biz a few years now, getting involved with everything from pay-by-picture concepts, where users get a meal in exchange for uploading and tagging a photo, to helping change cocktail culture by demystifying the concept of mixology.
Quandoo is not available in the U.S., but similar strategies are nonetheless at work—Instagram already has partnerships with Grubhub, Resy, and OpenTable.
Given that food has always been a popular topic to document on Instagram, it makes sense the company is playing an increasingly bigger role in the restaurant industry and will keep doing so in the future, for reservations or otherwise.
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