Restaurant management platform Sevenrooms announced today it has integrated its waitlist feature with Google’s reservation tool, Reserve With Google. Sevenrooms has also integrated its waitlist Google Search, Maps, and Assistant, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.
The Reserve With Google integration means guests can add themselves to a restaurant’s waitlist digitally, while they are still at home, and receive real-time estimates and updates on their wait time.
Guests are notified via text message when they are close to the top of the waitlist and can then check in virtually when they arrive at the restaurants. Remember the pre-digital process where the restaurant called your name over a loudspeaker then crossed it off a piece of paper when you arrived at the host station? The Sevenrooms-Google integration is basically a digital version of that.
It also comes at a time when most dining rooms are still operating at reduced capacity and restaurants that might not have previously used reservations now require them. This is in part to manage that reduced capacity, but it’s also a way to keep waiting areas less crowded and customers more socially distanced.
For Google, the Sevenrooms partnership is just the latest step in the search giant’s march into the restaurant industry. In August, Google announced a partnership with Panera that lets guests order and pickup meals directly via Search, Maps, and Assistant. Last year, it partnered with delivery integrator Olo to offer more pickup and delivery through Google features and added several new innovations around restaurant menus.
Sevenrooms, meanwhile, has expanded its own arsenal of features in recent months to include contactless ordering and payments and a direct delivery tool that lets restaurants (partly) bypass third-party services like Grubhub and DoorDash. The company raised $50 million in Series B funding in June of this year.
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