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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

dining room

OpenTable Launches New Tools to Discourage Diners From ‘Ghosting’ on Their Reservations

OpenTable today launched its Show-Up for Restaurants initiative, which highlights the impact of no-shows and late cancellations on restaurants’ margins. The initiative will take the form of forthcoming new digital tools as well as “blog and social content educating diners on the impact of ghosting a reservation.”

In most places in the U.S., dining at restaurants is back in full swing. Yelp, for example, recorded its highest totals ever this past May for consumers using the app to dine out. Across the country, foot traffic is up by nearly 50 percent since the start of the year.

While most of that is good news for restaurants, the re-emergence of dining rooms also means the return of the no-show — when customers book a reservation then simply skip out on it without calling the restaurant to cancel. OpenTable’s own recent survey data found that 28 percent of of Americans haven’t shown up for a reservation in the last year. The company says that in certain cases, as few as six no-shows can affect profits at a small restaurant.

To help restaurants better control the situation, OpenTable will launch a tool this summer that will let restaurants label a customer as a potential no-show based on that person’s past reservation history. The restaurant can then “be proactive” about confirming the reservation with that diner via other tools the company offers, including emails, alerts, and credit card-required reservations. A “four strikes and you’re out” policy suspends diners that don’t show up for a reservation four times.

OpenTable says it will also use various forms of content to further educate diners on the negative impacts of no-shows. Presumably that also means highlighting the company’s own digital tools that make it fairly painless for the user to modify or cancel a reservation within the app.  

Bbot Raises $4M for Its Contactless Dining Room Tech

Restaurant tech startup Bbot announced today it has closed a $4 million seed extension funding round, bringing its total funding to $7.3 million. The seed extension round was led by Rally Ventures with participation from existing investor Craft Ventures, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. 

The round follows Bbot’s $3 million fundraise from July 2020. The new funding will go towards hiring new talent and accelerating product development. Currently, Bbot makes a mobile order and payments platform restaurants can use to promote more “contactless” experiences in the dining room.

Of course, “contactless” was arguably the buzzword in the restaurant biz in 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic pushed eating establishments all over the world to promote more social distancing for in-restaurant experiences. Bbot uses a common method, providing restaurant-goers with a QR code they can scan to browse a menu and order and pay for food. The Bbot system integrates directly into a restaurant’s existing tech setup. 

In today’s press release, the company said it plans to introduce a new feature in 2021 that “reinvents the traditional bar tab” by allowing customers and bartenders joint access to it. Bbot will also release its own API that will let hospitality businesses “build on the Bbot infrastructure,” though more specifics were not provided.

The release (and subsequent success) of the bar tab feature may hinge partly on the direction of the pandemic, since bars specifically remain shuttered in many places. For the restaurant/bar/hospitality sector in general, there is a lot of competition afoot at the moment, since pretty much every front-of-house focused restaurant tech company released some version of a contactless order/pay system over the last year. Activity in this space has plateued slightly after the initial rush to go contactless. However, as a COVID-19 vaccine becomes more widespread and dining room restrictions relaxed, we expect competition to fire up once more.