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The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

guest management

OpenTable Adds Platform Enhancements, Waives Some Pricing to Attract New Restaurant Customers

Restaurant guest management platform OpenTable today announced two new initiatives aimed at the restaurant reopenings that are slowly starting to happen across some U.S. states. In a news post, the company outlined a few new enhancements to its platform it says will help restaurants manage new capacity regulations and make it easier for businesses to take reservations. 

Whether they open now or at some later date, restaurants across the U.S. will have to contend with new social distancing guidelines, some mandated by state governments and others provided by groups like The National Restaurant Association. For example, one of the guidelines recently released by The Association states that restaurants should “update floor plans for common dining areas, redesigning seating arrangements to ensure at least six feet of separation between table setups.” Smaller party sizes and reservations-only businesses are also recommended.

Those guidelines are great for social distancing, but for restaurants used to operating at full capacity and without restrictions around large groups, they could prove operationally challenging. Think of your standard TGI Fridays-like setting where restaurants try to fill as many tables as possible during a busy dinner rush while guests cram into the entryway to wait. Eradicating the packed waiting area scenario as well as managing the flow of guests more precisely will require restaurants to somewhat overhaul their existing operations.

OpenTable says its platform enhancements are designed to help with such issues. While the company blog post didn’t go too deeply into specifics, it noted that restaurants can quickly pivot to offering reservations and managing guest capacity and table spacing more precisely.

At its core, OpenTable is a reservations platform, which means its main business — letting guests book tables in restaurant dining rooms — has been rendered pretty irrelevant during dining room shutdowns. Today’s announcement seems a bid to reassert that relevance, and as some restaurants may have to start taking reservations for the first time in their histories, OpenTable’s tech might prove useful.

To that end, the company also announced the Open Door pricing program, which waives subscription fees for new customers through the end of 2020 and covers fees through the end of September. New customers will also get access to a 50 percent discount on cover fees from the end of September through the remainder of 2020.

OpenTable is yet-another restaurant tech company fighting to prove its worth during the industry’s current upheaval. Most restaurants, including big chains, are just trying to keep the doors open right now. As businesses slowly reopen, the tech solutions they choose to spend money on will be based how much value they bring to a restaurant’s overall operations, whether that’s making tasks more efficient or assisting with social distancing measures. Whether reservations software is something businesses flock to will depend a lot on how much consumers will want to go out to eat as we start inching our way out of this pandemic.

Paytronix Raises $10M for Its Restaurant Guest Management Platform

Restaurant guest management platform Paytronix Systems announced today it had raised a $10 million round of fresh funding. The round was led by Great Hill Partners and Paytronix cofounders Matt d’Arbeloff and Andrew Robbins, according to a press release sent to The Spoon. This brings Paytronix’ total funding to $75 million.

The company said the funding is “designed to ensure that Paytronix is on sound financial footing and will continue to provide its restaurant, convenience-store, grocery, and retail clients with the communications tools necessary during this unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic.” 

The Paytronix platform offers a number of different solutions restaurants can add to their tech stacks, including loyalty program capabilities, custom mobile apps, messaging, and data analytics. Its software integrates with most of the major POS systems, and the company counts California Pizza Kitchen, Bloomin’ Brands, and restaurant group Lettuce Entertain You among its clients. 

Many of those brands, not to mention independent restaurants, are feeling the strain imposed by COVID-19 and the accompanying dining room shutdowns. And while we’ve called into question the value of certain restaurant tech solutions at a time when businesses need to cut back to necessary tools only, what we can count on is that some tech will be necessary for restaurants to both survive the pandemic and function once the world settles into its new normal.

Paytronix — whose website actually reads “slim down your tech stack — recently released a number of features that seem geared towards that particular approach to restaurant tech. The company now offers an online ordering platform that integrates with both POS systems and third-party delivery platforms. Even more important in these pandemic times, restaurants can now set up touchless payments through Google Wallet and Apple Pay integrations. 

Contactless payments, in particular, will be an important technology for restaurants of all sizes going forward. Bo Peabody, who sits on the task force that created the reopening guidelines for the state of Georgia’s restaurants, recently told me that it’s one of the most important pieces of tech a restaurant should consider right now. He went as far as to say that by the end of next year, “putting your credit card down will be a thing of the past.”  

Whether or not that will actually happen, we’re likely going to see many more guidelines around restaurant reopenings for the rest of the year, some of them focused on the most useful technology businesses can implement in this weird, uncertain time. Patyronix, with this new round, looks to be positioning itself as close to the center of that usefulness as it can get.