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OpenTable

June 17, 2021

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.  

April 11, 2021

Restaurants’ Breakup With Single-Use Plastics Has Begun

This is the web version of our weekly Spoon newsletter. Subscribe now to get the latest food tech news delivered direct to your inbox.

From monstrous portions to excess packaging, restaurants have a super-sized waste problem on their hands right now, and single-use plastics are a major contributor to the issue.

But as I wrote a few newsletters ago, the most effective way to combat this is not necessarily by expecting every restaurant out there to develop its own sustainability strategy. Many restaurants are right now just trying to survive the fallout from the last year. Instead, the fight against food waste, the fight against plastic waste has to include businesses, innovators, activists, and lawmakers alike.

We took a step in that direction this week when fast-casual chain Just Salad released a sign-on letter for restaurants and food/bev businesses to show their support for the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act (BFFPPA) 2021, recently introduced legislation aimed to curbing our reliance on single-use plastics. 

BFFPPA 2021, which builds on an earlier version of the bill, calls for reduction of plastic production at the source, greater focus on reusable packaging and containers, and more protections for communities of color, low-income communities, and indigenous communities, which are disproportionately impacted by plastic pollution.

“The plastic pollution problem gets worse with each passing day,” Judith Enck, a former EPA Administrator and the President of Beyond Plastics, said in an email to The Spoon. “The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act is the most comprehensive and sweeping Congressional bill that addresses this problem.”

BFFPPA 2021 addresses all plastics. To drive the point home for restaurants, Just Salad introduced its own sign-on letter, which is a call-to-action for restaurants of all sizes to support the BFFPPA 2021.

Because of costs, operational challenges, and differing regulations from state to state, getting rid of single-use plastic is an expensive, time-consuming prospect for many restaurants. As a result, the restaurant biz generates about 78 percent of all disposable packaging. Case in point: plastic cutlery. The United States uses more than 36 billion disposable utensils per year, which is enough to wrap the globe 139 times. Don’t please get me started on plastic-lined disposable cups.

Just Salad’s letter outlines how BFFPPA 2021 could help. To name just a few benefits listed in the letter: 

  • More and better reusable programs, such as those currently in operation from Loop, DeliverZero, and, of course, Just Salad
  • Fewer single-use plastics, which are a major problem in the restaurant industry because of to-go boxes, bags, and cutlery
  • More standardized recycling and composting across states

“The BFFPPA would accelerate our respective companies’ efforts to reduce the waste and carbon footprint of our industry and create dining experiences that are healthy for people and planet. Supported by this legislation, our sustainability efforts would have a much larger impact,” the letter says.

Enck, in her email to The Spoon, expressed equal enthusiasm for the bill’s potential impact on restaurants: “Restaurants don’t want to contribute to the plastic pollution problem. When it is adopted into a law, this bill will eliminate some of the worst plastic products and boost alternatives to plastics.”

Just Salad is in the process of collecting public support for BFFPPA 2021. Restaurants, foodservice organizations, and food and beverage companies can show theirs by signing the letter. 

Speaking to The Spoon recently, Just Salad’s Chief Sustainability Officer Sandra Noonan pointed out that our efforts will “remain fragmented” until a national policy puts regulations around things like single-use plastic cutlery and does more to enable reusable containers, the circular economy, and waste management infrastructure. BFFPPA 2021 seeks to end that fragmentation, and with it, our longstanding reliance on the concept of single-use plastic.

More Headlines

Slice, a restaurant tech company that recently launched a POS system for pizzerias, announced it is also launching a loyalty program for pizza-loving restaurant customers. Slice Rewards will give users pizza points for every pie they order at a participating restaurant. 

Restaurant reservations platform Opentable has opened a brick-and-mortar restaurant it says will serve as a kind of innovation testing ground for the company’s technology. Dubbed Layla, the restaurant is now open for business at Kayak Miami Beach.

Churchill Downs Racetrack has released its official menus for 147th Kentucky Derby. This year, it includes online components, including a virtual cooking class with Churchill Downs Executive Chef David Danielson. 

April 6, 2021

OpenTable: 91 Percent of Consumers Want Off-Premises Meals After the Pandemic

Ninety-one percent of consumers surveyed by OpenTable and the James Beard Foundation said they would like restaurants to offer takeout and delivery options even after the pandemic subsides. 

The figure is from new survey data OpenTable and James Beard recently released that features responses from over 21,000 diners and almost 300 restaurant industry professionals in the U.S. and Canada. 

Other findings in the survey indicate that restaurants are willing to meet that consumer demand. Of the restaurant respondents, 76 percent said they want to continue offering off-premises meal formats like delivery and takeaway after the pandemic. 

Another 86 percent of consumers said they were “willing or somewhat willing” to order more takeout in order to support off-premises initiatives at restaurants. OpenTable noted in its blog post that, “Tangible support is meaningful, restaurateurs say: Restaurants can’t keep these programs alive without it, because they’re expensive and time-consuming to implement and maintain.”

While 91 percent is a big number, it’s not terribly jaw-dropping news in the sense that we’ve seen this shift happening for more than a year. Long before COVID-19, the National Restaurant Association predicted that the bulk of restaurant sales would come from off-premises formats by 2030. The pandemic just accelerated that timeline.

The survey data comes at the same time OpenTable has released new features to aid in the restaurant reopening process currently happening throughout the U.S. The new releases include a bundle of consumer-facing tools as well as a new hub for restaurant owners/operators, according to an email sent to The Spoon.

The consumer-facing “Back to the Table” hub includes what OpenTable is calling a “Reopening Heat Map.” Said map is a state-by-state rundown of restaurants’ reopening statuses and any restrictions. The Back to the Table hub also offers customers includes a tool that will let customers find local restaurants according to meal format (dine-in, delivery, takeout, etc.). 

For restaurants, the new At Your Service feature will launch on Thursday, April 7, and include controls for restaurants to manage capacity, access guest feedback, and tips on reopening businesses.

May 17, 2020

Fee Caps Can’t Save Restaurants

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I was going to use this newsletter to write about pandemic profiteering and the report that Uber wants to buy Grubhub. Then this gem of a dire headline hit: one in every four restaurants will go out of business because of coronavirus quarantines.

So says a new forecast by OpenTable, which Bloomberg reported on this week. According to OpenTable, total reservations and walk-in customers from its network (which has over 54,000 restaurants) were down 95 percent on May 13 from the same day one year ago.

That number shouldn’t surprise too much, seeing as most states have been on lockdown for the last six weeks. But according to the company’s data, even in states where restaurants are slowly reopening (at reduced capacity, of course), numbers are “still far below where they were last year.” Consider Scottsdale, AZ, which had no reservations from March 21 but saw that number change to -72 percent for May 13. Houston, TX was next, recording a -82 percent change. Other cities in Texas and Arizona, as well as those in Florida and a few other southern states saw some uptick in reservations, too. 

As much as I’d like to put an optimistic spin on this, I can’t. There are too many elements out there that make the idea of one quarter of American restaurants going under totally plausible.

For one thing, restaurants are not doing nearly as much business right now, and some none at all. Even those that have transitioned to off-premises formats struggle with the operational aspects of the model, and more and more restauranteurs say that delivery doesn’t make them any money. Full-service restaurants specializing in haute cuisine are even worse off because their food isn’t meant to be eaten out of a to-go box.

As OpenTable data shows, restaurants are slowly reopening. But those same numbers also clearly tell us restaurant traffic isn’t bouncing back to pre-pandemic rates. They can’t. States have mandated businesses operate at reduced capacity, as low as 25 percent in some cases. Diners are wary of going out to eat right now, which further reduces foot traffic. And while some states say their restaurants will be operating at full capacity by July, we’re simultaneously getting warnings of a second wave of coronavirus that could lock us all down again.

The bitter pill from all this is that we’re going to lose a lot of local restaurants. There is no way to sugar-coat that. Now we have to figure out what we can do to save at least some of them. That’s going to take a combination of government assistance, charitable donations, technological innovation, and a rethinking of what the restaurant experience means. It’s a tall order — and one we have to accept as we continue the fight to save restaurants.

More Regulation Comes for Third-Party Delivery Caps

Fee caps — another hot-button topic in the restaurant biz — got their fair share of news this week as well. New York City, which has considered placing limits on the commission fees Grubhub et. al charge restaurants for a while, finally voted to cap those fees at 20 percent while NYC is in a state of emergency.

The original bill, which was debated at a recent public hearing, had fees capped at 10 percent. The bill was modified over fears that delivery services would offset the revenue lost from fee caps by lowering workers wages. 

At the same time, Chicago’s 5 percent cap got an upgrade this week when Mayor Lori Lightfoot imposed additional rules over transparency around commission fees. Third-party delivery companies like Grubhub will now have to provide itemized recipes of all the charges involved in each transaction, including the cost of the meal, service fees, delivery fees, and, yep, commission fees.

Right now, the average consumer doesn’t necessarily understand where their money goes when they purchase food via a third-party delivery app. They may not know, for example, that there’s a difference between a tax and a service fee. Many certainly don’t know that third-party services charge up to 30 percent per transaction in commission fees for the restaurant.

Chicago’s new rules seem aimed at making consumers more aware of this. Of course the question is, will knowing that Grubhub is gutting your favorite restaurant keep you from conveniently using the Grubhub app to order?

I doubt it — for now. what needs to happen simultaneous to these rules and regulations is this: restaurants need simpler, faster ways to offer convenient off-premises options through their own digital properties. Due to time and cost, independent restaurants are unlikely to have the resources to go DIY when it comes to food delivery. Restaurant-tech companies are responding, and a number of different solutions exist that claim to reduce or eliminate fee caps. As of now, though, it’s hard to tell which tools actually deliver on that promise. 

One thing that may come out of the pandemic will be a more standardized set of tools for native food delivery. A restaurant could work with a single third-party tech company that would provide them with the infrastructure to create and manage a mobile app, from updating menus to processing orders. Restaurants would still need to pay someone to actually deliver the food, which is a huge cost in and of itself. In that case, third-party delivery services would still be relevant, and restaurants would still owe some commission fees, though not nearly as much.

Only with a solid platform for native delivery will restaurants be able to convince consumers to drop the third-party apps and order direct. If this happens, maybe someday we won’t need to rely on government regulation to give restaurants a fair playing field.

Dive Bar, Meet Your New Reservations System

In a lot of states, bars didn’t make the cut when it comes to foodservice businesses allowed to reopen. It’s not hard to see why, since they tend to be dark, crowded rooms in which strangers mingle, often in a shoulder-to-shoulder capacity. On a busy night, there might also be scores of used glasses lying around. None of that exactly instills confidence in would-be customers emerging from a pandemic.

To combat that, bars, when they do open again, will have to stick to the same reduced capacity guidelines restaurants do, and in some cases may even have to start accepting reservations.   

OpenTable clearly anticipated that development, as the company just announced it has added bars and wineries to its platform. Once “drink-focused destinations” open again, customers will be able to book a table at their favorite watering hole, join a virtual waitlist, and, at participating wineries, prepay for tasting menus. A couple famous spots — the Flatiron Room in NYC and The Roosevelt Room in Austin, TX, have already signed up with the platform in preparation for reopening. 

To be honest, it’s not hard to picture spots like those two taking reservations. They’re upscale — dare I say chic — spots you would hit for a classy night on the town. In other words, they are not your average dive bar. It’s the latter category that’s going to struggle more when bars are finally allowed to reopen. Your average bar sells $6 beer-and-shot specials, not $80 bottles of wine that could help make up for reduced capacity. Reservations will certainly help with social distancing efforts, but for bars that specialize in selling huge quantities of small-ticket items, they may not make a difference in terms of keeping a lot of places in business. 

The larger question is, How will the pandemic change bar culture in general? Once bars are allowed to turn the lights back on, your average Friday night out could look a whole lot different.

May 4, 2020

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.

March 14, 2020

This One Graph Shows How Bad Things Are For Restaurants Because of Coronavirus

If pictures tell a story, the one below is not a pretty one for restaurants:

The chart, which I created using data from OpenTable, shows the percentage difference year over year on each day for diners from February 18th all the way through yesterday, March 13th. OpenTable has data available for each state (you can check your own state here), but for this chart I included those areas most impacted by Coronavirus as well as Florida, which seems to be emerging as a hotspot. I’ve also included the data for the total of the United States.

What does it show? That restaurant traffic went from what looked like decent growth in places like Washington state just a month ago to simply dropping off a cliff. Data for yesterday, March 13th, showed Washington state restaurant traffic was down by 53%. New York, also grappling with an outbreak, traffic was down 54%.

While traffic hadn’t dropped to the same extent in California or Florida, it’s trending that way, and the United States as a whole has seen traffic drop by 36%.

What’s struck me is the velocity of the decline. Last week total US traffic at restaurants was down 8% compared to the previous year. Just a week later, the drop was over four times that.

Looking beyond the US, the picture doesn’t get any better. Below is a chart showing how coronavirus is hitting countries like Mexico, Germany and Ireland.

Interestingly, Ireland’s restaurant industry saw the biggest overall drop this past week, with its restaurant traffic down by 54% as of yesterday, compared with just 13% a week prior.

COVID-19’s impact on the restaurant industry is expected to only get worse in coming days. We’ve seen some of the industry’s biggest and most successful names already grappling with this change and having to furlough or lay people off. Because of this, we’re looking to highlight some of those companies stepping up to help. If your company is offering resources or discounts to help restaurants impacted by coronavirus, drop us a line at tips@thespoon.tech.

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October 4, 2019

The Week in Restaurants: Papa John’s Hearts Food Delivery Apps, OpenTable Expands Delivery Options

We’re neck-deep in final preparations for The Spoon’s Smart Kitchen Summit, which kicks off Monday morning in Seattle. (There’s still time to snag a ticket, btw.) But news doesn’t stop just because we’re throwing a fab event, and for the restaurant industry, it was business as usual this week. Before I hop on a plane and head west, here are a few more pieces of restaurant-tech news from the last few days.

Papa John’s Publicly ‘Embraces’ Third-Party Delivery Apps
Still coming back from controversy that rocked its bottom line, Papa John’s made its stance on third-party deliver clear to the public this week when new CEO Rob Lynch told CNBC that third-party food delivery apps are “an opportunity” for the company, not a threat. This is a direct contrast to Big Pizza rival Domino’s, who staunchly keeps all delivery operations in house. Lynch, on the other hand, says his company continues to meet with multiple third-party delivery services (Papa John’s signed on with DoorDash in March). These apps, he said, have “an impact on our industry, an impact on business. But we believe that’s because we haven’t worked strategically with them.”


Free News Courtesy of Starbucks
As of September, Starbucks quit selling paper copies of national newspapers, which means no more scanning the nearby print copy of NY Times while you wait for your latte. But you can still do it digitally, for a limited time. In a blog post this week, the coffee giant said it is providing “complimentary digital news” with its free in-store Wi-Fi in the U.S. Sites participating include The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), USA Today, The Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinel and New York Daily News. Many of these papers have subscription paywalls in place that normally limits the amount of content you can see on the website for free. Starbucks also said it will offer discounted subscriptions for print and digital subscribers to the WSJ.

OpenTable Expands Delivery Options to Canada
OpenTable is expanding its delivery capabilities with Uber Eats to Canada, following the launch of the same feature in the U.S. in July. To be clear, you can’t order and pay for food direct from the OpenTable app. Instead, diners perusing restaurants on the OpenTable iOS app will see a “Get it delivered” button and be redirected to the Uber Eats app. It’s another way the company is trying to evolve into more than just a platform for booking restaurant reservations, and in doing so, keep customers inside the figurative walls of its own ecosystem as much as possible.

Revention Unveils New Restaurant Tablet Software
It’s another day and another tablet in the restaurant industry. Point of sale (POS) and mobile order platform Revention launched its own tablet software this week that integrates with the company’s existing POS and mobile order system. The new software, which is compatible with both iOS and Android tablets, promises to streamline restaurant operations, from entering an order to managing and training staff, and works both online and offline. Revention counts Dairy Queen, the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, and numerous pizza chains, including mall favorite Sbarro, among its customers.

August 8, 2019

OpenTable and Quandoo Partner for Restaurant Reservations

Furthering its seeming aim to reach across the whole of the restaurant business, OpenTable announced this week a partnership with Berlin, Germany-based restaurant reservations platform Quandoo.

The integration of the two systems will allow users to see more choices when it comes to picking a restaurant. Quandoo users can now reserve tables at restaurants on the OpenTable platform, and the reverse will be true in the near future.

The deal also gives OpenTable more visibility in overseas markets, as Quandoo is available in 12 different countries across Europe and the Asia-Pacific region.

According to the press release, the initial integration will include over 10,000 restaurants across OpenTable and Quandoo, increasing OpenTable’s available restaurants to 56,000 and Quandoo’s to 23,000. More restaurants will be added to the integrated platform in the UK, Germany, Australia, Italy, and Singapore in the coming months.

“This partnership will make each site more comprehensive for diners and restaurant partners will benefit from increased discoverability by being available on both platforms,” OpenTable’s Chief Operating Officer, Andrea Johnston, said in a statement.

And while OpenTable may be focused on restaurant reservations with this deal, the company has of late made many moves suggesting it wants to be much, much more than just a platform for booking a table. Last month, OpenTable announced a partnership with some third-party delivery companies, including Grubhub and Uber Eats, which gives users the option to pick (but not pay for) delivery from within the OpenTable app. The company also recently partnered with restaurant-management platform Upserve to share data on customers’ dining preferences (e.g., food allergies) with servers in real time.

OpenTable faces competition most directly from Resy, a restaurant reservation system that was just officially acquired by American Express. Resy also unveiled a table inventory management system and a new loyalty program in 2018.

Increasing both restaurant choices and exposure to worldwide markets through the Quandoo partnership is no doubt a move to help OpenTable boost its visibility with more potential customers. In doing so, it’s another way to stay relevant while the company furthers its aim of becoming a one-stop-shop for an increasingly competitive restaurant biz.

July 24, 2019

OpenTable Launches Delivery Program With Uber Eats, Grubhub

Restaurant reservations platform OpenTable announced it has partnered with Caviar, Grubhub, and Uber Eats to give its users access to delivery options within the OpenTable app.

“Our goal is to make OpenTable the go-to app for all dining occasions. Adding delivery is an important next step.” Joseph Essas, OpenTable’s CTO, said in a statement.

Moving forward, delivery via the OpenTable app will be available at 8,000 restaurants in 90 metropolitan areas in the U.S. It applies only to those areas where OpenTable and delivery services via the aforementioned third parties overlap.

When users access the OpenTable app, they’ll see options under restaurants to order food for delivery instead of making a reservation at the actual restaurant. If the the restaurant only works with one of the services, say, Uber Eats, the user will be directed to that specific service to complete the transaction. If a restaurant works with multiple delivery services, users can take their pick.

Food delivery via third parties like Uber Eats and Grubhub is a game everyone wants in on these days. Even amid a swirl of controversies, these apps are still predicted to have 44 million users by 2020. It’s not surprising, then, that non-restaurant entities are now positioning themselves in the landscape, too.

And clearly OpenTable wants to be the one customers go through to access those dining choices, even if the app can’t yet keep users within its own ecosystem for the entire order-pay-track process. And that last point will change as OpenTable said in a blog post that features for estimated delivery time and cost are slated for the future.

Along with the delivery program, OpenTable also launched a newly redesigned app that promises more personalized meal recommendations based on favorites, past bookings, and other factors.

September 27, 2018

OpenTable Launches OpenSeat Feature to Pair Up Single Diners

Perhaps it’s because I’m not an outgoing millennial, or maybe it’s the fact that I don’t enjoy small talk, or maybe it’s just human decency, but I think OpenTable‘s new feature to pair up diners eating alone in restaurants sounds horrible.

Food & Wine writes that the restaurant reservation app has joined up with Virginia Tourism to create a new feature called OpenSeat. At select restaurants in Virginia, people making reservations via OpenTable can write in “OpenSeat” in the special request section. If another singleton (ugh, how badly do I date myself with that reference?) shows up at the restaurant with the same “OpenSeat” note, the two will be seated together and even get a free appetizer. (What happens if more than two singles show up?)

I’m not sure where to begin.

“Creepy,” and “So so awkward” were how my Spoon colleagues referred to the idea on our Slack channel. And they are not wrong.

At least on dating apps people can see and swipe others before communicating. Having someone get automatically seated at your table sounds like a recipe for social disaster. How does one gracefully excuse themselves when some jerk pulls up a chair and starts yapping about his collection of exotic teeth?

Yes, that is a worst case scenario, and perhaps it could be fun if you were traveling in a strange city and got seated with a normal person. And I’m all for restaurants and even reservation services trying out new things and new ways to monetize their experiences.

Still sounds horrible. But obviously I’m just too closed minded for OpenSeat.

August 8, 2018

Instagram’s Getting Into Restaurant Reservations With a New Partnership

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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