Tripleseat and SevenRooms just announced a partnership that will integrate the former’s event sales and management platform with the latter’s reservation and guest management software. That means restaurants wanting to book extra-large parties won’t have to deal with the confusion that historically occurs when you put private events and regular diners in the same restaurant.
Such turbulence is frequent. The classic example is a manager booking an event and not telling the host, who then overbooks the rest of the dining room(s). Having worked in restaurants for years, I can remember many instances where this mix-up happened. And that was in the late 90s, before you could book a reservation from your pocket. Now, regular reservations come in via many disparate sources — phone, website, third-party apps — which makes the process even more confusing, and the number of disappointed or pissed off diners greater.
Tripleseat and SevenRooms aim to do away with such mishaps by integrating their two systems, which would allow information about table reservations and private events to sync in real time via the cloud. Restaurant front-of-house staff and event managers share relevant information directly with one another. So, for example, if a corporation wants to hold a VIP dinner for 30 of its best clients, it can book a restaurant via Tripleseat. That information is then delivered to the restaurant via SevenRooms to alert hosts and other staff of the event.
Apart, these two companies operate pretty sophisticated, tech-driven systems. Tripleseat has made a name for itself managing events for restaurants, hotels, and nightclubs, many of them fairly high profile (see below). The cloud-based, cross-device platform centralizes leads, bookings, calendars, communications, and pretty much everything else involved in the event management process.
Sevenrooms, meanwhile, calls its product “CRM Driven Reservation Management.” It’s another “all-in-one” platform, featuring guest profiles (e.g., Jon Smith. is allergic to shellfish), VIP alerts (table 17 just spent $300 on wine), POS integration, and a digital assistant named Ava who uses natural language processing to book reservations.
Integrated, the two systems have the potential to do some major streamlining where event bookings are concerned, and help all parties involved avoid overbooking and under-communicating. There’s no word yet on who the first clients of this partnership will be, but Tripleseat and SevenRooms do share some existing ones, including Asian bistro chain Tao, The Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Hakkasan, and LDV Hospitality.
“Private dining is a massive growth opportunity for restaurants providing over 30% of the revenue, and through this integration with SevenRooms restaurants will be able to ensure that they can provide 100% occupancy within the four walls of the restaurant,” Tripleseat CEO, Jonathan Morse, said in a press release.
Other sources not connected to the partnership note that private dining can bring 5 to 20 times the amount of revenue a regular table brings in on an average night. That’s a lot of extra money. Let’s see if the Tripleseat-SevenRooms partnership can accommodate that opportunity and still ensure a good experience for the rest of the clientele.
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