How about I control my data and my preferences.
My meal is a one time transaction where you provide food in exchange for my money.
My meal is a one time transaction where you provide food in exchange for my money.
When you use a service like Opentable, it's hard to claim you thought it was a "one time transaction" that would be forgotten about when it shows your reservation history to you every time you log in.
Except many now use a service provider to manager their reservations. Once they have your phone number (to confirm) it's no longer a one time transaction.
Either this matters to you, or it doesn't. But if you don't want to make reservations over phone because you are afraid they will share your data or something, then don't.
I've never had a restaurant actually call to confirm I was coming.
Very interesting. Perhaps it's regional. Based on the number of $100 credits I've gotten, I must have booked hundreds of times through OpenTable, and I've never once gotten a confirmation call.
This is what I do. I see no reason or advantage to bringing a third party into what is a really simple transaction between me and the restaurant.
It also could be the time you called, or maybe your # is flagged as spam.
opentable is not profitable and have no market to exist for what they say they offer: reservation convenience, which increases trafic, for a cost to the business.
so they offer it for free or much cheaper, amass a lot of data and sell it on the side. effectively bypassing their inexistent above-mentioned business proposal.
OpenTable came into existence because of simple value proposition. For the restaurant, it simplifies the process of booking reservations. For the diner, it provides an easy way to access availability of any given time slot quickly across many places. Seems like a solid business that provides a nice service.
Unfortunately, that's not enough.
They took a big fat IPO, sold a couple times, and are now owned by Priceline. If they don't do the "surveillance capitalism" thing, that makes them a money loser-- given the obscene amount of money pumped in to "scale" them.
The best thing we can do is to make a phone call to the restaurant instead, or, just show up and hope for the best. Perhaps in time the restaurant industry will come up with an open standard webservice to do this stuff instead of depending on OpenTable, but I won't hold my breath.
If it's the latter then I'm surprised there aren't already cheap plugin systems for Wordpress that would do the same thing.
I didn't realise that OpenTable has a whole booking.com style website, including the "booked 15 times in the last microsecond!" nonsense. Feeling somewhat like a luddite now, I've only ever used it when trying to book a table at a specific restaurant (i.e. via the restaurant's website).
It's mostly used to list the less busy "collar hours" (the hours adjacent to any rush) in the hopes that an alternate means to advertising might flip an empty table to a populated table.
I'll avoid talking to a human to make a reservation if possible, but I've had dozens of occasions where OpenTable shows no available reservations at say, 7pm and a quick phone call is all it takes to land the time I'd like.
> more diners because they're able to compare multiple places for a single time slot?
Putting yourself in the shoes of a corporate event-planner trying to find a rez for VIP's at the first available expensive steakhouse, yeah, you're going to go straight to OpenTable and not bother with the phone. The hip edgy steakhouse that doesn't play with OpenTable will miss out.