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When Will OpenTable Crash?
As a casual OpenTable user, I've always had the client-side operations of the service hidden from me. Because for users, it's such a win: I can survey 40 restaurants and decide when and where to eat? Yes, please! So it's good to know about the costs on the restaurant side, explained in this letter from a restaurant-owner that's making the rounds. (And on the business side, yeah, wow is that stock overvalued.)
My only Open Table qualm is the fact that a lot of times restaurants hoard their best times for themselves and don't put them available online.
I find myself weighing that exact qualm against my phone-phobia every. time. Say hello to 10 pm dinner!
If you want to make a reservation in the morning on a weekday, your phone phobia is irrelevant! Nobody will pick up anyway! (This is what KarenUhOh says below, but I want to point out that your phone phobia is not keeping you from the good reservation times).
As a sometime OT junkie, may I merely say, to those who want to avoid the fees: create your own online reservation systems. A lot of restaurants don't even answer the phone.
They said the same thing about Pets.com.
I wonder if restaurants wouldn't have fallen into this situation if restaurant websites weren't so UNIVERSALLY TERRIBLE, generally lagging far behind, like, every other retail category on the Web. Half the time even prominent restaurants don't even have a site, or at least not one that shows up in the first page or two of Google hits; and if they do, it's often just a series of Flash animations of their menu (UGH UGH) with no way to make a reservation.
(As a side note, I am a frequent eater-outer who until reading this post had never actually heard of OpenTable! Of course, I live in a not-major metropolis and rarely go to places that require reservations, I guess. But still!)
They should all get on the Blue Ribbon wagon, and not take reservations.
In Los Angeles, it did crash last month, when 30,000 people apparently tried to book tables at the pop-up LudoBites all at once. I suspect at some point Ticketmaster is going to figure out how to get into the game, at which point: Bye.
More likely, Ticketmaster would try to acquire them.
WWDCD? (What Would David Chang Do?)
There was a hot stock up here in Canada, an IPO for a company that made whiteboard technology. Somehow everyone convinced themselves that innovative whiteboard technology had a bright, billions and billions of dollars future. The fairy dust wore off quickly.
It's really hard to feel bad for restaurants, and the letter from that chef owner guy was weird. Do they really value their customers? I dine out constantly and have never remotely valued.
Maybe this is a bit on the existential side — but how valuable a commodity is a restaurant reservation anyway?
I mean, when I have a restaurant reservation, what do I have? A right to a free table at the designated time? Or within 15 minutes? 30 minutes? I haven't found this to be the case. The reality of what a reservation is turns out to be quite erratic, at the very least.
The main value of the reservation appears to be that it gives me priority over certain walk-in customers. It just boggles the mind that someone can build a billion-dollar business on trading an asset of such low value. Something else must be going on here.