13 ms·

Who Controls Diners’ Data? OpenTable Moves to Assert Control

77 points by petethomas 8y ago

dominotw 8y ago
lol. What a world we live in.
Forge36 8y ago
Outline link to avoid paywall https://outline.com/fMSNSn https://outline.com/fMSNSn In this case it appears open table is limiting data access to third parties (I'm surprised this wasn't already in place). I'm not sure what data OpenTable has or what they are now requesting restaurants pay to share.
- rlabrecque 8y ago
  Someone that works in the industry probably knows better, but OpenTable has your full history of your dining experiences booked through them. What restaurants you frequent, how often, what time you go, how large your party was, how often you failed to show up. I believe when you booked a reservation the restaurant got to see all of this.
- listenallyall 8y ago
  Outline is for reading pages that: you own the rights to, is in the public domain, constitutes fair use, or you have consent of the copyright holder. I don't see "to avoid paywall" on that list https://outline.com/dmca.html https://outline.com/dmca.html
  - gpm 8y ago
    I send a http get request to outline.com, they send back an article. The only data I send to outline.com is a url, which is not subject to copyright. Note that DMCA notices are about user uploaded data, there is none here. I'm not involved in their data acquisition process, that's between them and the newspapers that are for whatever reason giving them paywalled data to serve to visitors.
jak92 8y ago
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.
- Proven 8y ago
  You don't control it if you willingly shared it. "Offline" diners, especially if they pay with cash, can have much higher privacy expectations. Those who expect near perfect privacy should eat at home.
- acheron 8y ago
  Easy enough: call the restaurant yourself then. 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.
  - jak92 8y ago
    > Easy enough: call the restaurant yourself then. 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.
    - jasonlotito 8y ago
      So then the restaurant doesn't want your business. You aren't willing to pay the cost to use their services.
      - dfxm12 8y ago
        How do you know how the restaurant is managing reservations when you make one over the phone?
        jasonlotito 8y ago
        Ask. 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.
sqrt17 8y ago
Yet another example where a user data profile is created and anyone but the actual user whose data it is will claim that the data is theirs. It's the (now-)unsavoury point of platform businesses, who step into the business relation between a user and a service provider to mine and aggregate and profile data to provide value in a surveillance economy. Would this even fly in GDPR-land, where you can only process data within the narrow confines of the actual business relationship?
- greglindahl 8y ago
  OT could claim that they are a service provider that helps consumers discover restaurants they'll like, based on mining their reservation history.
ghaff 8y ago
The article isn't terribly specific but presumably dining and spending patterns of various sorts that can be valuable in the aggregate. I have to confess that, as a user, I find it useful to be able to book the maximum number of restaurants through one or two apps whether or not they also support making reservations through other means. Especially on mobile, I'm not a big fan of navigating through often crappy web sites and potentially having to provide a bunch of info to find there are no reservations available at 7pm. OpenTable is just a few clicks.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > Especially on mobile, I'm not a big fan of navigating through often crappy web sites and potentially having to provide a bunch of info to find there are no reservations available at 7pm. Me neither. That's why I call the restaurant instead of using their web page. The whole thing is done in a couple of minutes.
  - greglindahl 8y ago
    I'm curious if you've noticed that many restaurants no longer answer their phones?
    - ghaff 8y ago
      I'm not sure that's anything new. Sure, I'll call a restaurant if there's no easy way to book online. But this doesn't work as well when I'm traveling overseas (language, cost of phone call) and, as you say, phone lines are busy, get put on hold, phone not picked up, etc. Also, with an app, I can see upfront what my options are and potentially see if I have better choices elsewhere.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      No, I haven't noticed that at all.
    - justtopost 8y ago
      Unless you call wgile tgey are slammed during lunch and dinner rush, this is absolutely not true.
dabernathy89 8y ago
OpenTable says this is about customer privacy, but... > [OpenTable] will block restaurants from giving competitors access to diner data acquired through OpenTable unless they pay new fees Ah. In any case, not sure why OpenTable believes they own this information. If I make a reservation at a restaurant, particularly if I follow through and actually eat there, I fully expect the restaurant to own the knowledge about that reservation.
- jak92 8y ago
  > not sure why OpenTable believes they own this information. Probably within the terms and conditions that no one reads.
Spooky23 8y ago
It's amazing that this is put up with. OpenTable provides a pretty trivial service but has good integration with point of sale and in no way have any business owning the customer relationship.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
While there is plenty to complain about with OpenTable, I find their competitor Resy to be far worse on almost every dimension of privacy & data sharing. Meanwhile, Resy has been aggressively pushing to undercut OpenTable’s price per reservation to get restaurants to switch over lately.
- chipotle_coyote 8y ago
  How is Resy worse? I've only used them once, as far as I remember; they seem to have been courting higher-end restaurants that presumably didn't want to put up with OpenTable.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    Op mentions privacy and data sharing in particular, and there are 2 others in this tgread aledging bag faith on their part in that regard.
bschne 8y ago
I've been following this somewhat because I learned about Tock, a Chicago startup founded by one of the Co-Founders/Owners of the Alinea restaurant. [1] Their founder Nick Kokonas is quite interesting and seems to have a bit of an ongoing fight with OpenTable, Tock even built a tool where restaurants can analyze if they're paying too much for OpenTable's services [2]. If it interests you, check out his interview on Tim Ferris' podcast, it's well worth the listen. [3] [1] https://www.exploretock.com/join/ https://www.exploretock.com/join/ [2] https://medium.com/tock/weve-built-a-website-to-check-if-you-are-overpaying-for-opentable-there-s-a-40-chance-you-are-b5fe1c8c81aa https://medium.com/tock/weve-built-a-website-to-check-if-you... [3] https://tim.blog/2018/10/18/nick-kokonas/ https://tim.blog/2018/10/18/nick-kokonas/
- DannyBee 8y ago
  Tock's cofounder is Brian Fitzpatrick, who founded Google's Chicago office (and the data liberation front). Great guy. https://www.red-bean.com/fitz/bio/ https://www.red-bean.com/fitz/bio/ Fight is probably a strong word. They just think people are not really analyzing whether they are actually getting value for it :)
  - jldugger 8y ago
    > who founded Google's Chicago office (and the data liberation front). And also SVN. And apparently Apple, developing webapps, which I really don't understand since it doesn't seem like they have a (any really) strong corporate consulting arm.
- lisper 8y ago
  I hate Tock, and my wife and I will not eat at any restaurant that requires that we use them. Eating out is not just about acquiring food. It's a social ritual, and paying for the meal at the end is an essential part of that ritual, the culmination of mutual trust between a diner and a restaurateur. Tock's pay-up-front business model destroys that trust. The not-so-subtle message to the customer is, "We don't trust you to pay." But that knife cuts both ways: if you get my money up front, why should I trust you not to cut corners on the meal that you provide? I get that restaurants have to protect themselves against no-shows, and I have no problem handing over a credit card number so that they can charge a no-show fee. But paying the entire cost of the meal up front is a line that I won't cross. There are too many excellent alternatives out there still doing business the old fashioned way, thank God.
guelo 8y ago
If I give my email and phone number to OpenTable in order to make a reservation I am absolutely not giving the restaurant the right to scrape my data out of OpenTable and give it to SevenRooms with whom I have no relationship. I am 100% on OpenTable's side in this.
- Kalium 8y ago
  In the eyes of restaurants, your relationship is with them. As a result, they feel fully justified in taking it wherever they please. No service company wants to be at the mercy of an intermediary. Of course, I don't trust restaurants and hotels to not abuse my info, so...
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    > As a result, they feel fully justified in taking it wherever they please. Which is 100% abusing the relationship I have with them.
kthejoker2 8y ago
When will we have a world where OpenTable has to signup to me? And I release/sell/donate none/some/all of my data to my friends/family/companies/whomever I want? Who's working on this?
- dominotw 8y ago
  How do buyers trust you that your data is actually legit and not something you made up?
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    Finally, a use case for blockchain ... Jokes aside, let the market figure it out. Authorized aggregators (Qualtrics, Nielsen) will emerge; ad tech will compete for your real data; correlations will continue behind the scenes between your behavior (the thing the companies actually own) and your data; maybe you never will, and we're back to guessing which half of your marketing is working.
    - dominotw 8y ago
      any solution will need fb to authenticate that data is legit and FB will never provide such a service.
      - kthejoker2 8y ago
        No, any solution just needs to incentivize people to share real data. If I don't share where I live, you can't make useful showtime recommendations, if I don't share who my friends are, you can't send me their cat memes, etc The market will solve this, FB can play along or go jump.
mbostleman 8y ago
I control it because I almost never take the time to make reservations. In fact, places in which a reservation is necessary almost by definition means a degraded experience for me.
- JohnFen 8y ago
  There are a number of otherwise excellent restaurants in my area that have stopped accepting reservations entirely and switched to a "first come, first served" model. I stopped going to those restaurants because of the number of times that I've shown up only to be informed that the wait list is over an hour long and we've ended up having to eat at the greasy spoon down the road because we're hungry and have run out of time. If I can't make reservations (directly with the establishment -- things like OpenTable don't count), I won't eat at the establishment. The gamble isn't worth it.
  - beckler 8y ago
    I think it's worse when you make a reservation, but it doesn't mean anything. For example, my wife and I went to a PF Changs on a holiday. We had a reservation we scheduled at least a week ahead of time, but it meant nothing, we were put at the end of the queue. It wouldn't have made a difference if we never made the reservation at all.
    - JohnFen 8y ago
      Yes, but that's a problem with that particular restaurant, not with the idea of reservations. If I were bumped like that, I wouldn't go back (especially if we're talking about a chain restaurant) -- life is too short.
ape4 8y ago
OpenTable should be replaced with an, er, open API standard.
beat 8y ago
I wonder if this applies to chains, or to situations where multiple restaurants are owned by the same person/company? Some of my favorite local restauranteurs own three or four places, with different focus, but often a lot of customer overlap.
dontbenebby 8y ago
Do restaurants who use OpenTable usually have an analog option? (Eg: call and ask for a table?)
- justtopost 8y ago
  Open table is the exception, analog is the rule.
  - dontbenebby 8y ago
    Yeah I'm just curious if it's replacing or supplementing
bkthrowaway 8y ago
I previously worked at an employer who dealt with restaurant bookings. I'm not going to mention who they are, but it's not OpenTable. One of the key things I built while there was around data importing. The burden of getting the data to us was mostly on the customer, but some customers had a seriously hard time moving away so we had to build custom tools specifically for some competitors. One product would only let you download encrypted backups, but they refused to give the decryption key. In their minds, this was following their policy to let you have your data, even if it was only readable by them. We ultimately had to abuse their APIs to scrape the data out. At least OpenTable is giving the option of exporting data, because not everyone in the industry does it, and the story above was not an isolated incident. We scraped data all the time, but only with the customers permission.
splonk 8y ago
Let me just start by saying I am entirely on the restaurant's side in this, and believe that this just another attempt at vendor lock-in from OpenTable. Restaurants have been fighting for customer control with OT for a long time, and at the end of the day, I'm fine with the restaurant, who actually see me in person, talk to me, and serve me the food, keeping notes on me to improve service. OT, less so. I'm not particularly personally concerned about privacy in this space, but it seems much better to have this data split up in the hands of the people who actually see me in person, rather than the faceless tool trying to aggregate my behavior. To add some color to this, I recently was shown my customer notes by the GM at a medium-high end Michelin starred restaurant where I've been a regular for a long time. There's some basic notes from the early days about the name of my partner I was dining with, and food allergies and preferences. There's also a long, long list over several years of every extra dish that was sent out (I generally get 2-3 extra courses at this place), with the goal of not duplicating those courses. The notes have tailed off for the past few years because, probably because everybody knows me and has chatted with me at this point, so they know they can just ask me for whatever, and that I'm a pretty easy customer. So like I said, I'm comfortable with this level of information in the hands of the restaurant. Pretty much everyone I've talked to in the industry is interested in this information strictly for the purposes of better service - nobody has grandiose plans of ever using this data outside of their own restaurant. OT provides a nice service in standardizing and simplifying the reservation process, but I'm inclined to think this is an power grab to try to force restaurants to stay within their ecosystem - and frankly, at the end of the day, I don't much care if OT lives or dies, but I do care about my local restaurants.
- somuchthis 8y ago
  I couldn't agree more! When I see that companies like GrubHub and their ilk have menus for restaurants that do delivery, I always look up what I want on their menu, then call the company directly and place the order over the phone. It takes about 30 seconds longer than doing it with the web interface and I can tell them things like, "extra this, leave off that." I also know that the tip is actually going to the driver if I give it in cash. These middlemen can take a hike for all I care.
gowld 8y ago
This issue is a quintessential 0th World Problem.
kbos87 8y ago
OpenTable is misunderstanding where the balance of power lies here. I’m not their customer, I’m the restaurants’ customer, despite the fact that OpenTable has maybe found a way to reduce a little bit of the friction in the situation. This is purely a play to lock people in under the convenient guise of protecting user data.

77 points by petethomas 8y ago

lol. What a world we live in.

Outline link to avoid paywall https://outline.com/fMSNSn https://outline.com/fMSNSn In this case it appears open table is limiting data access to third parties (I'm surprised this wasn't already in place). I'm not sure what data OpenTable has or what they are now requesting restaurants pay to share.

rlabrecque 8y ago
Someone that works in the industry probably knows better, but OpenTable has your full history of your dining experiences booked through them. What restaurants you frequent, how often, what time you go, how large your party was, how often you failed to show up. I believe when you booked a reservation the restaurant got to see all of this.
listenallyall 8y ago
Outline is for reading pages that: you own the rights to, is in the public domain, constitutes fair use, or you have consent of the copyright holder. I don't see "to avoid paywall" on that list https://outline.com/dmca.html https://outline.com/dmca.html
- gpm 8y ago
  I send a http get request to outline.com, they send back an article. The only data I send to outline.com is a url, which is not subject to copyright. Note that DMCA notices are about user uploaded data, there is none here. I'm not involved in their data acquisition process, that's between them and the newspapers that are for whatever reason giving them paywalled data to serve to visitors.

jak92 8y ago

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.

Proven 8y ago
You don't control it if you willingly shared it. "Offline" diners, especially if they pay with cash, can have much higher privacy expectations. Those who expect near perfect privacy should eat at home.
acheron 8y ago
Easy enough: call the restaurant yourself then. 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.
- jak92 8y ago
  > Easy enough: call the restaurant yourself then. 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.
  - jasonlotito 8y ago
    So then the restaurant doesn't want your business. You aren't willing to pay the cost to use their services.
    - dfxm12 8y ago
      How do you know how the restaurant is managing reservations when you make one over the phone?
      - jasonlotito 8y ago
        Ask. 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.

sqrt17 8y ago

Yet another example where a user data profile is created and anyone but the actual user whose data it is will claim that the data is theirs. It's the (now-)unsavoury point of platform businesses, who step into the business relation between a user and a service provider to mine and aggregate and profile data to provide value in a surveillance economy. Would this even fly in GDPR-land, where you can only process data within the narrow confines of the actual business relationship?

greglindahl 8y ago
OT could claim that they are a service provider that helps consumers discover restaurants they'll like, based on mining their reservation history.

ghaff 8y ago

The article isn't terribly specific but presumably dining and spending patterns of various sorts that can be valuable in the aggregate. I have to confess that, as a user, I find it useful to be able to book the maximum number of restaurants through one or two apps whether or not they also support making reservations through other means. Especially on mobile, I'm not a big fan of navigating through often crappy web sites and potentially having to provide a bunch of info to find there are no reservations available at 7pm. OpenTable is just a few clicks.

JohnFen 8y ago
> Especially on mobile, I'm not a big fan of navigating through often crappy web sites and potentially having to provide a bunch of info to find there are no reservations available at 7pm. Me neither. That's why I call the restaurant instead of using their web page. The whole thing is done in a couple of minutes.
- greglindahl 8y ago
  I'm curious if you've noticed that many restaurants no longer answer their phones?
  - ghaff 8y ago
    I'm not sure that's anything new. Sure, I'll call a restaurant if there's no easy way to book online. But this doesn't work as well when I'm traveling overseas (language, cost of phone call) and, as you say, phone lines are busy, get put on hold, phone not picked up, etc. Also, with an app, I can see upfront what my options are and potentially see if I have better choices elsewhere.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    No, I haven't noticed that at all.
  - justtopost 8y ago
    Unless you call wgile tgey are slammed during lunch and dinner rush, this is absolutely not true.

dabernathy89 8y ago

OpenTable says this is about customer privacy, but... > [OpenTable] will block restaurants from giving competitors access to diner data acquired through OpenTable unless they pay new fees Ah. In any case, not sure why OpenTable believes they own this information. If I make a reservation at a restaurant, particularly if I follow through and actually eat there, I fully expect the restaurant to own the knowledge about that reservation.

jak92 8y ago
> not sure why OpenTable believes they own this information. Probably within the terms and conditions that no one reads.

Spooky23 8y ago

It's amazing that this is put up with. OpenTable provides a pretty trivial service but has good integration with point of sale and in no way have any business owning the customer relationship.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

While there is plenty to complain about with OpenTable, I find their competitor Resy to be far worse on almost every dimension of privacy & data sharing. Meanwhile, Resy has been aggressively pushing to undercut OpenTable’s price per reservation to get restaurants to switch over lately.

chipotle_coyote 8y ago
How is Resy worse? I've only used them once, as far as I remember; they seem to have been courting higher-end restaurants that presumably didn't want to put up with OpenTable.
- justtopost 8y ago
  Op mentions privacy and data sharing in particular, and there are 2 others in this tgread aledging bag faith on their part in that regard.

bschne 8y ago

I've been following this somewhat because I learned about Tock, a Chicago startup founded by one of the Co-Founders/Owners of the Alinea restaurant. [1] Their founder Nick Kokonas is quite interesting and seems to have a bit of an ongoing fight with OpenTable, Tock even built a tool where restaurants can analyze if they're paying too much for OpenTable's services [2]. If it interests you, check out his interview on Tim Ferris' podcast, it's well worth the listen. [3] [1] https://www.exploretock.com/join/ https://www.exploretock.com/join/ [2] https://medium.com/tock/weve-built-a-website-to-check-if-you-are-overpaying-for-opentable-there-s-a-40-chance-you-are-b5fe1c8c81aa https://medium.com/tock/weve-built-a-website-to-check-if-you... [3] https://tim.blog/2018/10/18/nick-kokonas/ https://tim.blog/2018/10/18/nick-kokonas/

DannyBee 8y ago
Tock's cofounder is Brian Fitzpatrick, who founded Google's Chicago office (and the data liberation front). Great guy. https://www.red-bean.com/fitz/bio/ https://www.red-bean.com/fitz/bio/ Fight is probably a strong word. They just think people are not really analyzing whether they are actually getting value for it :)
- jldugger 8y ago
  > who founded Google's Chicago office (and the data liberation front). And also SVN. And apparently Apple, developing webapps, which I really don't understand since it doesn't seem like they have a (any really) strong corporate consulting arm.
lisper 8y ago
I hate Tock, and my wife and I will not eat at any restaurant that requires that we use them. Eating out is not just about acquiring food. It's a social ritual, and paying for the meal at the end is an essential part of that ritual, the culmination of mutual trust between a diner and a restaurateur. Tock's pay-up-front business model destroys that trust. The not-so-subtle message to the customer is, "We don't trust you to pay." But that knife cuts both ways: if you get my money up front, why should I trust you not to cut corners on the meal that you provide? I get that restaurants have to protect themselves against no-shows, and I have no problem handing over a credit card number so that they can charge a no-show fee. But paying the entire cost of the meal up front is a line that I won't cross. There are too many excellent alternatives out there still doing business the old fashioned way, thank God.

guelo 8y ago

If I give my email and phone number to OpenTable in order to make a reservation I am absolutely not giving the restaurant the right to scrape my data out of OpenTable and give it to SevenRooms with whom I have no relationship. I am 100% on OpenTable's side in this.

Kalium 8y ago
In the eyes of restaurants, your relationship is with them. As a result, they feel fully justified in taking it wherever they please. No service company wants to be at the mercy of an intermediary. Of course, I don't trust restaurants and hotels to not abuse my info, so...
- JohnFen 8y ago
  > As a result, they feel fully justified in taking it wherever they please. Which is 100% abusing the relationship I have with them.

kthejoker2 8y ago

When will we have a world where OpenTable has to signup to me? And I release/sell/donate none/some/all of my data to my friends/family/companies/whomever I want? Who's working on this?

dominotw 8y ago
How do buyers trust you that your data is actually legit and not something you made up?
- kthejoker2 8y ago
  Finally, a use case for blockchain ... Jokes aside, let the market figure it out. Authorized aggregators (Qualtrics, Nielsen) will emerge; ad tech will compete for your real data; correlations will continue behind the scenes between your behavior (the thing the companies actually own) and your data; maybe you never will, and we're back to guessing which half of your marketing is working.
  - dominotw 8y ago
    any solution will need fb to authenticate that data is legit and FB will never provide such a service.
    - kthejoker2 8y ago
      No, any solution just needs to incentivize people to share real data. If I don't share where I live, you can't make useful showtime recommendations, if I don't share who my friends are, you can't send me their cat memes, etc The market will solve this, FB can play along or go jump.

mbostleman 8y ago

I control it because I almost never take the time to make reservations. In fact, places in which a reservation is necessary almost by definition means a degraded experience for me.

JohnFen 8y ago
There are a number of otherwise excellent restaurants in my area that have stopped accepting reservations entirely and switched to a "first come, first served" model. I stopped going to those restaurants because of the number of times that I've shown up only to be informed that the wait list is over an hour long and we've ended up having to eat at the greasy spoon down the road because we're hungry and have run out of time. If I can't make reservations (directly with the establishment -- things like OpenTable don't count), I won't eat at the establishment. The gamble isn't worth it.
- beckler 8y ago
  I think it's worse when you make a reservation, but it doesn't mean anything. For example, my wife and I went to a PF Changs on a holiday. We had a reservation we scheduled at least a week ahead of time, but it meant nothing, we were put at the end of the queue. It wouldn't have made a difference if we never made the reservation at all.
  - JohnFen 8y ago
    Yes, but that's a problem with that particular restaurant, not with the idea of reservations. If I were bumped like that, I wouldn't go back (especially if we're talking about a chain restaurant) -- life is too short.

ape4 8y ago

OpenTable should be replaced with an, er, open API standard.

beat 8y ago

I wonder if this applies to chains, or to situations where multiple restaurants are owned by the same person/company? Some of my favorite local restauranteurs own three or four places, with different focus, but often a lot of customer overlap.

dontbenebby 8y ago

Do restaurants who use OpenTable usually have an analog option? (Eg: call and ask for a table?)

justtopost 8y ago
Open table is the exception, analog is the rule.
- dontbenebby 8y ago
  Yeah I'm just curious if it's replacing or supplementing

bkthrowaway 8y ago

I previously worked at an employer who dealt with restaurant bookings. I'm not going to mention who they are, but it's not OpenTable. One of the key things I built while there was around data importing. The burden of getting the data to us was mostly on the customer, but some customers had a seriously hard time moving away so we had to build custom tools specifically for some competitors. One product would only let you download encrypted backups, but they refused to give the decryption key. In their minds, this was following their policy to let you have your data, even if it was only readable by them. We ultimately had to abuse their APIs to scrape the data out. At least OpenTable is giving the option of exporting data, because not everyone in the industry does it, and the story above was not an isolated incident. We scraped data all the time, but only with the customers permission.

splonk 8y ago

Let me just start by saying I am entirely on the restaurant's side in this, and believe that this just another attempt at vendor lock-in from OpenTable. Restaurants have been fighting for customer control with OT for a long time, and at the end of the day, I'm fine with the restaurant, who actually see me in person, talk to me, and serve me the food, keeping notes on me to improve service. OT, less so. I'm not particularly personally concerned about privacy in this space, but it seems much better to have this data split up in the hands of the people who actually see me in person, rather than the faceless tool trying to aggregate my behavior. To add some color to this, I recently was shown my customer notes by the GM at a medium-high end Michelin starred restaurant where I've been a regular for a long time. There's some basic notes from the early days about the name of my partner I was dining with, and food allergies and preferences. There's also a long, long list over several years of every extra dish that was sent out (I generally get 2-3 extra courses at this place), with the goal of not duplicating those courses. The notes have tailed off for the past few years because, probably because everybody knows me and has chatted with me at this point, so they know they can just ask me for whatever, and that I'm a pretty easy customer. So like I said, I'm comfortable with this level of information in the hands of the restaurant. Pretty much everyone I've talked to in the industry is interested in this information strictly for the purposes of better service - nobody has grandiose plans of ever using this data outside of their own restaurant. OT provides a nice service in standardizing and simplifying the reservation process, but I'm inclined to think this is an power grab to try to force restaurants to stay within their ecosystem - and frankly, at the end of the day, I don't much care if OT lives or dies, but I do care about my local restaurants.

somuchthis 8y ago
I couldn't agree more! When I see that companies like GrubHub and their ilk have menus for restaurants that do delivery, I always look up what I want on their menu, then call the company directly and place the order over the phone. It takes about 30 seconds longer than doing it with the web interface and I can tell them things like, "extra this, leave off that." I also know that the tip is actually going to the driver if I give it in cash. These middlemen can take a hike for all I care.

gowld 8y ago

This issue is a quintessential 0th World Problem.

kbos87 8y ago

OpenTable is misunderstanding where the balance of power lies here. I’m not their customer, I’m the restaurants’ customer, despite the fact that OpenTable has maybe found a way to reduce a little bit of the friction in the situation. This is purely a play to lock people in under the convenient guise of protecting user data.