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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.
by 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 agoYou 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 agoEasy 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 agoSo then the restaurant doesn't want your business. You aren't willing to pay the cost to use their services.
- dfxm12 8y agoHow do you know how the restaurant is managing reservations when you make one over the phone?
- jasonlotito 8y agoAsk. 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.
- chrisan 8y agoYou can state you don't want to give them your number when making a reservation. Of if you happen to find someone persistent about it and you really want to continue to give them your business just use a fake number I've never had a restaurant actually call to confirm I was coming.
- pgodzin 8y agoMany will send an automated text to confirm the reservation the day before
- chipotle_coyote 8y agoRestaurants I book through OpenTable almost always call to confirm I'm coming; other reservation methods usually don't get that, except at the most expensive "special occasion" kinds of places.
- reaperducer 8y agoRestaurants I book through OpenTable almost always call to confirm I'm 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.
- melq 8y agoIt's very common for restaurants to text to confirm these days.
- JohnFen 8y ago> Easy enough: call the restaurant yourself then. 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.
- greglindahl 8y agoMany restaurants have stopped answering their phones.
- jak92 8y agoReally? Never experienced that
- greglindahl 8y agoMy company just called 300 mid-to-high-end restaurants to try to confirm their hours and ~30% never picked up.
- jak92 8y agoWell, I guess 30% is many. It also could be the time you called, or maybe your # is flagged as spam.
- gcb0 8y agothat's a dangerous strawman. 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.
- godzillabrennus 8y agoThere is an ambitious project that aims to make that the case: https://hu-manity.co/ https://hu-manity.co/
- crispyambulance 8y agoYeah, ideally, it should be between you and the restaurant. 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.
- joshvm 8y agoI'm curious. Do OpenTable-enabled places get significantly more diners because they're able to compare multiple places for a single time slot? Or is the value simply that it makes booking easy for consumers? 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).
- ghaff 8y agoI assume it's mostly about making it easier and avoiding the pain that's often associated with homegrown and other systems. However, I suppose if it's a busy night and I just want to eat somewhere halfway decent in an hour or so, I could see using OpenTable to find an open slot. (Not sure I've ever done that though.)
- petronic 8y agoMost restaurants don't even list their good timeslots on OpenTable, as they're capable of filling those on their own. 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.