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 b

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.