8 ms·

Bots Gobble Up Restaurant Reservations in the Bay Area

33 points by tsax 13y ago

krstck 13y ago
I resent the idea that someone who genuinely wants a dinner reservation but has to write a bot in order to get one isn't an "honest" diner. How is that any worse than refreshing all day waiting for a spot to open up?
- danso 13y ago
  It's probably frowned upon in the way that slipping a $20 to the bouncer to skip the line is. Or hiring someone on Craigslist to stand in line for a cronut. It creates an arms race for access, which some people find annoying.
- mfringel 13y ago
  One involves a human requesting a reservation in real time. The other does not.
- glesica 13y ago
  I think it's because only a limited number of people have the ability to do so. There are probably a number of other methods of "cheating" in similar situations that would also be viewed poorly for the same reason. A few examples off the top of my head: hiring a handicapped person to let you skip lines at Disney, hiring a homeless person to hold your spot in line, bribing an employee, having your assistant spend all morning mashing F5 while you go about your day, and certainly many others. The ones I named would be seen by many people as unfair because they are options that are only available to people with a great deal of money. Other strategies (like calling in a favor) are only open to those with influence and special personal connections. In this case, we have a strategy that is only open to individuals with highly technical skills. Note that I'm not saying it is unfair to use any of these strategies. I think reasonable people could disagree on many of them and they are sensitive to circumstances. In some sense, though, this can be seen as a market distortion. For you or I, writing a bot to do this might be pretty simple. Since we don't have to "pay" very much for the reservations, we would be likely to over-consume them, that is, to make more reservations than we intend to keep. We might even double-book ourselves so we have options (e.g. this morning I felt like steak, now I feel like seafood). This is obviously bad for the restaurants, but it is also bad for other customers who might have wanted the reservations more than we did, but were unable to build a bot to get them because, years and years ago, they chose to study things other than computer science.
  - krstck 13y ago
    Totally agree that using this to book reservations that you don't intend to keep is unfair and harmful. I see this, though, less like hiring handicapped person to jump the line and more like having your friend save you a spot. I agree with the people that say charge a convenience fee. That would discourage the unfair behavior and still let people who actually intend to keep their reservation secure a spot.
theatrus2 13y ago
And this is why credit cards are increasingly required to book a reservation online.
akiselev 13y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161
- _delirium 13y ago
  Original source, from the previous discussion: https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant-reservations-in-sf/ https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant... The siliconbeat.com article here just seems to be a reblog/summary.
sadris 13y ago
Require a CC, charge a $3 cancellation fee. Problem solved.
- LarrySDonald 13y ago
  Temp CCs. There may or may not be money on it when the fee comes in..
  - popotamonga 13y ago
    Authorize at reservation...
  - tomjen3 13y ago
    Require the CC to be shown to the waiter when you come for your reservation - it is not that hard.
  - sadris 13y ago
    Sorry, meant to say: charge $3 for a reservation, not a $3 cancellation fee. Deduct that cost from your bill for the meal.
- dictum 13y ago
  If the people running this scheme are profiting from it, soon they'd start using stolen CCs.
  - tomjen3 13y ago
    CCs aren't stolen that often (usually it is the numbers that are stolen) so it would be pretty difficult to actually pick up the reservation, assuming the restaurant is smart enough to demand that the CC be shown when the diner show up.
- epoxyhockey 13y ago
  If the customer actually wants the reservation that they are paying an automated service to secure, then neither of these proposed solutions will have any effect.
daurnimator 13y ago
Do they not have captchas? or are the bots beating them?
ChuckMcM 13y ago
It doesn't mention if the automated reservation takers are then trying to 'sell' them in other forums. I'm wondering if there is a motive there or not. There is a similar problem with getting camp site reservations even though there are charges for cancellation.
- nohuck13 13y ago
  That was my reaction too. You see exactly the same thing with concert tickets and scalpers. It's supply and demand problem that venues want to use rationing because it increases cachet, but abritrageurs have an incentive to step in and resell for the "market" price. I wonder if we'll see more Ticketmaster-style countermeasures on reservation sites soon. Or more restaurants varying their prices for high- and low-demand times like Alinea in Chicago (https://www.alinearestaurant.com/website/welcome/ https://www.alinearestaurant.com/website/welcome/)
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    Given the low margins on restaurants they could clearly benefit economically by having a 'cost' reserved table, which is to say for $x you can sit down right now vs wait in the regular queue. Of course it would be interesting to plot tips from people who paid extra for rapid seating vs those who waited.
spiek 13y ago
For context on this, Gothamist recently posted this article about a company that "pre-books" reservations at hard to get restaurants. Customers pay $1,000/year for the privilege and then $45/$90 on top for especially hard to get reservations. Article: http://gothamist.com/2013/08/02/wealthy_foodies_can_buy_hard-to-get.php http://gothamist.com/2013/08/02/wealthy_foodies_can_buy_hard... The Gothamist article came from this Food Republic article: http://www.foodrepublic.com/2013/07/30/man-gaming-new-york-city-restaurant-reservation-sc http://www.foodrepublic.com/2013/07/30/man-gaming-new-york-c.... In other words, companies are starting to farm restaurant reservations to sell them, similar to the way that the market for event tickets has been corrupted.
- jusben1369 13y ago
  Thank you for this! I read the entire article waiting for "Ok, so why do bots book all these restaurants. Be nice if the author had pointed out the economics behind it.
squozzer 13y ago
Yeah. Look for the arbitrageurs and destroy them.
bjpcjp 13y ago
SO happy I don't have to live out there & deal with that crap.
sgustard 13y ago
Restaurants are such a fickle business anyway. Surprised they don't just auction off reservations to the highest bidder and cut out the middleman, while they're still trendy.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I have heard that some restaurants have started auctioning off a handful of their tables. Usually part of the proceeds go to charity I think?
Jazonk 13y ago
Since when has 'calling a restaurant' become a hassle?
dictum 13y ago
A truly global business. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140894
philbarr 13y ago
Could the restaurants require an account to be created, limit the number of reservations one account can make, and check that people aren't multi-accounting from the same ip address? The bots could get around this with proxies, but it would seem to be a pain to set up that many proxies. Maybe there's a space in the market for someone to solve this problem for the restaurants.
- yogo 13y ago
  You can't restrict based on IP address since there are scenarios where a group of machines will present the same IP address. It's also very hard to verify with other methods. They would have to take an approach similar to hotels or car rentals. Even then I don't think the problem is easily solved because if the demand is so great for these restaurants and the supply limited, charging or authorizing a payment ahead of time might not be much of a deterrent if the profits to be made are higher.
- tomjen3 13y ago
  Just require a credit card to be used for the reservation, limit the number of reservation each cc can make and require it to be used to pay for the dinner - you can still reserve the seat and enjoy the food, but the resale value of the ticket is nothing.
toki5 13y ago
I'm sorry, but this line bugs me: >Using OpenTable, Urbanspoon or SeatMe , diners could see available time slots and make a reservation online or from their smartphone without the hassle of calling the restaurant, and know that their table would be secure. How is calling the restaurant a hassle? Especially when the solution is to use your phone to look the restaurant up online? Maybe it's the cranky old man spirit in me, but I call restaurants every time -- I hadn't even heard of these sites. I didn't know that this was a need people felt needed fulfilling.
- ig1 13y ago
  Many people feel uncomfortable having to talk to strangers on the phone. Plus the hassle of having to repeatedly spell out the details of your reservation when the person at the other end is in a busy and noisy restaurant.
- potatolicious 13y ago
  It's a hassle because for popular restaurants it can either be a wait to get a hold of the maitre'd, and it's likely there are no reservations available in your parameters. Which means calling a restaurant, waiting on hold, asking for your reservation, possibly not getting it, in which case you get to repeat the same for another restaurant. For online systems the perk isn't really about not talking to a human, it's the ability to see availability at a glance so you only have to "call" once. For not-insanely-busy restaurants where I know a seat is almost certainly available, I prefer calling. After all, their number is probably already in my address book, and making a phone call is a hell of a lot easier than diving through multiple pages on a shitty mobile browser.
- yogo 13y ago
  When you call, someone at the restaurant looks up the info on opentable (or whatever system is used) then tells you the result of that search. It's quite convenient to look up this info online and even change make changes like reservation times.
- nohuck13 13y ago
  I couldn't disagree more with this. Having to involve two actual people, who have to drop whatever else they're doing and complete a trivial transaction, which can probably only be done during business hours, is a problem just begging for a technological solution. Anyway, they're just entering your details into a system not unlike OpenTable. Why serialize this process into a conversation over a phone line?
malandrew 13y ago
This blog posts offers absolutely nothing new relative to what was in Diogo's original post [0] and accompanying previous discussion [1]. In fact it offers less since it doesn't include the original scripts Diogo used. I (and I'm sure many others) would love it if there were some way for moderators to aggregate all upvotes for related articles that don't offer substantial new information or commentary on the original article instead. It's pretty clear that a lot of journalists troll HN and related sites, find human interest stories that strike a nerve with the HN community, then write a blog post rehashing the same content without really adding anything new. It's a simple recipe for getting karma and page views that cheapens the experience here on HN. This type of journalistic pablum should not be rewarded with karma or attention. [0] https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant-reservations-in-sf/ https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161
tomjen3 13y ago
This would seem relatively simple to fix: post the reservations at random times, cache the result page in mem-cache based on ip for 15 minutes. Yes some may be able to use a few extra ips, but to win they would need access to thousands of them, which is far more difficult.
vampirechicken 13y ago
If a restaurant can be fully booked sixty days in advance,they aren't goign to care who's making the reservations, as long as butts are in seats and bills get paid at the end of the meal.

33 points by tsax 13y ago

I resent the idea that someone who genuinely wants a dinner reservation but has to write a bot in order to get one isn't an "honest" diner. How is that any worse than refreshing all day waiting for a spot to open up?

danso 13y ago
It's probably frowned upon in the way that slipping a $20 to the bouncer to skip the line is. Or hiring someone on Craigslist to stand in line for a cronut. It creates an arms race for access, which some people find annoying.
mfringel 13y ago
One involves a human requesting a reservation in real time. The other does not.
glesica 13y ago
I think it's because only a limited number of people have the ability to do so. There are probably a number of other methods of "cheating" in similar situations that would also be viewed poorly for the same reason. A few examples off the top of my head: hiring a handicapped person to let you skip lines at Disney, hiring a homeless person to hold your spot in line, bribing an employee, having your assistant spend all morning mashing F5 while you go about your day, and certainly many others. The ones I named would be seen by many people as unfair because they are options that are only available to people with a great deal of money. Other strategies (like calling in a favor) are only open to those with influence and special personal connections. In this case, we have a strategy that is only open to individuals with highly technical skills. Note that I'm not saying it is unfair to use any of these strategies. I think reasonable people could disagree on many of them and they are sensitive to circumstances. In some sense, though, this can be seen as a market distortion. For you or I, writing a bot to do this might be pretty simple. Since we don't have to "pay" very much for the reservations, we would be likely to over-consume them, that is, to make more reservations than we intend to keep. We might even double-book ourselves so we have options (e.g. this morning I felt like steak, now I feel like seafood). This is obviously bad for the restaurants, but it is also bad for other customers who might have wanted the reservations more than we did, but were unable to build a bot to get them because, years and years ago, they chose to study things other than computer science.
- krstck 13y ago
  Totally agree that using this to book reservations that you don't intend to keep is unfair and harmful. I see this, though, less like hiring handicapped person to jump the line and more like having your friend save you a spot. I agree with the people that say charge a convenience fee. That would discourage the unfair behavior and still let people who actually intend to keep their reservation secure a spot.

theatrus2 13y ago

And this is why credit cards are increasingly required to book a reservation online.

akiselev 13y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161

_delirium 13y ago
Original source, from the previous discussion: https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant-reservations-in-sf/ https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant... The siliconbeat.com article here just seems to be a reblog/summary.

sadris 13y ago

Require a CC, charge a $3 cancellation fee. Problem solved.

LarrySDonald 13y ago
Temp CCs. There may or may not be money on it when the fee comes in..
- popotamonga 13y ago
  Authorize at reservation...
- tomjen3 13y ago
  Require the CC to be shown to the waiter when you come for your reservation - it is not that hard.
- sadris 13y ago
  Sorry, meant to say: charge $3 for a reservation, not a $3 cancellation fee. Deduct that cost from your bill for the meal.
dictum 13y ago
If the people running this scheme are profiting from it, soon they'd start using stolen CCs.
- tomjen3 13y ago
  CCs aren't stolen that often (usually it is the numbers that are stolen) so it would be pretty difficult to actually pick up the reservation, assuming the restaurant is smart enough to demand that the CC be shown when the diner show up.
epoxyhockey 13y ago
If the customer actually wants the reservation that they are paying an automated service to secure, then neither of these proposed solutions will have any effect.

daurnimator 13y ago

Do they not have captchas? or are the bots beating them?

ChuckMcM 13y ago

It doesn't mention if the automated reservation takers are then trying to 'sell' them in other forums. I'm wondering if there is a motive there or not. There is a similar problem with getting camp site reservations even though there are charges for cancellation.

nohuck13 13y ago
That was my reaction too. You see exactly the same thing with concert tickets and scalpers. It's supply and demand problem that venues want to use rationing because it increases cachet, but abritrageurs have an incentive to step in and resell for the "market" price. I wonder if we'll see more Ticketmaster-style countermeasures on reservation sites soon. Or more restaurants varying their prices for high- and low-demand times like Alinea in Chicago (https://www.alinearestaurant.com/website/welcome/ https://www.alinearestaurant.com/website/welcome/)
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  Given the low margins on restaurants they could clearly benefit economically by having a 'cost' reserved table, which is to say for $x you can sit down right now vs wait in the regular queue. Of course it would be interesting to plot tips from people who paid extra for rapid seating vs those who waited.

spiek 13y ago

For context on this, Gothamist recently posted this article about a company that "pre-books" reservations at hard to get restaurants. Customers pay $1,000/year for the privilege and then $45/$90 on top for especially hard to get reservations. Article: http://gothamist.com/2013/08/02/wealthy_foodies_can_buy_hard-to-get.php http://gothamist.com/2013/08/02/wealthy_foodies_can_buy_hard... The Gothamist article came from this Food Republic article: http://www.foodrepublic.com/2013/07/30/man-gaming-new-york-city-restaurant-reservation-sc http://www.foodrepublic.com/2013/07/30/man-gaming-new-york-c.... In other words, companies are starting to farm restaurant reservations to sell them, similar to the way that the market for event tickets has been corrupted.

jusben1369 13y ago
Thank you for this! I read the entire article waiting for "Ok, so why do bots book all these restaurants. Be nice if the author had pointed out the economics behind it.

squozzer 13y ago

Yeah. Look for the arbitrageurs and destroy them.

bjpcjp 13y ago

SO happy I don't have to live out there & deal with that crap.

sgustard 13y ago

Restaurants are such a fickle business anyway. Surprised they don't just auction off reservations to the highest bidder and cut out the middleman, while they're still trendy.

jlgreco 13y ago
I have heard that some restaurants have started auctioning off a handful of their tables. Usually part of the proceeds go to charity I think?

Jazonk 13y ago

Since when has 'calling a restaurant' become a hassle?

dictum 13y ago

A truly global business. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140894 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6140894

philbarr 13y ago

Could the restaurants require an account to be created, limit the number of reservations one account can make, and check that people aren't multi-accounting from the same ip address? The bots could get around this with proxies, but it would seem to be a pain to set up that many proxies. Maybe there's a space in the market for someone to solve this problem for the restaurants.

yogo 13y ago
You can't restrict based on IP address since there are scenarios where a group of machines will present the same IP address. It's also very hard to verify with other methods. They would have to take an approach similar to hotels or car rentals. Even then I don't think the problem is easily solved because if the demand is so great for these restaurants and the supply limited, charging or authorizing a payment ahead of time might not be much of a deterrent if the profits to be made are higher.
tomjen3 13y ago
Just require a credit card to be used for the reservation, limit the number of reservation each cc can make and require it to be used to pay for the dinner - you can still reserve the seat and enjoy the food, but the resale value of the ticket is nothing.

toki5 13y ago

I'm sorry, but this line bugs me: >Using OpenTable, Urbanspoon or SeatMe , diners could see available time slots and make a reservation online or from their smartphone without the hassle of calling the restaurant, and know that their table would be secure. How is calling the restaurant a hassle? Especially when the solution is to use your phone to look the restaurant up online? Maybe it's the cranky old man spirit in me, but I call restaurants every time -- I hadn't even heard of these sites. I didn't know that this was a need people felt needed fulfilling.

ig1 13y ago
Many people feel uncomfortable having to talk to strangers on the phone. Plus the hassle of having to repeatedly spell out the details of your reservation when the person at the other end is in a busy and noisy restaurant.
potatolicious 13y ago
It's a hassle because for popular restaurants it can either be a wait to get a hold of the maitre'd, and it's likely there are no reservations available in your parameters. Which means calling a restaurant, waiting on hold, asking for your reservation, possibly not getting it, in which case you get to repeat the same for another restaurant. For online systems the perk isn't really about not talking to a human, it's the ability to see availability at a glance so you only have to "call" once. For not-insanely-busy restaurants where I know a seat is almost certainly available, I prefer calling. After all, their number is probably already in my address book, and making a phone call is a hell of a lot easier than diving through multiple pages on a shitty mobile browser.
yogo 13y ago
When you call, someone at the restaurant looks up the info on opentable (or whatever system is used) then tells you the result of that search. It's quite convenient to look up this info online and even change make changes like reservation times.
nohuck13 13y ago
I couldn't disagree more with this. Having to involve two actual people, who have to drop whatever else they're doing and complete a trivial transaction, which can probably only be done during business hours, is a problem just begging for a technological solution. Anyway, they're just entering your details into a system not unlike OpenTable. Why serialize this process into a conversation over a phone line?

malandrew 13y ago

This blog posts offers absolutely nothing new relative to what was in Diogo's original post [0] and accompanying previous discussion [1]. In fact it offers less since it doesn't include the original scripts Diogo used. I (and I'm sure many others) would love it if there were some way for moderators to aggregate all upvotes for related articles that don't offer substantial new information or commentary on the original article instead. It's pretty clear that a lot of journalists troll HN and related sites, find human interest stories that strike a nerve with the HN community, then write a blog post rehashing the same content without really adding anything new. It's a simple recipe for getting karma and page views that cheapens the experience here on HN. This type of journalistic pablum should not be rewarded with karma or attention. [0] https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant-reservations-in-sf/ https://diogomonica.com/bot-wars-the-arms-race-of-restaurant... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6101161

tomjen3 13y ago

This would seem relatively simple to fix: post the reservations at random times, cache the result page in mem-cache based on ip for 15 minutes. Yes some may be able to use a few extra ips, but to win they would need access to thousands of them, which is far more difficult.

vampirechicken 13y ago

If a restaurant can be fully booked sixty days in advance,they aren't goign to care who's making the reservations, as long as butts are in seats and bills get paid at the end of the meal.