4 ms·
> Whoever wants to replace OpenTable needs to replace all of this at once. Not only that, they need to convince a restaurant to ditch practically their entire I
by wting 12y ago
> Whoever wants to replace OpenTable needs to replace all of this at once. Not only that, they need to convince a restaurant to ditch practically their entire IT stack, retrain all of their employees in the new system, and do so without service or quality interruption.
Yelp acquired SeatMe[0] (front of house management) last year to expand into this market, and Yelp Reservations[1] was launched last month. These two products combined function as an OpenTable replacement.
Disclaimer: I work at Yelp.
[0] https://www.seatme.yelp.com/ https://www.seatme.yelp.com/
[1] http://officialblog.yelp.com/2014/05/yelp-reservations-new-free-tool-for-businesses-gives-diners-even-more-options-when-booking-online.html http://officialblog.yelp.com/2014/05/yelp-reservations-new-f...
- zbowling 12y agoI worked at SeatMe right before the acquisition (actually I was the first employee and engineer and built a major portion of it). I can say that it is completely designed to be a full OpenTable replacement in every way. I don't think was a feature after working on it for 18 months that OpenTable had that we didn't.
- MicroBerto 12y agoI'm not in this industry, but isn't Yelp highly untrusted and relatively despised to the point that selling this is going to be a massive challenge? Your checkered past seems like it might come back to haunt you ad you try expanding into other verticals...