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Making and selling restaurant reservations doesn't strike you as dishonest? It's an honor system. What's to stop me from making reservations at ten different

by dkarl 17y ago

Making and selling restaurant reservations doesn't strike you as dishonest? It's an honor system. What's to stop me from making reservations at ten different restaurants for my blind date tonight, and deciding at the last minute which one will make the best impression on my date? The system relies on honesty. It only works because few people are willing to abuse it, and those who do so only do it in a small way. This business would either be blackballed and frozen out by the restaurants, or the reservation system it depends on would be abandoned. But let's say you could convince restaurant owners that selling reservations is a dandy idea. Sure, restaurants have long known (the idea isn't new) that they could, for a very minimal cost, sell reservations to the highest bidder. Sure, almost all have decided to go with a system that is perceived as free, fair, and egalitarian (with some discretion for doing favors for VIPs and accommodating glamorous people.) Suppose you can convince them. Why wouldn't they do it themselves? Restaurants manage their image very carefully and would certainly prefer to be in complete control. They could just do it in a notebook until (as the phenomenon caught on) their reservation software offered support for it. The only plausible way I could see the business surviving is by charging lots of money (fewer customers limits your visibility) and kicking some of the money back to maitre d's as bribes.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
The system relies on honesty. I'm not so sure that it does. It relies on filling the tables at the restaurants. The restaurants don't care if the people who come to fill your table aren't the same ones that originally booked the reservation. Nor do they care if a certain number of reservations are no-shows, if the number of no-shows is smaller than the number of people waiting at the door. As I said above, you obviously can't take this all the way to the edge case or you'll have a company that buys up every single reservation, sells none of them, and then cancels them all at the last minute. Then that company will go out of business, either because the restaurant stops them or because the restaurant goes broke, taking the company with it. ;) So, don't do that! Just because your business plan fails on some edge case doesn't mean that it has to fail for you...
- dkarl 17y ago
  Restaurants do care if they deny reservations to non-paying customers and then have empty tables because your business didn't sell as much as usual. They also care about alienating customers who are told, "We don't have any free reservations available, but some are available for an extra charge." Very likely, if they found out what you were doing, they would put you out of business whether you were hurting them or not, just to prevent their patrons from ever facing that choice. Like I said, the greatest proof that restaurants don't want their patrons paying for reservations is that they don't do it. They already have what they need: a way of recording reservations and a maitre d' with knowledge of their business and a triple-digit IQ. They know there's demand: many people already try to get a table on a busy night by slipping the maitre d' some cash. If they wanted in on it, they'd already be in on it, and you'd be stuck trying to convince a restaurant to hand over control of a simple, vital, near-zero-cost part of their business to a third party for no gain. I maintain that you could only survive as a parasite by avoiding notice and/or paying off the right people.
- antonovka 17y ago
  I'm not so sure that it does. It relies on filling the tables at the restaurants. The restaurants don't care if the people who come to fill your table aren't the same ones that originally booked the reservation. Nor do they care if a certain number of reservations are no-shows, if the number of no-shows is smaller than the number of people waiting at the door. Restaurants are in the business of filling their tables by making customers happy -- those customers will return, tell their friends, and the tables stay full. By filling up available spaces (thus resulting in customers being told that a very long wait is to be expected) and providing a paid line-cut (who enjoys being cut in front of while waiting 60 minutes?), you're going to make a lot of the restaurant customers unhappy, both directly and indirectly. If this was an ethical business, they would have told the restaurant what they were doing and received approval before they decided to lie to the restaurant to achieve their aims.

by dkarl 17y ago

mechanical_fish 17y ago

The system relies on honesty. I'm not so sure that it does. It relies on filling the tables at the restaurants. The restaurants don't care if the people who come to fill your table aren't the same ones that originally booked the reservation. Nor do they care if a certain number of reservations are no-shows, if the number of no-shows is smaller than the number of people waiting at the door. As I said above, you obviously can't take this all the way to the edge case or you'll have a company that buys up every single reservation, sells none of them, and then cancels them all at the last minute. Then that company will go out of business, either because the restaurant stops them or because the restaurant goes broke, taking the company with it. ;) So, don't do that! Just because your business plan fails on some edge case doesn't mean that it has to fail for you...

dkarl 17y ago
Restaurants do care if they deny reservations to non-paying customers and then have empty tables because your business didn't sell as much as usual. They also care about alienating customers who are told, "We don't have any free reservations available, but some are available for an extra charge." Very likely, if they found out what you were doing, they would put you out of business whether you were hurting them or not, just to prevent their patrons from ever facing that choice. Like I said, the greatest proof that restaurants don't want their patrons paying for reservations is that they don't do it. They already have what they need: a way of recording reservations and a maitre d' with knowledge of their business and a triple-digit IQ. They know there's demand: many people already try to get a table on a busy night by slipping the maitre d' some cash. If they wanted in on it, they'd already be in on it, and you'd be stuck trying to convince a restaurant to hand over control of a simple, vital, near-zero-cost part of their business to a third party for no gain. I maintain that you could only survive as a parasite by avoiding notice and/or paying off the right people.
antonovka 17y ago
I'm not so sure that it does. It relies on filling the tables at the restaurants. The restaurants don't care if the people who come to fill your table aren't the same ones that originally booked the reservation. Nor do they care if a certain number of reservations are no-shows, if the number of no-shows is smaller than the number of people waiting at the door. Restaurants are in the business of filling their tables by making customers happy -- those customers will return, tell their friends, and the tables stay full. By filling up available spaces (thus resulting in customers being told that a very long wait is to be expected) and providing a paid line-cut (who enjoys being cut in front of while waiting 60 minutes?), you're going to make a lot of the restaurant customers unhappy, both directly and indirectly. If this was an ethical business, they would have told the restaurant what they were doing and received approval before they decided to lie to the restaurant to achieve their aims.